Rough and Rowdy Lies the Way

One of the lovely things about being a professor is that one still gets to participate, if one wishes, in the collegiate institution of spring break. By middle March, everyone living in northern places is starved for sea and sand under a southern sun. After a snowy St. Patrick’s Day, and a visit to my elderly mother in Richmond, Virginia, I filled up my car with costly gasoline and followed John Hiatt’s dictum in one of my favorite road-tripping songs that will ever be written: “drive South.”

I wasn’t in a Chevy van, and had no one in the car with whom to hold hands—alas, not John Hiatt!—but was indeed heading way down south, in what some still call Dixie land, straight down Interstate 95 from middle Virginia to Beaufort, South Carolina. It is about a six and a half hour drive, and I took it slowly, taking exits for lunch and for places resting in my memories. Petersburg, and a pause early in the trip at the graveside of a beloved friend. A quick, happy wade at Roanoke Rapids. Lunch in Lumberton, in the heart of North Carolina’s piney woods that have supplied so many trees to so many industries, the setting for David Lynch’s classic Blue Velvet, in which you could set your watch to the “sound of the falling tree” on the fictional radio station WOOD. I took off layers as I drove. Already barefoot after Roanoke Rapids, I shucked off my jeans for a pretty dress in the parking lot at the rest stop near Hendersonville. By the time I took the exit at Yemassee for the slow roads to my friends’ house, the windows were down and I was happily sweaty, or as my grandmother would have insisted I say, glowing. Four days of catching up with my friends, who I had not seen since 2017, relaxing with their handsome golden retriever on daily walks by the marshes and the Atlantic, wearing sundresses by day and adding just a sweater at night, and I felt I had recovered a part of me long missing. Thank you, Bob Dylan, I said quietly to myself, for making your Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour leg for the spring of 2022 swing up this coast. I’d have gone south on this trip anyway, but the delightful coincidence of three tour dates within an hour or two’s drive of where I was going to be anyway? Benedictory. Single tickets for the three shows, in Savannah, Charleston, and Columbia, were easy to get; I splurged on good ones, in the first five rows, for all. (I invited my friends along for the Savannah show, so near their home, but they graciously declined. The venue didn’t require masks, and they would rather not, they said. None of the venues, it turned out, required masks or vaccines; I never removed my mask any of the evenings. It was surely sanest for safety’s sake, and, honestly, there’s something about the whole masked and anonymous feeling that seemed fitting to me. From the first row for two of the nights, I was also happy to know I wasn’t breathing on Bob and the band; they were so close).

***

Savannah

The city squares were fragrant and gray-green in the late afternoon, ancient live oak trees dripping with Spanish moss. There’d been a hard rain on Thursday, and by Saturday a transformation had come. Growing thickly on the broad backs and shoulders of the wide, spreading oak limbs are resurrection ferns. When there’s a drought, they turn brown and crisped, and you think they are dead. Come a downpour, though, they green up overnight, unfurling and waving in the air, celebrating. All the oak limbs bore jubilant, verdant color on March 26th. I got to town in the midafternoon and parked in a multistory deck next to the Savannah College of Art and Design. The evening’s venue, the Johnny Mercer Theatre, was just a block away from SCAD. It was too pretty, the air too soft, to be indoors, as tempting as the art museum might have been. Instead I moseyed down to the Colonial Park Cemetery and Chippewa Square, enjoyed The Book Lady Bookstore, and then sat on a bench in luscious Orleans Square, eating my sandwich. While I nibbled and swung my feet, I watched the activity at the tour buses and equipment trucks, parked facing me in the driveway of the Savannah Civic Center, of which the Mercer Theatre is a part.

The Mercer is a lovely room that seats just over 2500 people, and bears the name of John Herndon Mercer, born in Savannah in 1909. Singer, songwriter, composer, and superb lyricist Johnny Mercer struck it big in New York City, after failing to make it as an actor, when Hoagy Carmichael liked his lyrics and set them to music for the hit “Lazybones” (1933). Soon Mercer was in living in Hollywood, writing lyrics for both movie and Broadway musicals. He cofounded Capitol Records and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and among his hundreds of memorable songs are four for which he won Academy Awards: “On the Atchison, Topeka, And Santa Fe”; “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening”; “Moon River”; and “Days of Wine and Roses.” Here’s Johnny with Steve Allen, not so very long ago, really. You’ll know some of the songs by heart. If you don’t, you can hear some of them on Bob Dylan’s great American songbook albums. Try Shadows In The Night. Dylan’s performed Mercer’s “Autumn Leaves” on tour in the past.

