Last Night in Bethel (by Anne Margaret Daniel)

2024-07-06, Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, Bethel, NY

Jul 08, 2024

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Last night, Bob Dylan played Woodstock! That is, he played the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, which sits on the site of the original 1969 Woodstock festival (which, despite the name, did not actually take place in Woodstock, NY). This was the second-to-last stop of the first leg of the Outlaw Tour. The finale is going on as I write this intro. The tour will resume at the end of the month, with John Mellencamp replacing Robert Plant and Alison Krauss for the duration of the run. And, hopefully, with Willie Nelson along for the entire thing this time. After an illness benched him for most of this initial run, last night was only his second appearance.

I wasn’t there, but one of the best current Dylan writers was. Anne Margaret Daniel teaches literature at the New School. She’s published extensively on Fitzgerald and Modernism, and written many articles about Dylan. I’d particularly point you to her Hot Press author page (if you need a place to start, her Fragments review was the best I read on the Time Out of Mind box set). You might also have read her chapter in the recent Dylan Center book about the Tony Glover interviews.

But, before you click any of those links, here’s Anne Margaret Daniel’s report from last night’s show.

It is only forty miles or so, but an hour and a half’s drive on tiny windy roads through small towns and state parks, like that which rejoices in the name of Peekamoose, from Woodstock, New York, to the former site of Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel. Why did the organizers of Woodstock choose Yasgur’s farm for the “Aquarian Exposition: Three Days of Peace and Music” in the spring of 1969? The story’s well known. Fearing an invasion of peace-love-and-druggers, though the promoters said there would be no more than 50,000 attendees, the town of Woodstock panicked and said no to the event. Michael Lang took at look at the alternate spot and said yes. Yasgur’s cows went elsewhere to graze, stages were quickly built, and half a million people drove, hitched, and mostly walked in to the green fields and little bell-shaped dell in rural Sullivan County.

Last night we drove down from Woodstock to meet friends for the Outlaw Music Festival on the same grounds, now in part occupied by the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts. There was no mud and no brown acid (though there was plenty of weed). Jimi Hendrix was there only in large permanent neon form. The parking was almost too well organized and orderly, with both attendants and police everywhere to keep cars and those on foot flowing. The museum and exhibition area was packed with people trying to beat the ferocious heat and humidity—yesterday I sweated nonstop from three in the afternoon until soon after midnight, when the car air conditioning kicked back in. Vendors were selling local craft beer for $16 a can, and woven hemp hats for considerably more. The times they have a-changed, and the most famous absentee from Woodstock 1969, Bob Dylan—who skipped the event for reasons oft-speculated upon—was there to play a set before Willie Nelson and his family band closed the evening.

Dylan took the stage punctually after Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, two performers bright and vital on their own, and stunning together. I wonder what he thought of their spectacular medley that included “Mathy Groves,” which long ago he learned from, perhaps, Paul Clayton—who put it on his Folksongs and Ballads of Virginia (1956) as “Lord Darnell.” Dylan mentioned Lord Darnell in his Nobel speech, and put a lot of the angry cuckold into “Tin Angel” and his many other anxious, envious songs. I thought back to “Mathy Groves” when Dylan spoke, lightly and almost happily, his lyrics in “Soon After Midnight” about Two-Timin’ Slim.

He and his band took the stage when it was still quite light, and even from a seat up front it was hard to see through the forest of cellphones held up to film him. It seems to me that only for Willie would Bob have agreed to this. He paused briefly to look out at the crowd, then settled behind his grand-piano keyboard. No more upright with water bottles concealing him from our gaze; it’s a big black grand with the lid closed, Bob seated facing us with the piano in between, so the longest largest curve comes at us like the prow of a ship. He had on his customary garb for this tour: dark pants and a collared, long-sleeved white shirt that has occasioned much commentary and pieces in the English tabloid press, where Dylan has long been more thoroughly covered than in his home country. It’s a Romantic shirt that might have come off the back of his old idol Lord Byron; it is, as Adam Selzer noted after reading too many times about Bob’s shirt being unbuttoned, a zip-front shirt. Wheels are already spinning: why is he not wearing his cowboy-dude stage gear on this tour? Where are the hats? People: it has been in the 90s for most of the evenings of the Outlaw Tour so far. Let the man be in shirt sleeves and for heaven’s sake, hatless.

