What a strange thing Shadow Kingdom is.
What a strange artist Bob Dylan is.
Of course, it isn't a live stream. How cool would that have been, though? Bob in his front room, strumming some old songs into his IPhone, fans throwing questions at him via Zoom, the old boy responding to some of us by name. His old mate and fellow piano smasher upper Martin Carthy did just that during lockdown. But Dylan isn't that kind of artist. Shadow Kingdom is a pay-to-view movie: rather expensive at twenty quid for fifty minutes, but this is BOB DYLAN we are talking about.
Remember Christmas in the Heart? We were all a little shocked that Dylan had gone kitsch; but once we were done shouting "Herod!", some of us decided that we rather liked. One of the turning points, perhaps, was the very silly video he created to go with Must Be Santa, in which a fight breaks out at a Christmas party at which Bob is leading the festive sing-song. No fight breaks out during Shadow Kingdom: but we are watching a kind of film noir pastiche, a fictionalised Bob reinventing his songs in a monochrome 1930s speakeasy. (There's a credit to the Bon Bon Club, which I assume is every bit as real as the Abernathy Building). Any glitches in Bob's performance is smoothed over by the relentless artificiality. It isn't clear if the band are playing or miming or both. They are all wearing breath masks, which is just as well, because there is a permanent haze of cigarette smoke between the audience and the stage.
It kind of works.
Bob has been murdering -- I am sorry, deconstructing -- his back catalog at live gigs for at least twenty years. On stage he growls and mutters and sings around the melody while the band clatter out tin pan alley arrangements and the audience try to catch a line of a lyric to get a clue to what on earth he is singing. There are great moments and dreadful quarter hours. The studio construction of Shadow Kingdom (and the fact that he has been resting his voice for eighteen months) means we can hear every word. I have long suspected that when he plays the Cardiff Arena or the Albert Hall, Bob imagines himself playing to a few guys and and gals in a bar somewhere. The magic of technology means that Bob finally sounds like he does in his own head.
It is subtitled "the early songs of Bob Dylan", which means that we can hope for a second half called "the later songs of Bob Dylan". Early is understood to mean "between 1965 and 1989". (If Bob's career runs from 1960 to 2020 then Oh Mercy does indeed fall in the first half.) There are no early-early protest songs or folk songs: Nashville Skyline and John Wesley Harding are well represented.
He does strange things with the songs. The section about "the judge who walks and stilts" in Most Likely You'll Go Your Way is delivered as a heartfelt interlude, which detaches the lyrics even further from any possible meaning. Queen Jane Approximately is slowed down, transposed into an ethereal romantic ballad, with a touch of mouth organ at the end. I'll Be Your Baby Tonight is more shouted than sung, with two women from the audience standing impassively and threateningly on either side of him. Tom Thumb's Blues tends towards parody, a recitation of the lyrics with random words extended in Bob's trademark drawl. We always said that Bob was a poet rather than a lyriicist and his words survive this kind of treatment. I started out on Burgundy but-soon-hit the. har. derstufffffff. Tombstone Blues is slowed right down, with the musicians providing tension strings rather than anything you could actually call a melody. To Be Alone With You, a forgettable song off a forgettable album, gets a forgettable treatment; the guitar seems to be an ornament rather than an instrument, and he waves his hands like a bad political orator. The meditative, cryptic songs survive this treatment the best: the agonised What Was It You Wanted? seems to work better here than it does on the album; but then present day Dylan has more in common musically with the Dylan of '89 than with the Dylan of '65. Forever Young stands up as an artefact and a testament rather than as a song,. It's hard not to be moved by an incredibly old man growling out a song about youth. (It was almost the last thing Pete Seeger recorded, incidentally.) He notably sticks with the delicate lyric but doesn't attempt the long drawn out notes in the refrain that are arguably the heart of the song. Watching the River Flow is the closest thing to his actual stage act: Dylan mumbling a song no-one remembers over a raucous band and the audience inexplicably claps a lot. The final Baby Blue is probably the best example of what Shadow Kingdom is doing. Dylan stands, legs akimbo, band to his left. He sings with his hands, opening his palms at the end of each line. "The highway is for gamblers, better looooooose yourself" he sings: the rhythm of the original song completely abandoned. "Take what you have gathered from co..... in.... sid.... ence." And that may be the point. We are hearing the words as if for the first time. Does Bob have any more idea what they originally meant than anyone else does? Does it even matter?
If we were very cynical, we would say that there is something exploitative going on here: a very old man being wheeled on stage because of his reputation, with a technological superstructure making the film concert at look better than a live one ever good. Like propping an ancient Pope up on the balcony for one last blessing; or worse, like one of those Victorian corpse photos. But no-one who heard Dylan's Nobel Prize speech or listened to Rough and Rowdy ways can doubt that his mind is as bright as a button, or was three months ago. This is what he wants to be doing; and I am glad he's doing it.
The legend rolls on.
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