Dylan in the Flesh

...Seeing him, they were a little more certain that it was all still real for them, too...

...On this last point, there may be a bit of confusion, for despite the impressive statistics—at least 10 requests for every seat available!?the tour brought out an audience some years older on the average than the usual rock-concert mob...

...They couldn't compete with him...

...and Bouquet Music...

...His recuperation was slow...

...Never mind that the others comprised The Band, one of the finest rock groups around (big enough to rate a Time cover story all its own), and that they got equal billing on this gig...

...nobody alive today could, for he comes closer than any of the surviving superstars of the '60s to being an honest-to-goodness legend in his own time...

...Neither spoke: both simply looked and rode on...

...In an appearance at the Newport Folk Festival that year, when he stood up with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and plugged in a brand new Fender electric guitar, he barely got through a single number before he was booed off the stage...

...The more recent Dylan—the Nashville musician and movie actor—is much less distinct in one's memory...

...At 32, he is so well set financially that he does not need the work...

...He proved himself different, however, when he began composing in earnest, for what came out was a whole new kind of song, a genre soon to be known as "protest music," that decried American injustices during the Kennedy era...

...Yet he persisted, thereby helping to usher in the new rock era...

...Certainly, this was the case the night at the Capital Centre, where the crowd was, by and large, made up of young adults...

...This is just one of a number of speculations put forth as Dylan's reason for undertaking the tour, his first since 1966...

...Many were Dylan's age or older, and a few were parents who showed up with their children...

...the singer of protest songs like "Blowin' in the Wind," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" and "Masters of War...

...and the music he made at that time turned out to be just about the best of his career...

...Altogether, an estimated 658,000 people saw Dylan and The Band—the combined capacity of all the halls, arenas and stadiums they played...

...He sang it in a voice that was an adolescent parody of Guthrie's own, the same voice as on all those early Dylan sides—nasal, slightly waspish, earnest, asserting its importance and demanding that its owner be taken seriously...

...This was the performer they had come to hear—the prerock, nonelectric Dylan...

...After producing nothing for over a year, he did return to a recording studio—in Nashville for the beginning of his country phase...

...But by the time he arrived East, he had worked a near complete metamorphosis upon himself...

...All rights administered by United Artists Music Co., Inc...

...They reacted like audiences of old, too, saving their most enthusiastic response for a set just after intermission when Dylan slouched onto the stage alone with nothing but an acoustic guitar in hand and a harmonica wired around his neck...

...When asked whether he was disturbed by this, Goethe replied that he was not, that the whole experience had had the effect of assuring him of his own reality...

...A rumor is making the rounds to the effect that he intends to donate a large part or all of that money to the State of Israel...

...Dylan's songs—those from his Columbia albums Free-wheelin' Bob Dylan (CS 8786) and The Times They Are A-Changin' (CS 8909)—were sung by members of the newly formed Students for a Democratic Society and played on portable phonographs brought down by young civil rights workers in the voter registration drive of 1964, the Mississippi Summer...

...A motorcycle accident near his home in Woodstock, New York, in 1966 came within a fraction of an inch of breaking his neck...

...Goethe is said to have met an image of himself, an apparition, on the highroad outside Weimar...

...The proper notice is: 1971, Medi-arts Music Inc...

...The tour grossed $5 million, of which it is estimated Dylan himself got $2 million...

...He came to New York in 1961 from Hibbing, Minnesota, by way of Minneapolis (where he spent one year at the state university...

...In just such a way, those of Dylan's generation who looked on that night at the Capital Centre seemed most reassured by the actual, physical presence of the young man whose songs first gave them a sense of themselves...

...It looked less like a new '70s audience than the one he had in the '60s —grown older along with him...

...The young singer hitchhiked there again and again to see him and to sing his tribute, "Song to Woody," which he recorded on his first album (and performed during his acoustic set...

...Some fine songs came out of it-"Lay, Lady...

...He was retreating from the role of activist, saying that politics didn't matter, that singing and writing songs didn't do a bit of good...

...Bob Dylan was moving away from it all...

