The Books: The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town, edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Dylan’, by Hendrik Hertzberg and George Trow

Next up on the essays shelf:

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks), edited by Lillian Ross

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks) is a collection of “The Talk of the Town” pieces in The New Yorker, grouped by decade, which is a lot of fun because you can see how the “voice” of the magazine developed, and how “The Talk of the Town” has grown and changed over the years.

In January of 1974, Bob Dylan and The Band played Madison Square Garden. They were on a brief tour (two months), and it was Dylan’s first tour since 1966 which took him around the world.

So there was a great deal of curiosity about him, and all of those mixed emotions/expectations that seemed to dog Dylan no matter what he did. People wanted him to be their poster child. People wanted him to properly represent the nostalgia that they had for him. Obviously, Dylan never played the game that way. It’s probably one of the reasons why he kept growing and changing and developing as an artist (and continues to do so). If he had listened to his critics, and kept his career on a re-tread to satisfy the unimaginative earnest folk-singer types who never wanted him to change … then Dylan would have only had one season in the sun, as opposed to decades.

Of course you have to give a shit what the audience thinks of you. But honestly, you can’t care TOO much. Because often they don’t know what’s best for them, frankly. Often they are wrong in what they want from you. The anxiety about change is rich considering that he was representative of a “movement” that was all about change. But there was that undercurrent, dwelled upon in the Martin Scorsese doc, and elsewhere, of: If HE changes, then were they wrong about him in the first place? If HE changes, then does that mean I’m growing old and don’t “get it” now? If HE changes, then I don’t know what my life is about anymore. People placed so much importance on Bob Dylan. The noise surrounding Dylan, in this regard, has always been loud. People acted like it was a personal betrayal when he famously “went electric”. Now I’m no Dylan aficionado, unlike, say, Jonah Lehrer, but those who were disappointed on a personal level by Bob Dylan doing his own thing misunderstood his message in the first place. Misunderstood what he was all about. Doing what was expected would never have been what he was about! But this is the way the story goes with giant celebrities. It has always been the case. How much will audiences “take”? Do you expect them to follow you everywhere?

The 1974 tour was lucrative, involving sell-out shows, massive crowds, and intense media scrutiny.

This jointly-written Talk of the Town piece has a really interesting structure and is a fun dialectical piece, which gets at all of the things that were swirling around Dylan/The Band at that time, the stuff I mentioned before. Hendrik Hertzberg and George Trow sit down with two friends, one blond, and one dark-haired, both of whom were at the concert at Madison Square Garden. They both are asked to give their impressions of the concert. There is some disagreement, on a pretty basic level, about Bob Dylan as an artist. The blond one has some skepticism about Dylan, but maybe more so about his typical fans. This is a pretty funny statement: “I’ll tell you some people who weren’t there [at the concert]. There were no blacks there, and no transvestites, and there were very few people in embroidered jeans. Instead, there were extraordinary numbers of people who seemed to have come directly from registration at the New School. A very earnest group.” Ouch. The point the blond friend is making has to do with what she/he sees as Dylan’s lack of a sense of humor. The blond gets that there is irony in Dylan, but the humorlessness is why a more diverse audience stays away. The dark-haired person disagrees, admitting up front that he/she comes from a “Dylan-can-do-no-wrong angle”. The dark-haired person talks about Dylan’s elusive nature, how Dylan “manages to free himself from the expectations of his audience.” The suggestion appears to be that it is not Dylan’s problem, it is the problem with audience expectations (a concept that comes up again and again with Dylan). The dark-haired person was not crazy about the first half of the concert. He/she thought all the songs were played too fast, without any interpretation (or any that could be discerned or understood). However, the dark-haired person says that in retrospect the first half may be “a necessary softening-up process for both Dylan and the audience. The room was full of complicated yearnings, after all.”

The majority of this piece is made up of long quotes from these two people, and it’s a pleasure to read. “Complicated yearnings” is a hell of a line of dialogue.

Here is an excerpt where the dark-haired person talks about what happened during the second half of the concert.

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks), edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Dylan’, by Hendrik Hertzberg and George Trow

“And the second half of the concert?” we asked.

“Ah,” our dark-haired friend went on. “Dylan came out all alone, small and brave, with just his harmonica and his acoustic guitar. I was too far away to see the details of his face, but I could see his hair, curly and mousy, and that tense, crabbed stance. He sang ‘The Times They Are A-Changin” and ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ and ‘Gates of Eden’ – still too fast, still in that almost strangled high chant. Then, halfway through ‘Just Like a Woman,’ it started to get magical, and when he sang ‘It’s All Right, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ it all fell into place. He was still fooling with the melody, but with a purpose. I felt I was hearing that song for the first time instead of the thousandth. When he sang the line about ‘But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked,’ everyone cheered, of course, but they cheered even louder for the line ‘And it’s all right, Ma, I can make it.’ After The Band came back on again, he sang a couple of very pretty new songs, and then ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ People began streaming down the aisles, and everyone stood up – there was no particular cue; we just all stood up at once. Dylan’s accompaniment for the chorus was the whole audience – twenty thousand people singing ‘HOW DOES IT FEEL?’ at the top of their lungs. The houselights were turned on, so we could all see each other, and four huge klieg lights went on behind Dylan, making everything – Dylan, us, the music – seem half again as big. He did two encores: a reprise of ‘Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine),’ much more melodic and accessible this time, and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ I’d never heard him sing it quite that way before. He never does anything the same way twice. His voice was clear, strong, and true. He pulled it off – he kept the myth intact.”

“Personally,” our blond friend said, “when it comes to mythic figures I prefer the ones like Elvis Presley, who stay mythic in spite of themselves. Dylan was never really a successful archetype, if you know what I mean. He was only someone who seemed to be somewhere we ought to be. That’s why people worried so much about his changes of style. People worried about where Dylan was and what he was doing because they wanted to know where they should be and what they should be doing. The style changes prophesied – falsely, perhaps, some kind of movement, and that mercurial quality of his appealed to our generation’s love of novelty. But now, you see, he has run out of ways to seem some distance ahead, and has fallen back on devices that will allow him to seem (at all but a few carefully chosen moments) some distance away. It’s a little sad to fight so hard for Mythic Distance.”

“But that’s precisely what I like about him,” said our dark-haired friend. “He lives by his wits.”