The set list, after some curveballs and joyous speculation early on, seems to have solidified now. I’m glad that “Stella Blue,” which Dylan added to the Rough And Rowdy Ways Tour last summer, remains. The covers he and the band—Tony Garnier on bass, Doug Lancio and Bob Britt on guitars, and Jim Keltner on drums, joined occasionally by Mickey Raphael on harmonica—did were every bit as good, indeed even better in some cases, than Dylan’s own songs. He loves singing other people’s songs, and if you should doubt this, or doubt that he is happy singing songs by Johnnys Mercer and Cash, Chuck Berry, DeWayne Blackwell, Earl Green and Carl Montgomery, you should go and listen to, oh, Shadows In the Night or Triplicate, or World Gone Wrong; or read The Philosophy of Modern Song or some of his interviews about other songwriters he admires in Every Mind Polluting Word, or do yourself a favor and catch the Outlaw Tour.

Dylan opened with a “Highway 61” full of sass, followed by a strangely metronomic “Shooting Star.” His piano playing glimmered and shone on the riffs and runs, but had a tick-tock regularity on the main lines. Is it meant to connect the numbers in some way? Does he want us to listen to the rhythm and beat rather than individual other instruments? I wasn’t sure. He once said that he could hear Aaron Neville singing “Shooting Star” when he wrote it, but the line that stood out to me in the heat of Bethel was the paraphrase of Scarlett O’Hara: tomorrow will be another day. At least I think it was. I could hear the gentle brush of the drums and particularly the guitars far better than I could hear Dylan’s voice most of the night.

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“Love Sick” is suited by that metronome quality, in its slow-march back-and-forth melody. Keltner’s soft thumps were like tiptoes, so elegant and gentle against Dylan’s voice. I wish I could’ve heard better, but the people around us talked all night, and there was no way to stop them. This is becoming endemic, sadly, in indoor theaters too; people jabbering behind us spoiled the Asheville night of the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour for me. If you’re reading this and you gabble during a concert (and I do not think readers of these pages do so), do everyone a favor and stay at home, or go out with your loved ones and friends and talk at a restaurant. By the time I finally unloaded, during Willie Nelson’s set and “Angel Flying Too Close To the Ground,” in spectacular language that I cannot even remember but that my husband assures me he wishes he’d recorded, on the couple behind us (old guy in the yellow polo shirt, and younger date with curly dark hair who knew nothing about the music so you HAD TO EXPLAIN IT TO HER, BADLY, when you weren’t kissing her, I will always know who you are), I was almost wishing I’d stayed at home.

Almost. Well, no. Not at all, even as I write that now. Just stay home if you want to talk, okay? Thank you.

The woman next to us fired up her phone for “Little Queenie” after her husband said “What the hell is this, 1950s rock and roll? Did he write this?” Points to hubby for a song that Berry released in 1959, with Willie Dixon on bass—the year Dylan wrote Barbara Ann Hewitt a letter saying “Little Willie” would make a good stage name for himself, and enclosing a drawing of “Little Willie, lead singer of the Night Gales.” Dylan had a good time playing this one, delivering that “c’mon Queenie,” and “no no no little Queenie” like I bet he would have with the Golden Chords.

“Mr. Blue” is a sweet soft gooey self-pitying song of abandoned love that no one should be surprised Dylan feels like singing. It’s from 1958, his junior year at Hibbing High. He and The Band did it in Woodstock years ago, and as we know blue is one of his favorite colors, songwise and paintingwise. He sings this one with a bit of a nudge and wink, as if we know it isn’t (the inevitable rhyme) true. On this number I finally realized that it is now impossible for me to hear any slow, meditative song performed by Dylan without missing Donnie Herron so much I was supplying his accompaniment in my mind.

The shock of the beginning of the Outlaw Tour was Herron’s absence after nineteen years with Dylan’s band. He joined it in 2005, stepping into the gargantuan multi-instrumentalist shoes of Larry Campbell, who departed from Dylan’s band in 2004 and shortly thereafter became the bandleader for the epic Midnight Rambles at Levon Helm Studios. Speculative reasons were given for Herron’s absence: will he be back? Won’t he? I sincerely hope that he will. I first heard him with BR5-49, opening for Dylan at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Virginia on a hot night in 1997, and have followed his career with interest and pleasure since “Cherokee Boogie” lit up the country charts roundabout then. His more than accompaniments, his duets with Dylan have dazzled and compelled on both predictable and unlikely songs. No one in the band follows Dylan’s rise-and-fall voice as well as Donnie does. They palpably enjoy each other’s playing, and get a kick out of the instrumental connection, too. One night in 2008 in Moncton, Canada, he and Bob made each other laugh for the entire course of “Spirit On the Water” for reasons unknown—Dylan was still snickering all through the start of “Highway 61 Revisited.” Currently, there is a Donnie-sized hole in the band, and you can hear nothing but it on some songs.