The merchandise lines were long. As I stood and waited for a poster, the couple in front of me, a mother and son, were trying to decide which t-shirts to get. The son, in his 30s, was all for a Rolling Thunder Revue shirt, of which there were a couple to choose. She went for the Rough and Rowdy Ways album cover shirt. “Really, these songs he’s writing today are better than the ones in 1970 whatever,” she said to him. They were having a lively debate over the merits of “Crossing the Rubicon” and “Isis” (“both full of ancient gods and places,” she was saying) as I walked away.

The theater was cozy and bright, beautifully spreading out in fans of red seats from a sleek blond stage. The strangely coffin-shaped acoustic baffles hanging from the ceiling gave me a bit of a pause, but only a bit. The show started right on time, with a symphonic burst of Beethoven’s magisterial Ninth Symphony—allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso, just like Dylan on stage these days. The band rattled around, shuffled into their positions, from which they are not wont to move, except for Dylan now and then, and set forth with “Watching the River Flow.” Indeed, we were still flowing into seats, hurrying, spilling beer and so forth. Savannah time, southern time, was surprised by a fairly punctual start.

Dylan’s current band is such a good band. Bob, Tony Garnier (bass) and Donnie Herron (multi-instrumentalist chiefly on fiddle and pedal steel; and a silvery accordion on “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)") could play in a smoky club as a trio any late night of the week. The addition of virtuoso guitarist Bob Britt, switch-hitting Doug Lancio who supplies everything extra needed, and Charley Drayton makes for such a grand lineup, especially on the Rough and Rowdy Ways songs. Drayton should stay with Dylan always; he gets it, the music, the timing, the not overwhelming His Master’s Voice with heavy bass thuds.

Highlights for me were hearing “Crossing the Rubicon” live for the first time; the pleasure Dylan was clearly taking in his new lyrics for old songs; the rough snaky dazzle of “False Prophet”; the mingled beauty and grit of “Mother of Muses”; and Charley Drayton’s playing. “Rubicon” was intense and grand, with Dylan enunciating every word to be heard. “Gotta Serve Somebody” was a hard-rocking joy, with words I’d not heard before, and people sedately seat-dancing—only at the Columbia show did folks stand up and dance. “Black Rider” was slowed down to a rocking beat, like many numbers quietly propelled and never drowned out by Drayton. Dylan deploys profanity only rarely in his songs, and almost always to flay the figure of a leader who has failed: another politician pumping out the piss; the size of your cock will get you nowhere. There was a ripple of laughter from the audience. And then, in “Mother of Muses,” a few scattered hisses on the verse beginning “Sing of Sherman, Montgomery, and Scott / And of Zhukov, and Patton, and the battles they fought / Who cleared the path for Presley to sing / Who carved the path for Martin Luther King.” William Tecumseh Sherman, Union commander during the Civil War, and leader of his victorious armies through Georgia from Atlanta to the sea. There’s a song about it, written by Henry Clay Work to commemorate Sherman’s march. The culmination of the march, which was an exercise in what Sherman called “total war” and left great destruction in its path, was Savannah. Sherman spared the city itself, but the hisses remembered. I was heartened, though, by the scattered applause for the name of Martin Luther King moments later, in the same theatre. The same thing happened at the Township Auditorium in Columbia when Dylan sang these lines; Columbia was, unlike Savannah, burned to the ground by Sherman’s army. Did this happen in any other venues across the south, I wondered. Dylan put, it seemed to me, a little extra oomph into that “Mother of Muses, unleash your wrath” every night, turning the song dark and contemplative.

Thinking of the drive back to Beaufort, and knowing it would be the last song, I left my seat and listened to “Every Grain of Sand” from the curtain at the back of the theater. The sound as just as good there, and the performance was beautiful. I applauded hard and happily, and then hurried through an empty lobby for the doors. Right behind me was a tall, thirtysomething man. “My wife’s home with the kids,” he said. “I live close by, and want to get there to tell them good night.” “It’s not even 9:45 yet,” I laughed. “How old are they?” “Seven and nine,” he said, and we slowed down as we walked out into the night. Next to us the buses and trucks were ranged, with one bus in the middle lane, as it were, of the driveway, its engine running and door open. No one was near it as we looked curiously, and then stopped walking, as Dylan came down the steps toward his bus not twenty feet away. He was fresh off the stage, with no hat on, and a towel draped like a boxer’s around his neck, bunching high on his head. His eyes were clear light blue in the dusk, and he was surveying the scene in front of him, the avenue down to Orleans Square, the live oaks green and gray, the two people standing all alone with no phones, no cameras. His security guard, a step or two behind him, saw us too, and began to raise his flashlight to stop us from taking photos. Seeing there was no threat of this, he dropped the light and they came on. Drayton was a few feet behind them. “Thank you for a fine evening, gentlemen,” I called. Bob did not look at me, but smiled, as he rounded the bus door and got on. Drayton grinned and flashed a peace sign, as the man next to me said, “It was a great show, thanks.” Then my new friend and I looked at each other, laughed, and went on. “It’s not every night you get to say thanks to Bob Dylan,” he said, as we shook hands at the street and went our separate ways. Out before the traffic had even begun, I saw the big bus in shades of brown a couple of blocks in front of me, its taillights above the cars. The Bobmobile took the high road and I took the low road; they swept up onto Interstate 16, heading for the 95 North and Charleston, while I meandered back to Beaufort on old roads hugging riverbanks, crossing marshy fingers to the sea.