...Indeed, Dylan's career started with the decade to which he is so inseparably linked...

...What happened then put an end to that period in Dylan's musical development and very nearly put an end to Bob Dylan himself...

...Hearing Bob Dylan on records or seeing him in a movie may be all right, but the real kick for hundreds of thousands across the country is digging him in person...

...Down Along the Cove," "Copper Kettle"—and some big-selling albums...

...On Music DYLAN IN THE FLESH BY BRUCE COOK When the slight, droopy-shouldered, fuzzy-haired performer shambled onto the stage of Washington's new Capital Centre arena at Largo, Maryland, maybe it only seemed to the capacity crowd of 17,500 that he stood out from the other musicians who sauntered on with him...

...It took only one newspaper advertisement in each scheduled city (simply stating "Dylan/The Band," and giving a price list and address) to sell out every concert...

...As early as the middle of 1964, he was urging simple, straightforward personal relationships ("All I really want to do/Is, baby, be friends with you"), and remarking with some irony that he had not been nearly as smart in his political pronouncements as he had supposed ("But I was so much older then/I'm younger than that now...

...And when he sang "The Times They Are A-Changin'," he brought down the house...

...the writer of anthems heralding a movement...

...After all, their shoulders also drooped, they were dressed in the same nonstyle as he, and each of them walked with an identical graceless gait...

...Highway 61 Revisited (CS 9189), released in August 1965, is one of the finest and most important albums of the '60s...

...It was as if audience and artist both were caught in a time warp, tossed back to the period when those lyrics held out an optimistic promise and not merely a hollow threat...

...Born Robert Zimmerman, he had become Bob Dylan—after the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas...

...his old label, behind his back, has issued a collection of out-takes and rejects from earlier records, Dylan (Columbia PC 32747), and he wants to prove he's well beyond the music on that one...

...There were an estimated 6 million replies to the ads across the country, and they were honored on a first-come, first-served basis...

...Credits In my column, "The American Chanson" (NL, January 7), the copyright notice for the lyrics from Dory Previn's "Mythical Kings and Iguanas" was inadvertently omitted...

...That, I suppose, is why this tour was such an event...

...Still, the biggest change of all came in 1965: Dylan went electric...

...The funny thing is that Dylan, hustling for gigs, scrambling just to make a buck, was taken seriously, almost from the very start—even by the hard-bitten denizens of the New York folk music community, and even though he sang mostly the same tunes they did...

...And to the folk fans who formed his first audience, the musical compromise he worked out, which came to be known briefly as "folk rock," seemed the ultimate sell-out...

...moreover, he had switched from piano to guitar, and was singing folk music instead of rock-'n'-roll...

...In those days Dylan's idol was Woody Guthrie, the Okie balladeer of the Depression who was then dying a slow death of Huntington's disease out in a New Jersey hospital...

...It was music of a particular moment, one that marked the beginnings, the first skirmishes of the near civil war that rent America in the last few years of the decade...

...The man standing on the stage was no longer a millionaire recluse but once again the poet of an era, the prophet who was as much the product of his time as its producer...

...finally, it is said that Dylan wants to find out if a new audience is waiting for him in the '70s like the one he had in the '60s...

...But no tours...

...But it was he we were there to see, and so it was he we noticed immediately...

...But as tempers and allegiances across the country were rising...

...Other possible explanations or likely factors influencing the decision: He has just switched record labels, and wants to give his first album, Planet Waves (Asylum 781003), a good send-off...

...In fact, he made only three personal appearances: at a 1968 Carnegie Hall tribute to Woody Guthrie, at the 1969 Isle of Wight pop festival, and at the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh in Madison Square Garden...

...He was Bob Dylan, of course, and the Capital Centre appearance—there were two concerts on successive mid-January nights—was just one stop of 21 on a 6-week tour that began in Chicago, hit New York City about midpoint, and wound up February 14 out in Los Angeles...

...Back in the '50s, when he first got interested in music, he had been a kid rock-'n'-roller, playing the piano, admiring Little Richard, and nursing a desire to make it "as big as Presley...