“Early Roman Kings,” with its Muddy-Waters riff and biting, romping lyrics—Dylan positively dragged out that “haggggg” and then gave a little “heh” at the end—veered from a poundy jingle-jangle into a softer conclusion, more boogie-woogie than rocking. “Can’t Wait” was a flattener, but “Under The Red Sky” sweet and swingy. Dylan’s keyboards on this song were the best in the set so far, the tick-tock plinky-plank replaced by flowing keyboards and lines delivered almost as a rap. Dylan’s harmonica here, and he used it twice to punctuate the song (and, it felt to me, fill in part of that Donnie-shaped hole) was grand and got the usual roar from the audience. “Things Have Changed” has a new arrangement that does it no favors, though I love the long phrasing break between “I useta care” and “but things have changed.” Dylan sounded a lot more Southern, if you will, on his pronunciation. Maybe he’s hanging with Willie on the bus; Lord willing that’s the case. Surely a chief reason for him to participate in the Outlaw Tour at all was to be on the road, making music with his friend.

“Stella Blue” was a highlight of the night, and the thousands of Deadheads in the crowd gave it the biggest hand of Dylan’s whole set. He followed it with the sexy old trucker’s song “Six Days On the Road,” Earl Green and Carl Montgomery’s 1961 classic about making it past highway patrols and the Interstate Commerce Commission baddies to get home tonight. On the “I coulda had a lot of women, but I’m not like some of the guys,” Dylan grinned. The “My rig’s a little old, but that don’t mean she’s slow” wasn’t enunciated, but people who knew the song gave what they took to be the line the same ribald reception the “I ain’t dead yet, my bell still rings” gets in “Early Roman Kings.”

The concept of Dylan singing a song about getting home from the road made me think about the whole idea of six days on the road. Not even a full week, and the singer has spent thousands, tens of thousands, of days and nights on the road. I have now heard him four hundred and twenty-two times over the course of thirty-six years. This is nothing, really, a drop in the bucket that can hold a whole Big River, a bucket as vast as a sea.

“Soon After Midnight” was letter-perfect, fluid, with the cascade of keys he used to grace so many Rough and Rowdy Ways songs in place here, too. He really does like that line “I’ll drag his corpse through the mud,” which belongs on any good old murder ballad or in any Western worth its salt. Dylan played a beautiful harp during this one. The instruments jangled together after the song ended, looking for a way into “Ballad of a Thin Man.” It was as if the musicians didn’t recognize it either, with the dah-dah-DAH-dah riff absent at first, and Dylan speak-singing the words softly. The woman next to us had to consult her phone again for the 4th of July set list. “That’s not it,” said her husband. When everyone started talking in recognition after the first “DO ya, Mister Jones,” he said, “Goddam.” Dylan yowled the vowels, having particular fun with “thanks for the looooooooan,” and, finally, in a sleight of hand, he and the band dropped in that familiar riff. It felt like a reward, as did the superb harmonica solo that went for a long time.

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Then Dylan said something to the crowd. It sounded like, “We’re gonna play something for ya,” or “try somethin’ for ya,” as Mickey Raphael joined the band for one of the most beautiful versions of “Simple Twist of Fate” I’ve ever heard. Dylan has rewritten this song so many times, scribbling lyrics on hotel notepaper long after its first release, switching words around in concert regularly. “They were confused” and the third person he and she give way to “I” eventually. His keyboard playing rose to the height of the night in duet with Raphael’s harmonica. The line “You shoulda met me back in ’58” really resonated, on a night full of covers from just around that time, when the 83-year-old Dylan was sweet sixteen, when he was just seventeen and you know what I mean. “Thank ya, Mickey,” he said at the end. I did too.

He began “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” with a laugh. This one, which he’d been playing on the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour, was a crowd-pleaser and became spectacular when he and Keltner started up a little duel, back and forth, raucous and ideal as a restless farewell. They didn’t waste time on the bows, and I hope they waited in the wings to hear Willie’s absolutely magisterial set—from his singing to his guitar playing, nothing short of matchless for a 91-year-old man, and it was a privilege to be there and bear witness.

Tonight is the last night of this leg of the tour, in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Did the buses burn the three hours straight down I-81 last night? Did they ramble instead through the little Catskill towns, like we did, White Lake and Swan Lake, Monticello and Loch Sheldrake, seeing all the bungalows and summer camps that still remain lit up against the pines, young people out walking at night, boats on the water? As we drove home, slowly, in the still-hot air, we couldn’t listen to music, having heard such good things that now the best was silence. Finally, around Ellenville, we rolled the windows down and just heard the night all the way home. Dylan and his band will have the rest of July to enjoy summer quiet after tonight, before they recommence the Outlaw Tour with Nelson and his family on the west coast, joined by John Mellencamp and Brittney Spencer. I’ll be there. So will you?

Thanks Anne Margaret! Follow her on Twitter or Threads and keep an eye on her website for more on her work.

2024-07-06, Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, Bethel, NY

PS. Here are all our Outlaw Tour reports so far: