Bob Fest 2015

I love Bob Dylan. No apologies, no qualifications.

I love Dylan.

Bob Dylan has been a major part of my life in so many ways, starting from when I was a young teen, and he was crowned “the voice of a generation”, to when I grew into a FOG (fat old guy), and while he croaked his way into an irascible geezerhood.

Growing up, I loved the Stones and the Beatles. But Bob Dylan is the reason I started playing guitar 50 years ago. Through Bob Dylan, I discovered Woody Guthrie, Son House, the Carter Family, Robert Johnson, and the whole treasure chest of American music. Tangentially, because of Dylan, I discovered Kerouac and the Beats and John Steinbeck. And, as teens will, made a point of name-dropping as many as I could whenever the conversation turned to music.

Because of Dylan, I learned to take country music seriously. Cowboy music was just as legitimate a form of music as jazz. I discovered Bob Wills, GIs Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, and Bessie Smith.

Bob Dylan was my rabbit hole into what the late Greil Marcus called “that old, weird America”.

Dylan was called the “voice of a generation” for a reason. He was able to articulate the frustration as well as the dreams of his contemporaries and brazenly point out the hypocrisy of post-war America. He attacked war, greed, materialism, and racism; he was not afraid to call out the Emperor and scream that he wore no clothes, while most others would simply avert their eyes and duck out for a three martini lunch.

What an incredible canon… “Blowin’ In The Wind”, “With God On Our Side”, “Masters of War”, “The Times They Are A’Changin’, all written before he was 25. Incredible, if you think about it. Even more incredible, sadly, when you think of how relevant these songs are some 50 years later.

Those songs alone, would be enough to guarantee sainthood. But he also wrote some of the best, bitterest kiss-off songs in modern times. “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”, “Just Like a Woman”, “I Don’t Believe You”… “Positively 4th Street”just drips with venom.

Especially as a young teen, and even more so as a teen in the 1960s, Dylan’s contrariness appealed to, no, captured my sense of rebellion and concept of righteousness.

Sometimes I think Dylan’s sole purpose in life is to do the unexpected, just to annoy people. Everything from “selling out” at Newport by going electric, to selling out by selling cars in a recent Super Bowl commercial wad not so much selling out as it was telling people “Don’t get too comfortable with your idea of who I am. ‘I’m not here.'”

I love Dylan.

And with that said…

We were looking at the newspaper (yes, we both read the paper. Not cool is it?), and we saw an ad for a Tribute to Bob Dylan show on Friday night at a place called Steve’s Live Music.

As an aside, we’d been to Steve’s before. Steve was a 60-something former lawyer who had always loved music, and had a very, very eclectic taste (sound familiar). Right about the time he decided he’d had enough of being a lawyer, he also decided that Atlanta needed a venue where he could see live music that he liked… and that you were unlikely to hear on corporate radio.

Steve also wanted to give musicians a chance to be heard, especially original musicians. We went last year to a showcase for North Carolina singer-songwriters, and the acts ranged from pretty damned good to great(!).

Steve is not as interested in the money – well, he does have to keep the lights on and pay the staff – as much as he is in providing an outlet for musicians.

The place itself,is fairly intimate, you can squeeze maybe 75 or so people in… if they are a REALLY good friends. It’s about the size of Preservation Hall, minus the “funkiness”.

In other words, it’s a pretty good place to go hear music.

The show was billed as a Tribute to Bob Dylan, but unlike a lot of the “tribute” bands out now, who are really kind of creepy if you stop to think about it, this was more of a jam, with people and bands really encouraged to do their own interpretation.

One of the things that had always fascinated me about Dylan was how many of his songs so easily lent themselves to interpretation by others. So naturally, I was excited to go to the show. And at a $10 cover charge, compared to other music venues in Atlanta, this was a bargain.

Knowing how quickly Steve’s fills up, we got there early to get a good seat. I have to say up front, that I still find it difficult to accept my age, and when I see a sea of gray hair and bald heads, my first thought is “Oh Jeez, it’s all old people!” Of course, then reality rears it’s ugly, gray head, and I realize that they are all my age. Like it or not, I’m one of them!

So it was at Steve’s. When we first walked in, my initial reaction was “Uh oh…” Until I realized that mist of them may have been Dylan fans even longer than me.

The first two hours of the show was solo acts, basically guys my age, sometimes backed by a house band, sometimes not. And as it was also a jam, a lot of those guys had never played together before.

