In the 1960’s The City of New Orleans, The Panama Limited, The Seminole, along with numerous freight trains, all stopped at Carbondale. And I do mean stopped. True southern patience was needed to cross the town east to west. Home to Southern Illinois University, the legend was that a forsaken student committed suicide by laying on the railroad tracks. Cause of death was determined to be starvation.
Trains brought the Blues from Mississippi and Louisiana to Chicago. Trains and train themes kept rollin’ throughout Bob Dylan’s songs in 1966. They still do. Trains and their tracks replaced the power symbol of life’s journey from the Mississippi River in the slower more natural times of Huck Finn. Mark Twain’s river and St. Louis, Missouri are 100 miles, by train, from Carbondale, Illinois.
The concert in 1966 was at Kiel Auditorium at 15th and Market in St. Louis. Kiel was, as a 1934 mayoral proclamation stated, “… designed to enrich the peoples’ lives and…add to the attractiveness and popularity of our City as it will bring to us great conventions and cultural activities.” Well, I guess so.
Linda Ihne gave me my first Bob record in 1964 – The Times They Are A’changin.’. The first time the needle hit the shiny unscratched Columbia 360 Sound surface, hearing Bob for the first time was similar to my first shot of whiskey. A sudden rejected shock to the system followed by a very warm mellow feeling, and then followed by an irrational desire for more, lots more.
Like that whiskey, Bob’s voice is an acquired taste. Once acquired, tattooed to your soul. This acquired appreciation was much to the displeasure of the residents of the third floor of the Thompson Point dorm at Southern Illinois University in 1965. For those first-in-the-families, middle class college freshman, the beauty of that voice singing folk poetry was yet to be acquired.
It was the folk music. I loved folk music and I still do. This music, along with the indoctrination of a secondary education, shaped my naïve politics at the time. Except for the genius of folk blues, folk music lyrics seemed to always portray envy for the wealthy and powerful and champion the poor and weak - those that the left consider the folks. Bob, in order to succeed at the time, assumed these themes – and it worked well; so well in fact, he is yet to shake that dust off his feet.
Bob’s music then and today is like no other form of expression. From “One Too Many Mornings” to “Dark Eyes,” “Lay Down your Weary Tune,” “Every Grain of Sand,” “Tomorrow is a Long Time,” “Girl of the North Country,” “Farewell Angelina,” The beauty of the imagery, the power of the metaphors, and the gentle beauty of a ghostly voice connects to an undefined emotion of a vague understanding and comfort.
The common man, the working man, the passionate lover, the soldier, the nomad, the fortune hunter, the outlaw, and other personae of lower classes, travel through so many of his rock tunes as well. Folk music really has nothing to do with an unamplified guitar. The themes and stories are what define it and Bob’s genius is able to submerse in it, understand it, and capture it. Being able to convincingly become the poor nomad, the black blues-man, the oldest son of a crazy man, the soldier, or the grandson of a duck trapper, while being a very rich person isolated from the very things he writes and sings about, is skilled artistry, indeed.
It was the gentle beauty of the folk songs that drew me to the concert in 1966. I took a train to St. Louis – of course. And while riding on that train going west, I was alert in anticipation of seeing the object a misplaced admiration.
He divided his concerts. The first half was just him, his guitar and harmonica. He was speed freak thin with a bush of a hairdo. He looked like a deciduous tree with a guitar. I remember “Vision of Johanna,” “Maggie’s Farm,” and “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”, but I was waiting for “One Too Many Mornings”. The anti-war and civil rights stuff was already starting to lose his interest, and his days of pandering to those groups were over. As they have been throughout history, useful then cast aside, they were no longer needed. The next step in fame and money did not include them.
[The electric barrier at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival was broken by Dylan singing “Maggie's Farm,” - a folk song.]
Every day my memory grows dimmer and the rest of this set is a sober blur. He left the stage after acoustical versions from Bringing It All Back Home.
