Why does Bob Dylan do it?
I have a friend who told me about Dylan showing up at his Grandkids schools, just reveling in being this old guy nobody knew, his fame lay in his progenitors. It must get awful old being the Zim. It must get old being projected upon so much.
I guess it is where Bowie and Dylan and… I guess most rock stars, meet it. A projection, of a thought , of an image, and the image isn't the reality but it is close enough. It is as close as anything else might be.
This comes to mind because I was reading how "The Neverending Tour" has been on the road since 1988. I read an article around a year ago, like a a good one, with a lot of info, but nothing much stuck.
I haven't seen Dylan every time he has been around, but I've seen him a lot. And I kinda think he hit a height in the 1990s and then, once he got behind the keyboards (and with the loss of Charlie Sexton -I know he is back, but that first time), the momentum seemed to go.
If you go to your boots -those early 1990s ones, you will hear how great he was some 15 years ago. But as time went by, Dylan went back to seriously rewriting his 60s classics with truly non-existent new melodies. Perhaps not the crappiness of his mid 80s performances, but right now? Nothing so awe inspiring.
It seems like it is not really the road that goes on forever but the song. There are whole albums he never comes close to playing, meanwhile we get "All Along The Watchtower" and "Like A Rolling Stone" time after time, day after day for decades. I am so sick of that song. I can't even think about it anymore. I do the same with Nabokov's novels. Around the turn of the century I stopped reading him. No "Speak, Memory",
No "Pale Fire" or "Transparent Things". I am gonna wait till I reach (if I reach) 75 years old and then read em again -hopefully it will feel brand new.
I am also gonna stop seeing Dylan for awhile. The last time I saw him? At United Palace with Dion blowing him off stage, I said then, that'll do it.