And it was wonderful! These guys may not have been the best singers, or technically great guitarists, but they knew and loved the songs. Their enthusiasm and affection for the songs came through loud and clear. It was like sitting in someone’s living room and listening to a bunch of your pals. It was just the sort of thing I really live for.

It reminded me so much of when we were young and used to play in each other’s living rooms, and it didn’t matter if it was good. What matters is that we were having fun.

I don’t get to do that much these days. But I do get up to visit my brother Ted in North Carolina once or twice a year, and we spend the weekend doing that. Some of the best times I ever had, and it’s always one of the high points of my year.

And all the “old timers” in the audience? They sang along with every song, every single word. And with Dylan, that’s a lot of words to remember. And all the “seniors” got a hearty laugh over the MC’s reference to”Lysergic something or other.” We are everywhere!

The MC kept apologizing for the lack of the musicians onstage practicing, and swore that the bands that were appearing later in the evening were “professional musicians who rehearse and everything.” Hmmm…

So the “old guy” portion of the show ended, much to our disappointment, and the first band took the stage.

As the band began to assemble onstage, Dorene said “Jeez, they look like a bunch of doctors or lawyers or something.”

“CPAs gone wild, maybe?”

Well they started playing, and I certainly hope they were better lawyers than they were musicians. Because as musicians they were pretty good plumbers.

They started out with a pretty horrific version of “Just Like Tom Thumb Blues”, that actually sounded oddly familiar.

It wasn’t just the arrangement, but the tone of the guitar and the riffs that the bearded fat guy on guitar was playing. They were playing, very poorly, the Grateful Dead’s arrangements of Dylan.

Now as much as I am a fan of the Grateful Dead, they are NOT very good interpreters of Dylan. In fact, other than a few exceptions, they are pretty bad. Sorry… the truth.

So not only were these guys doing bad arrangements of the songs, they were doing them badly. And not only that… Holy Shit! They stole the body language from the band!

Sure enough, as bizarre as it sounds, the fat guy was acting just like Jerry Garcia, the “rhythm guitarist”, who could play all if four barre chords, was singing like Bob Weir – not in his vocals, but in the way he twisted his body around the microphone. And the bass player was hunching himself up the way Phil Lesh plays…

It was actually creepy.

I can handle the Grateful Dead playing Dylan. I can even handle lawyers playing the Grateful Dead playing Dylan. But these guys managed to find a whole new low to set the bar.

I was in bands in high school that were better than these guys. I really had to control myself from screaming “Learn to play your fucking instruments!” and “You guys are too old to play this badly!”

I would have loved for one of them to say,”Oh yeah, well if you can do better…”

Mercifully, they only played four songs.. each worse than the one before. It was almost as if they had never listened to any version of the songs, let alone the original.

When the next band began to set up, I can’t believe that I actually said, “At least these guys LOOK like musicians!” Unfortunately, that was about the only thing they had in common with musicians.

They weren’t bad… They just weren’t good. Maybe because there are so many really, really good musicians in Atlanta, we had set out expectations too high. Atlanta is a really good city for musicians, lots of work, lots of places to play, and in most cases, a very, very high standard for musicianship.

As the band started the first song, the lead guitarist picked up a mandolin. I got excited because I really like good mandolin music. Well this guy must have been playing for all of a week, because he played three chords and a bad, two note solo. Disappointment.

But by God, the looked cool! Especially the bass player with the 1966 “Beatle cut” haircut, the raybans, and the skin tight paisley (That’s right!) pants. And don’t take the brown acid.

By this time we were ready to leave. We’d been there four plus hours, and the final band didn’t look ( or sound) too promising as they did a brief sound check.

But I do gave to say that the older, “unrehearsed” jamming guys at gage beginning were really, really enjoyable. Despite the back bands, we certainly felt satisfied, like we got our money’s worth.

And it made me realize how much I enjoy playing with Ted, and how much I’m looking forward to getting together for another “lost weekend” in March. We spend the entire weekend playing… and watching March Madness – Ted is a huge UNC fan.

Several years ago, Randy Shipp joined us for the weekend. Randy doesn’t play, but it was great seeing him after all these years, and having him be a part of a very personal weekend.

We even made a couple of silly videos, including a fake “documentary” of a Ted and I playing and recording an old Howlin’ Wolf tune. Great weekend.

It reminds me of how much I miss doing this sort of thing with my old friends, and how much I would love to get together with them for a weekend of playing.. and maybe some basketball.

After all, life’s too short for bad music.