***

North Charleston

The road from Beaufort to Charleston can be the Interstate 95, or it can be those slow low roads. If you have the time, take the latter. And, as you go, stop on the beaches and by the lagoon at Hunting Island State Park. The sun was brilliant, the sea cold but just swimmable, the shrimp shacks and sweetgrass-basket stands open and waiting on a lovely Sunday. The venue was in North Charleston, but I got to town, sandy and salty, by 3:30. It was easy to park in the tip of town on King Street and walk past beautiful homes, and gardens already in full spring glory, to the Battery, where, as the old Charleston phrase goes with a grin, the Ashley and Cooper Rivers come together to form the Atlantic Ocean. Wandering the streets, shopping a little, my freckles darkening in the afternoon sun, I ended up in Magnolia’s for a bite at the bar: fried green tomatoes, hold the ham; deviled eggs; a glass of Chardonnay. A little pixilated by the delicious food and sweet sunshine, I wandered for another hour before getting in the car and making the easy drive up to North Charleston.

The North Charleston Performing Arts Center is adjacent to the much larger Coliseum which, when I arrived, was disgorging thousands of South Carolina Stingrays fans. They’d had a 3 o’clock game, and were departing as the Dylan fans were arriving. I’ve never had a better parking spot for a concert in my life, I thought, pulling into a just-vacated space an easy walk from the will call. The crowd was more homogenous than that in Savannah, older, quiet. People were enjoying drinks rather than buying merch. Indoors was far more of a classical music concert space to me, and my seat was much better, in the second row. The Beethoven fit right in, as did the songs on which Dylan speak-sings most clearly. When one ages, and one’s voice changes, a male performer seems to have two singing style options for the most success: to shift into a more nasal, folky, tenor register—think Dr. Ralph Stanley or Pete Seeger—or go full-on crooner, emphasizing the phrasing in a way that I think of as speak-singing—think Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, and the living master, Tony Bennett. Having begun his career in the first register, Dylan has chosen the second for now. Alternately crouched or standing behind his upright piano, upon which, tonight, two large untouched bottles of water caught the light between him and us most of the time, Dylan was relaxed and yet seemed in a hurry, too. His voice was rich and best on the low notes, relishing the ominous words of “Crossing the Rubicon,” “False Prophet,” and “My Own Version of You” as the band accompanied with the earthy, bump-and-grind arrangements of the tunes. Once upon a time Wesley Stace, as John Wesley Harding, recorded a romp of a song called “Making Love to Bob Dylan.” Honestly, you could get it on to any of the Rough and Rowdy Ways songs—if you take care not to listen to the words, which will prove both too distracting, too scary, and/or too profound!—in their arrangements on this tour. “Crossing the Rubicon” was so good the audience yelled and whooped; Bob obligingly came out from behind his piano and nodded politely from center stage while we clapped. “When I Paint My Masterpiece” reminded me of Levon Helm singing it in the late 2000s at his barn in Woodstock, New York, during the Midnight Rambles he held there. Dylan sang more of the original words to the song than he had in Savannah, a little throwback; maybe this is why. “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” was especially fine. The band and Bob seemed to want to rock and roll, but then decided not to. They’d make up for this in a couple of nights.

“I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You” was a slowly, sweetly swinging lyric that evening. The band held back and let Dylan’s voice hold us, from the gentle words, to the high notes he had to reach for giving way to the ensuing descents on which he shone. The “take you out travelin’” and last verses gained power as they went, and the line “I hope that the gods go easy with me” brought tears to my eyes. Thanks for the memory, Benedetto:

