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<\/a><\/p>\nNext up on the essays shelf<\/a>:<\/p>\n The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks)<\/a> \nThe Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks)<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n \n \nSo 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. <\/p>\n 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<\/i> 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<\/a>, 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<\/i>?<\/p>\n The 1974 tour was lucrative, involving sell-out shows, massive crowds, and intense media scrutiny. <\/p>\n 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<\/i> 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.”<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n Here is an excerpt where the dark-haired person talks about what happened during the second half of the concert. <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n