Free Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus

on the music, that you’d heard what they had to say, they came back with something tougher—like “All Along the Watchtower.”
    It was a jagged, growling blast; the Band reached roughly for the melody and Dylan shouted past it. They made the recorded version—likely the best thing Dylan has done since Highway 61 Revisited —seem tentative and weak, as if, down in Nashville in 1967, Dylan had hedged his bets. In fact, seven years later, he was raising the stakes.
    As I write, I hear James and Carly singing “Ride with the tide, go with the flow,” and while I’m gratified the two of them are limiting their goals to their talents, such a credo strikes me as the very opposite of what Bob Dylan—or any artist—is all about. The music Dylan made with the Band was not easy to relate to. If, in the past, you had only seen the Band, a group that sometimes spends more time on the soundcheck than they do playing, you might have written the edges off their music by assuming they were just a bit rusty after so much time off the road. As for Dylan’s singing, it was a shock no simple excuse—he’s tired, he’s rusty, he’s aloof—could
contain. Some writers have spoken respectfully about Dylan’s experiments with melisma—that sounds classy, doesn’t it?—but melisma has to do with bending words, and Dylan was breaking them. He came down on the last word of every line with all he had, regardless, it seemed, of what they might have meant—like a gunfighter without a target, and Bob Dylan without a target is only shooting blanks. But he did have a target, or several: music; his songs; the audience; himself.
    Music today—especially the polished, lifeless Elektra-Asylum folk rock that is aimed at the audience that came to hear Dylan—has a lot of well-defined, surface melody (in real rock ’n’ roll, the melody is inseparable from the rhythm and the beat). Such music substitutes professionalism for inspiration. Dylan wailed out his songs, attacking melody as if it were an obstacle, not a means, to feeling; in place of professionalism he offered a crude expressiveness, breaking through the limits of phrasing and technique. When he missed, he missed; when he scored, he drove his songs past themselves. Often he was aiming not his words, but himself—not as a persona, but as physical presence, as flesh and blood—at the audience, and instead of the messages and meanings of his songs there was something much more elemental: commitment and force.
    If these shows were not to be merely a live greatest hits package, Dylan had to find a way to get an authentically new kind of life into the songs. This music doesn’t wear out any more than Robert Johnson, the Carter Family, or Little Richard, Dylan must feel, but proving it is another matter. Only when he could liberate the songs from his past and ours, yet without denying that past, could the songs continue to liberate the musicians and the audience. The music had to feel right to the singer, and come across to the crowd.
    Dylan was shouting, chanting, partly, I’m sure, to be heard over the noise, but if that was all he cared about he could have turned down the amps. The noise was part of the shout. To simply present the songs in a marginally new way—difference in phrasing here,
change in emphasis there, transposed intros, altered tempos, they did all that—would, by itself, have seemed contrived, to the singer even more than to the audience. So in one sense, Dylan chose not to really sing the songs at all. It seemed to me that more than anything else Dylan was reaching for an equivalent, though nothing like a copy, of his original sound: something very rough, disturbing, disorienting, not easy to like. It didn’t always work. But the ambition was clear, and the songs that fit best with the hard chant, those with a beat strong enough to force Dylan to deal with the rhythm, grew as songs: “Ballad of a Thin Man,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” and “Maggie’s