***

Columbia

Where did Bob and the band spend their time after North Charleston? It’s their practice to leave a town as soon as their show, or shows, there are through and go directly to the site of the next; perhaps they were in a nice hotel in downtown Columbia, home of the University of South Carolina, or perhaps they were somewhere between there and Charleston, in a resort or grand old house. I went straight to Columbia, and spent the off day and day of the next concert happily sifting through the letters of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. One of the first, and still most important, scholars studying F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Matthew J. Bruccoli, was for many years an English professor at the U of SC. He was also an early collector of all things Fitzgerald, and the rare books library of the university contains such gems. I also walked around the town, exploring the downtown—rebuilt after February 1865—and eating too much shrimp and grits, if there is such a thing as too much shrimp and grits. The poet Henry Timrod, whose poems certainly influenced Dylan’s songs on Modern Times, as Scott Warmuth has shown, is buried in Trinity Cathedral churchyard (spared by Sherman). Thanks to Richard Thomas for having reminded me of this. Whatever the guys did during their time off, they should do it every time, because the show at the Township Auditorium on March 29 was one of the best of many hundreds of Dylan shows I’ve attended.

I’d bet my bottom dollar that Dylan is involved in selecting the towns, and theaters, for the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour. The cities along the road are generally ones he’s played in many times before, and in almost every case the theaters are historic and well loved for many decades, or indeed centuries, by musicians. The Township is special even by these standards. Built in 1930, with white Greek columns across its cheerful red-brick facade and a lovely intimate bowl of an interior with comfortable roomy seats, the Township has hosted everyone from the Ink Spots to Skrillex, Duke Ellington, Patsy Cline, Buddy Holly, the Allman Brothers, Elvis, The Clash, and—repeatedly—Bob Dylan. Here’s a bit of him performing “Tangled Up In Blue” at the Township back in 2016, thanks to Elaine. He and the band took the stage promptly, eagerly, and they really knocked themselves out, as they followed in such footsteps. Dylan did a long harmonica solo to lead off “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” seemed to be tickled by his own changes to the song, and was downright loquacious and happy in his band introductions. He urged Drayton to stand up from behind his drums so we could see him (Drayton did); he pleaded with Britt to talk to us (Britt didn’t), and introduced Herron as an “infant prodigy,” thereby cracking up both himself and Donnie. Why is it so much fun to watch Dylan laughing on stage? We all joined in. It’s a fair call for Herron, too, who founded BR5-49 when he was just 29 (I heard this fantastic band open for Dylan on his 1997 tour). Herron’s various instruments work like fine glue binding together the sets on this tour; hats off to him.

My extra ticket to the Township show had gone to a young fiddle player outside the venue. She said she never went to the shows, just played before and after for tips. I saw her as I left, playing for some twirling guys in flannel shirts. “What did you think?” I asked. She beamed at me and waved her bow. “That ticket’s the best tip I’ve ever gotten.” I walked back across the college campus in the sweet-smelling cool night, regretting already that the brown buses and red trucks were in their convoy north from one Carolina to another, on the way to Charlotte, and that I was not.

***

Coda

The show I missed that I wish I’d heard? The one at the old Brady Theater in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It is now called the Tulsa Theater, eliminating the name of Wyatt Tate Brady, a Ku Klux Klan member who participated in the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921, or as Greil Marcus has rightly called them, the Tulsa pogrom, in which hundreds of Black townsfolk were murdered and thousands of homes burned. The venue is vast, rambling and battered and beautiful. I’ve heard Robert Plant, and the aforementioned John Hiatt, there; the acoustics were equally fine for Plant’s skyrocketing voice and full band, and Hiatt’s solos with his acoustic guitar. Reviews of the show ranged from commending the sound, the lyrics of the new songs, and Bob’s genial delivery, to bashing his voice and even his age. To me, the night sounded absolutely golden. Here, settle in for the next hour and a half, and judge for yourselves, thanks to My Polished Boots:

The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour rolls on, from Memorial Day weekend into June, with a string of just-announced dates on the west coast. You should go if you can. You will be glad, and also changed, if you do. Dylan will be a year older, having celebrated his 81st birthday on May 24. May he do so in absolutest privacy among family and friends, with splendid presents from books to boats, libations and celebrations and cake. After a month and a half off, with spring in the air and summer stepping in all across the country by then, he and the band will be rested and ready and, no doubt, rehearsing first.

And what about us? Are we ready, too? Dylan’s audiences, guests in the living room that these shows are so like, breathing—carefully—the same air for an hour and a half, rooted to the spot, rapt?

Postibus Augustis eadem fidissima custos

ante fores stabis; mediamque tuebere quercum: utque meum intonsis caput est juvenile capillis

to quoque perpetuos semper gere frondis honores

Approaching his eighty-second year, and forever young, Bob Dylan is still carrying us with him as he goes along his way, laurels and vine-leaves in his hair. . . whose silhouette is part of his iconic profile still.

Bob Dylan by Jerry Schatzberg, 1965 © Jerry Schatzberg via Rukaj Gallery