Chicago, Illinois (10-Nov-14)

- a Miriam Review, pt.1.

D1175 SEPTUAGENARIAN CLAIMS NOT DEAD YET

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The author of these discs is a strange bird. As anyone familiar with his Alphabet Series will know, he refuses to discriminate between fine concert footage and foul on the grounds that its not his job. He's just the archivist, and if you switch on a camera in the vicinity of a performing Bob Dylan and upload the resultant footage to Youtube, he'll collect and preserve it, whether it shows D and the band or the floor or the roof or the nether regions of the filmer's armpit and whether it sounds melodious and sweet or (no joke, sadly) unlike music at all. Fair enough. You've a skip button, he says, so use it. What's more, D1175 comes, courtesy of Longfellow, with an up-front if slightly cryptic warning that prospective viewers should brace themselves for a mix of the "very, very good" and the "horrid". It was the same Henry Wadsworth who observed that "into each life some rain must fall" so grab your umbrella - or, for those in Seattle, your bumbershoot -and let's step cautiously forth.

D1175 reprises D's third night of three at Chicago's Palace Theatre where, in marked contrast to former more expansive NET days, the same set was delivered each time. Indeed, to find any variation in the pre-encore part of the show you have to go back 25 dates and across that lonesome ocean to 27 August where in Fortitude Valley, Australia the second half of the evening went radically off script via North Country Girl, Cry A While, Tweedles, Lonesome Day, Tryin' To Get To Heaven, Thunder and Thin Man - fond memories all, and probably more so for Cowboy Band than paying public. The most commonly voiced positive re the unchanging set would have you believe that it's "carefully crafted ... well planned out ... so the songs all work together and have a certain flow." Comprising 19 tunes (18 up to 1 November, when Wind blew into slot #18) it is claimed in toto to deliver a cohesive, structured, unified, late-era statement rather than an arbitrary ragbag of greatest hits and sixties standards. The first thing to note about D1175, then, is that it presents not a full monty 19 but a mere 14 and a half. Okay, so statement abatement, a shame, perhaps, but if that's all the camera could catch, what can you do? Well, how about a sound upgrade? We've all seen deficient films made good with stills and patches in order to allow the superimposition of a full soundtrack. And this footage is delightfully sound upgraded - but only so far as to make the music fit the pictures, which might make more sense if they were wall-to-wall, A1 pictures. But they're not. So how is junk footage a better or more worthy carrier than stills or black screen? Due to the extreme difficulty of gathering any of this video nowadays, it's wholly understandable that some songs are only part-captured, and not too well, and others missed altogether. But the audio tapers generally still manage to snag whole shows, so if you're going to make use of their talent and exploit their bounty, why do it in this half-hearted, cheese-paring way? The Dylan Experience is first and foremost about the music, so to fillet his "carefully crafted" set for dubious editorial reasons is first to pay the musicians' work a disservice and second to abjure the author's role in helping preserve and showcase that work. It's like taking a Stanley knife to the cheek of a loved one for no better reason than that it's there and you gotta cut sump'n. For the record, opener Things Have Changed, trap three Beyond Here Lies Nothing and encore pair Blowin' and Stay With Me are absent, which means that we get under way with potent paean - now 50 years young; ooh, where does the time go? - She Belongs To Me.

The camera, up in the left side seats, is lap-held, viewfinder obscured and so, as we soon discover, a challenge to aim. For three verses it roams blindly about before, as D takes a first harp break, settling on Stu. After a couple of minutes there come more dither and close. But never mind all that. First surprise to these ears is D's voice. I should perhaps say at this point that I used to like Bob Dylan much more than I do now. With me, the first gnawing doubt set in when he put out the 3 disc version of BS7 for a stonking three figure sum. Around the same time came the malodorous campaign to persuade us he could paint worth a damn, followed by pushy marketing campaigns for wares - The Witmark Demos, the wretched Christmas album, the mediocre Together Through Life, the Self Portrait set - we didn't need or want but bought anyway. I played Tempest twice through, haven't been back to it since and, banal and posturing by turns as I found it, don't care if I never do again. Then the final straw was more megabucks for The Basement Tapes, the best cuts of which (and those all too few) we all know frontwards and backwards and the majority of which aren't worth and never were worth the media they're peddled on. I passed mine, together with Another Self Portrait, on to a friend, (while feeling disquiet that it wasn't, on my part, really the act of a friend). I felt better, then sold a few books and boots and felt better again. The crooner CD holds no interest for me - and yes, I have heard half of two of the songs, which was all I could take of either. That Bob and I should become estranged after forty odd years is no cause for regret. I'm certain he'll get over it - and me? Well, the last time I listened to live Dylan, his voice, once so mighty, was gone, which was another turn-off. Yet here it is, if not restored, at least something like functional again. I'd better watch out or, before I know it, I'll be blindsided back into the fold.

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