It wasn’t that he was playing the second set with an electric band that got me upset, rocking with drums, electricity, and such; it was because it was so bad. They were terrible. There were local bar bands doing better – much better than Bob and The Band. Timing was off, notes were missed, and it all came through as unpolished noise. They were just bad. Then it got worse.
Bob turned around from pointing his Fender at Sandy (Levon?) and with his businesslike anger looked the audience square in the eye vengefully for two long seconds, hit a few notes and proceeded to butcher “One Too Many Mornings”. It was like everybody had significantly pissed him off. He was making a point about just who this music belonged too. On the now released Live 1966, “One Too Many Mornings” appears to have gotten better, but not enough to make it pleasant.
After hearing the 1966 version from Live 1966, my wife said she liked it. I asked her if she would have liked it if it was not Bob doing it. She said, “No, it’s not done very well.” By the time of the English tour, the band was getting marginally better. Idol worship deadens discernment.
As Peter Townsend would get lost in rock madness two years earlier and bash his guitar into junk, inventing the musical version of auto-destructive art, Bob proceeded to bash his music into irreparable trash leaving it there on the stage floor for the roadies to clean up.
So more appropriately the boos and Judas heckling were because Bob outwardly turned his back on the leftist folkies, but, for some of us they were simply editorials for a mediocre performance that should have gotten the hook.
Over time he did make it up, though. Twenty-nine years later in Boston, December 9th, in a time of reconciliation, Dylan was actually performing concerts that seemed to apologize for everything – the drunken concerts, the bad live music, the butchering of the quite reflective poetry of the folk songs, the rude interviews. Get a copy of that concert, just for the most moving Bob performance of “One Too Many Mornings,” where instead of insults shouts of “Thank you, Bob,” and “Beautiful, Bob!!” were passionately expressed.
Bob Dylan aged himself into customer service.
On the empty train ride going back to Carbondale, I went to that rounded-back last car, opened the door, leaned on the fences facing the past, and watched the tracks disappear into Missouri.
Looking back, at these phantoms, as a simple, naïve, too sensitive farm boy, the betrayal on a cool night of bliss still haunts me. I felt the shame of it for many years, not wanting to be associated with the weakness of Pete Seeger - Mighty Wind purists, who still think they live on higher ground, until the focus of my anger became clear. It was not that Bob gave up music about the folks – he never did.
A few years ago, what’s left of The Band came to town. It was their live version of Blind Willie McTell that made me realize something. It was bad enough that Danko looked like he had eaten a few of the original members of the band, but the music was bad and I had grown to recognize just how bad good artists can be. Bad efforts pissed me off.
All the lefty folk purists are looking back, now. After 30 years, they are realizing, finally, that Bob did the right thing by amplifying his growth. They gave him a Grammy in real categories, they honored him at the Kennedy Center, and they made new documentaries and (Lord help us) a Broadway play. Some still cannot define the snubs of the electric conversion. Others feel the shame of the jeers from the Beach Boys fans at quite boys in college dorms in 1965 that played that awful crap of a voice so loud. Bob is now always at or near the top of the 100 Best something or another these days.
The writers and critics dissect the times leading up to the electric conversion but they are all again missing the point. The documentaries, the looking back stories, all seem to end with the electric conversion of Bob Dylan. The recent Grammy Awards were an afterthought to honor an aging legend.
Time Out of Mind – a rather saddening and rarely played recording received three Grammy Awards — Album of the Year, Best Contemporary Folk Album and Best Male Rock Vocal. While it seems Bob is being honored for one thing or another, his best stuff it still being ignored by these backward looking, overly conservative progressives. Bob has done great work between 1966 and 2012 and it looks like it will be another 30 years before they discover and reward the best of his folk music.
Although train travel in the 1960’s was far from poetic, Amtrak just doesn’t have the rhythm and meter that Illinois Central had. People don’t ride real trains anymore. They allow too much time for reflection.
“I used to think that myself and my songs were the same thing. But I don’t believe that any more. There’s myself and there’s my song, which I hope is everybody’s song.”
Bob Dylan
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