Last night we went to see a show that I had high hopes for,
something we’d heard about at the last minute through a fortuitous Facebook ad
on Jay’s page. Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson
and John Cougar Mellencamp were playing at a baseball stadium in Lake Elsinore
which isn’t too far away. Tickets were
pretty cheap, and the event was far from sold out. We bought tickets and rounded up some other
friends to go with us.
Lately, I’ve been making a point of getting every chance I
can to see old guys play. I’ve missed my
chance with too many, like Johnny Cash or Frank Sinatra. And generally speaking, they tend to be
really great. Leonard Cohen. Kenny
Rogers. Neil Diamond. I’ve already seen Willie (at the Wiltern,
fabulous) and Cougar (at the Hollywood Bowl, surprisingly fun). But I’ve never seen Dylan and didn’t want to
miss this chance.
As the show drew closer, I started to hear ominous rumblings
from people who had seen Dylan play disastrously in the past. Too drunk, too mumbly, songs unrecognizable
from the popularized version, etc. Alarm
bells were quietly starting to go off – but I remained optimistic. He’s cementing his legacy, some said – this will
be different.
So yesterday, 5 of us squeezed into a Suburu and drove down
to Lake Elsinore, where I’d never been before.
It’s one of those incongruously rednecky Southern California towns. Here are some shots of the ballpark we were
in, home to the Storm.
I saw my first ever live-blogging-in-action here! UPDATE. I think this is her.
Willie Nelson was up first, keeping it casual in the late
afternoon heat with a floppy straw sombrero and a ‘family band’ whose sound was
like something you might hear in a thrown-together jam at Willie’s house on a
Sunday afternoon. A little sloppy but
his voice was beautiful and strong, making me wish (not for the first time)
that he was my grandpa or at least my penpal.
Jay bought this souvenir Willie doll.
We admired the
efficient equipment ‘conveyor belt’ that had been set up, a giant walkway
connecting the stage to nearby waiting trucks.
As the daylight faded it was time for the Coug. He put a lot more effort into his show, with
a full band, really awesome sound, and more audience pandering aka
showmanship. We went down onto the
baseball field for a closer view.
I have only a few comments about this portion of the
set. 1) I wish that he’d played Jack and
Diane. 2) Based on the lyrical content
of his newer songs, he is apparently obsessed with dying and trying to deal
with this fear through songwriting. 3) His
cutish 13-year-old son (who came out to jam with the band for a song or two) has
the unfortunate name of “Spud”. Any bets
as to how long it will take him to rename himself Bob or Mike or something more
conventional? 4) The Coug is now adding
an “h” after every “s”. For instance, “shmall
town”. Why?
Next up was Dylan. By
this point the crowd was well and truly messed up, with pot smoke a-floatin’,
drunks a-stumblin’, hippies a-dancin’, and seven maids a-sleepin’ on the lawn,
passed out. We went back down to the
baseball field to see this iconic figure up close and personal. Dylan came out wearing some kind of bizarre mariachi-inspired
suit. Compared to The Coug, his sound
was glaringly terrible – both the quality (through the PA system) as well as
the musicianship of the group. Now
perhaps the Coug’s band was too tight and slick – but Dylan took things too far
in the other direction. For instance he
was halfway through his second song before I realized it was “The Times They
Are a Changin’”!
UPDATE: Oh, and by the way. If you want to get a better sense of what his vocals sound like, think Benicio del Toro in The Usual Suspects.
We made our way back up to the bleachers where our friends
were sitting and watched in horror as the set grew progressively worse. And – fun times – louder. I literally was sitting with my fingers in my
ears for the last half hour of Dylan’s endless rambling hurky-jerky set.
The set was long enough, and unengaging enough, that it led
me to all sorts of ruminations. For
instance, why was Dylan’s set so bad?
Does he not care? Does he not
KNOW? Is he deaf, does he have bad
taste, is he surrounded by incompetent deaf people with no taste who give him
bad advice? Is it on purpose – some kind
of statement or joke that I’m not cool enough to get?
Or could it be that our older self is truly a different
person from our younger self? That the man who once was Young Bob Dylan is long gone, leaving in his place a shallow and unserious carny
huckster set on leveraging Young Bob’s brand and songs to squeeze the easiest
possible dollars out of smalltown drunks and stoners?
I entertained myself by thinking: if each set was a car,
what car would it be? I decided that
Willie Nelson was like a big old flatbed pickup, parked in someone’s yard, with
a big party on the back. John Cougar was
like a perfectly cherried out vintage pickup, complete with fuzzy dice. Too perfect, too shiny, maybe even never taken
out of the garage except to drive down the street in a local parade.
But our boy Bob? Like a 1973 dune buggy. You’re at the beach trying to relax and get a
tan, and here comes this dune buggy, spinning out and coughing out exhaust
fumes, doing wheelies around you and getting sand in your face, squeezing an
ah-OO-ga horn every five minutes and laughing like a clown at your dismay.
The comparisons to Leonard Cohen were hard to avoid, given
that the visuals of the show appeared to be somewhat cribbed from Cohen, not to
mention the fact that the two are of a similar generation. Leonard Cohen cares about his performances. The show we saw was flawless, an improvement
over his recordings, true to the nature of his songs, every word clear and
embued with passion, a love poem to an audience whom Cohen seemed determined to
respect as much as a treasured idol.
Dylan’s show came off, to me, as a big Fuck You.
To which I can only respond: Fuck YOU, Bob Dylan. Go see Leonard Cohen and take some notes.
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