Spin
November 1993
Aren’t tribute albums terrible? You don’t look to mass extravaganza concerts—one performer after another trooping across the stage in fealty, in memoriam, or bowing to some good cause—for real music. The artifacts such shows leave behind are just souvenirs. Even legendary Woodstock produced only a single number that’s still talked about: Jimi Hendrix’s version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
When more than a score of stars gathered at Madison Square Garden on October 16, 1992, to play Bob Dylan’s songs and thank him for supposedly putting a head on the body of popular music, it would have made sense to expect what a lot of people in fact came up with: respectful or wrong-headed or decently satisfying turns by the likes of Eric Clapton, John Mellencamp, or the Clancy Brothers. There was no reason to expect that time and again people would step forward and, reaching for something in a Bob Dylan song that had never quite been heard before, leave their own careers in the dust. It was a shock then and it’s a shock now.
Sound recordings are just a map here; the video is the territory. You can hear what Johnny Winter—backed, as were most others this night, by the in-your-dreams combination of Booker T. and the MG’s plus drummers Jim Keltner and Anton Fig—does with “Highway 61 Revisited,” but you can’t exactly hear his performance. The sound is sardonic, hip, fast, uproarious, just as it was on Second Winter, the great lost album of 1970. But it’s Winter’s appearance that takes the song to other worlds. On he comes, impossibly thin, his arms covered with tattoos of hex signs and hoodoo symbols, tattoos that look more like Kaposi’s sarcoma than anything else, tattoos that seem to have eaten away most of the flesh he’s apparently intending to play his guitar with.
This is a pagan apparition. The song is going to begin with “God said to Abraham, kill me a son,” but Winter looks as if he’s already been sacrificed. Then out of nowhere, as Winter stands still, his mouth closed, you hear weird hollers and moans. It’s as if the song knows what’s coming, and it’s flinching, as if the song doesn’t want to play itself. But Winter is only tuning up. He does play the song, rams through it, leaves.
Lou Reed doesn’t look as if he’s going to do anything odd. Dressed in black—big surprise—wearing glasses, he comes out to sing “Foot of Pride,” a tune Dylan left off his 1983 album Infidels. It’s a very long song: two or three hundred verses, about half a million words. Reed reads them off a music stand. This is quite distracting, until Reed hits the first chorus; then the biblical curse of the number hits home. The huge roar that emanates from the stage doesn’t seem tied to any individual; the vertigo the sound creates is a vertigo of rising, not falling. Reed could be standing on his head for all you’d care. He’s created a monster and now he’s riding it.
Heard today on John Wesley Harding, “All Along the Watchtower” is cool, sinister, a tale about Limbo told in Purgatory: “Two riders were approaching / The wind began to howl,” it ends, leaving the listener in a wasteland. Jimi Hendrix’s version of the wind-storm has been riding the airwaves for twenty-five years; it’s probably the strongest cover of a Dylan song anyone has ever produced.
Neil Young steps out to prove the song has just begun to speak. As Jon Landau once said about Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour” (perhaps Booker T. and the MG’s finest hour), this is not a classic, it’s an epic. “All along the watchtower,” Young says to himself over and over after he’s all but ended the performance, as if the power of the image has only just now hit him. It’s all modern war, what he’s done with the song; go back and listen to Dylan’s version after Young’s and it’s like hearing Robert Johnson for the first time, a man who died before you were born in a place you’ll never get to, exiled by the fact that you’ll never catch up with him.
All of this, though, is merely art. What happens with Roger McGuinn and “Mr. Tambourine Man” is something else: real life, the transformation of a man before your very eyes. Looking fine and just a bit uncertain, at once proud and shy, he strides out to join Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. He launches into the song with the same ringing Rickenbacker twelve-string notes and the same fey, Beach Boys voice that made “Mr. Tambourine Man” a number one hit in 1965. But then he passes the single verse the Byrds used all those years ago, and lunges for the next one.
He is a different person. The voice is thicker; the body rocks back and forth. There’s a vehemence here that no one has ever heard from this man before. On the “and” in “And if you hear vague traces,” his voice lifts into the air and the word fragments, then floats down as pieces of some Scots ballad, but McGuinn is already making the hard consonants of the next words into weapons, a blacksmith with “skkkkkipping reels of rhyme”—the performance is cruel, heedless, vengeance for a crime that isn’t named.
That act—that vengeance—is something one can hear all through Dylan’s own work, even if he once said that all of his songs end with “Good luck.” You can hear that, too: there are a lot of good smiles in the show, but the best of them comes almost at the end, when Dylan and everyone else have finished “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” The taciturn mask Dylan has worn for the last numbers of the concert breaks; just barely, he seems to acknowledge that he might have heard something he hadn’t heard before, even in his head.
Bob Dylan, The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration (Columbia, 1993).
———. The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration (Columbia Music Video, 1993). The only currently available DVD release is the botched Tribute to Dylan (101 Distribution, 2009), which omits the Winter, Reed, and Young performances in favor of John Mellencamp’s hideous “Like a Rolling Stone,” Nanci Griffith and Carolyn Hester’s simpering “Boots of Spanish Leather,” and the oleaginous Richie Havens on “Just Like a Woman.”