Dylanology 20 (Dec 2022): Tangled Up In Blue III: On The Road – 1975–2006

I really thought this would be the final part of my discussion of “Tangled up in Blue”, but it turned out to be too long for one issue. Besides, in the meantime there was Christmas, and December just seemed to vanish in a haze of meat, work, and glorous, Saturnalian hedonism. so yet again I’ve broken it up: this issue covers the live realisations of the song up until 2006.I still consider this to be the December issue; the final part, with the developments from 2007 to 2018, will come later this month – I promise!

Everything and the kitchen sink

Tragedy and Persistence: A Dedication

The best couple of books that have ever been written about Dylan are Paul Williams’s Performing Artist series. The title says it all: Williams regarded Dylan as a performing artist: he regarded Dylan’s live work as the ground level from which grow albums and concerts as two individual, independent but also interdependent strands, with no radical difference or hierarchy of importance between them.

His books, then, are just about the only Dylan books that take the performing aspect of Dylan’s art seriously, including the musical side of his art.

When I first read Paul Williams’s books, they were a tremendous influence, and it is not an exaggeration to say that without them, neither Dylanology nor Dylanchords would have existed. This series of posts seemed like a good place to pay tribute to Paul Williams: I hereby dedicate them to his memory and recommend everyone to read his books.

“To his memory”, because Paul Williams is also my definition of a tragic figure. When he was 17, he created Crawdaddy!, the first serious magazine of rock culture. Thirty years later, in 1995, he crashed on his bicycle, got a severe brain injury, which led to dementia and an extremely untimely death in 2013.

That’s the biographical tragedy. But there is more. Williams, as a rock journalist with a focus on the live, performed art of the artist Bob Dylan, decided to follow an entire tour. It turned out to be the 1986 tour. Now, 1986 has its moments, but I can’t help but think that of all the tours Dylan has ever done, 1986 is probably the least interesting: Dylan was – according to himself – washed-out, out of touch with his own songs. There is a certain slickness to the performances. And two years later we see the birth of the Never Ending Tour. When a serious scholar of Dylan’s live art landed on that particular tour, it is in itself a sign of tragedy.

There is a weirdly tragic element even in the layout of Williams’s book series. The first volume is called 1960–1973: The Early Years. Volume two, which culminates with the 1986 tour, is called 1974–1986: The Middle Years. After Beginning and Middle comes The End, according to Aristotle’s treatise on the tragedy, and given Dylan’s level of creativity and material at the time, one can not blame Williams for having set the stage for a vol. III that would naturally have been called 1987–1999: The Final Years, as the last 13-year chunk of the history of an artist on a steady course of slow descent into oblivion just in time for the new millennium.

As we now know, 1986 was not the beginning of the end, but the start of a complete redefinition of what a musical career is. The Never Ending Tour shattered Williams’s neat three-volume plan, perhaps even more than his bike accident did. Volume III, which came out in 2004, was called 1987–2000: Mind out of Time, and for volume IV, which was planned but never came out, the intended title was The Genius of A Performing Artist: 2003–1990 and back again – a clear concession that the neatly Aristotelian tripartite scheme had been shattered to pieces.

That’s perhaps the most tragic aspect of Paul Williams’s work: that the catharsis, the turning point of the story that he was telling, occurred at precisely the point where we, the observers, must notice that the protagonist – in this case Paul Williams – dies, thus endures a “pain that evokes pleasure” in us, the spectators, to quote Nietzsche.

“It’s All In The Riff”

Despite my general praise for Williams, I have one qualification, and that is the same objection I have against most writers about Dylan: when it comes to the musical side, Williams all too often ends up saying things like: “It’s all in the riff”.

What does that even mean – “it’s all in the riff”? What is in the riff? Are we expected to simply understand what this means, by somehow connecting to the hub of emotions that is Williams’s intuitive connection with Dylan and his riff, after which we too can see “it all”?

I object.

That’s actually why I’m writing this, and everything I have written about Dylan’s music making: no, it’s not enough to say: “it’s all in the riff” as if that says something profound. It doesn’t. “It” is not all in the riff. You have to say: what is it about the riff? Is it the concrete notes that are being played? The pace? the attack? The phrasing? The relationship to tradition? etc. What exactly is it about the riff?

That is what is missing in most rock journalism.

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With this in mind, take a look at the following chart of all the performances – live as well as studio – of “Tangled up in Blue”:

The song was written just at the beginning of Williams’s “Middle Years” volume. The entire “middle years” period 1974–86 occupies five minuscule bars (if we disregard the uncirculating rehearsals from 1977 and 1980) to the very left of the chart. The glorious Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975, which produced the iconic “white face with no visible eyes in the shadow under the brim of the hat” image, is hardly more than a blip in the chart; 1984, a highly significant year in the history of the song, is a mere 18 performances, and even the monumental 1978 tour pales in comparison with the block of years in the late 90s.

A white face with no visible eyes in the shadow under the brim of the hat.

The entire history of the song as a live, developing entity lies in those years after the “middle”.

So: writing the history of the song “Tangled Up in Blue” also means detaching oneself from the recording history of the song (which ends in 1984 with the Real Live version) and instead dive into the never-ending stream of tapes and torrents and internet reports and one’s own concert memories, which constitute the bulk of its history. In that sense, the history of “Tangled up in Blue” also overlaps with the history of the Never Ending Tour itself, and as such it is the backbone of our history, the fellowship of all of us who for some reason or another feel compelled to listen to yet another concert recording – just in case it hides a priceless gem.

This also means that the history of Tangled on the Road is not primarily defined by Bob Dylan the musician, but by Bob Dylan the band leader. Much of what is to come is a celebration of guitar players, their riffs, their solo licks, their ability to give life to Dylan’s ever-changing ideas about what the song might sound like on this particular tour leg.