Bob Dylan is many things to many people – folksinger, poet, cultural icon, the conscience of a generation, religious experience, Mrs. Zimmerman’s little boy and Jakob’s Dad to name several – and his performance at the Moncton Coliseum this past weekend suggests that whatever one’s perspective, all of those handles were validated. Thirty-six years to the week after his first professional appearance at Gerde’s Folk City in New York, and with the most modest of introductions – “Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan” – he opened a superlative two-hour-plus show with “Crash on the Levee” from ‘The Basement Tapes’. While this band wasn’t THE Band, they were fabulous support and it was evident from the git-go that Dylan and Company came to play. Tony Granier, David Kemper, Bucky Baxter (from Steve Earle’s Dukes), and Larry Campbell on guitar carried the evening with lots of good natured kickin’ around, lengthy jams and sloppy tempo changes, at times creating an atmosphere comparable to watching a few buddies jamming at the regular Friday night watering hole. Baxter’s utility work on pedal steel, dobro and mandolin was exceptional throughout, as was the slap-happy barroom bashing of former Jerry Garcia Band timekeeper Kemper – never mind that the Folksinger Himself deftly handled a heaping helping of the guitarwork with Campbell and Baxter.
In the course of a fifteen song set, classics like “All Along The
Watchtower”, “I Want You” and “Positively 4th Street” mingled comfortably
with later material like “Silvio” from ‘Down In The Groove’ and “God
Knows” from the ‘Under A Red Sky’ album. But it was Dylan’s signature harp playing that was as much a touchstone for the appreciative crowd as any particular song, and they roared in manic approval each time he brought it to his lips. Following a passionate acoustic reading of “Desolation Row”, Dylan remembered his friend and fellow counter-culture hero Allen Ginsberg, who had passed away only that morning. In the first of only two spoken moments of the evening, Dylan offered a simple and moving dedication – “That was one of Allen Ginsberg’s favorite songs of mine” before continuing on with “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”.
Wrapping up the show by urging the audience to “please give a hand to the
band” and providing cursory introductions, ‘the band’ plunged headfirst into a lengthy, rollicking take on “Highway 61 Revisited” before coming back for three enthusiastically received encores. A powerful, raspy “Like A Rolling Stone” became for me the defining moment, as a thirty year gap between buying the single and finally hearing it live brought my admiration for Dylan full circle. Then off into the wings again and back out with the most dramatically reworked classic of the night – “It Ain’t Me Babe” as acoustic country shuffle, with a few bars of “Jokerman” teasingly slipped into the tag. And finally, houselights up with a blues-banger version of “Rainy Day Women”, which provided the last of a number of giddy pleasures, as I momentarily turned my attention to the spectacle of three cherubic little girls in their early teens mouthing “everybody must get stoned” right along with all us old hippies. Well into the fourth decade of a rock and roll career, the words of Bob Dylan, the man most pundits consider to have brought rebellion, poetry and literate thought to popular music, still have the power to effect the same joy in these children’s children that has moved generations before.
On the morning of April 5, 1997, Bob Dylan lost a good friend, but that
evening he broke musical bread with six thousand more at the Moncton
Coliseum, and I proudly count myself among that number. Thanks for
stoppin’ by, Bob, come back anytime…
Terry H. Gorman ©1997
Set List for April 5, 1997, The Coliseum
Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada
Crash On The Levee [AKA: Down in the Flood]
I Want You
All Along The Watchtower
Positively 4th Street
Watching The River Flow
Silvio
Oh Babe It Ain’t No Lie
Desolation Row
Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
God Knows
She Belongs To Me
Highway 61 Revisited
ENCORES:
Like A Rolling Stone
It Ain’t Me, Babe (acoustic)
Rainy Day Women #12 & 35
And a few neat quotes…
Ralph J. Gleason, critic laureate – “The jazz and poetry guys of the
50’s…woke up ten years later and here’s this squirrely little kid who
has done the things they wanted to do…to get poetry in the streets, to
the people and on the jukeboxes.”
Carl Sandberg (upon meeting Dylan in ’64) – “You certainly look like an
intense young man.”
Robert Shelton, Dylan biographer – “Knowing Dylan as much as the mystery of his genius will reveal to us, he’ll probably do it his own way. He
always has.”
Colin Larkin, NME – “…as time has often proved, you can never write Bob
Dylan off. He is a devil for hopping out of the hearse on the way to the
cemetery.”
Terry H Gorman Essays 
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