We had breakfast Thursday morning with two friends (one blond, the other dark-haired, both recently turned thirty) who had been to the Bob Dylan concert at Madison Square Garden the night before. “I’ll tell you some people who were there,” our blond friend said. “Yoko Ono was there. Her seat was two rows in front of Dick Cavett’s. Pete Hamill and Shirley MacLaine were there and had seats four rows ahead of Yoko Ono’s. That’s six ahead of Dick Cavett. James Taylor and Carly Simon were in the vicinity, and I want to tell you that this is only the back part of the front section of the orchestra I’m talking about. I couldn’t see the front part of the front section, where one assumes the real heavies, Yeats and so forth, were sitting. I’ll tell you some people who weren’t there. There were no blacks there, and no transvestites, and there were very few people in embroidered jeans. Instead, there were extraordinary numbers of people who seemed to have come directly from registration at the New School. A very earnest group. One of my problems with old Dylan has to do with humor, you see. I don’t think he has any. Which is why the blacks and the transvestites stay away. I personally don’t trust any rock-and-roll concert without a single transvestite, but never mind. The point is that Dylan has irony—I mean, he knows how to milk a juxtaposition—but no humor. He reminds me of a guy I went to school with who was very bright and very ambitious and who just missed starring in ‘Zabriskie Point.’ My schoolmate sang songs about Franco in the offices of our school newspaper in 1957, but luckily he was completely tone-deaf and had to go into the social sciences.”

“What’s that all about?” our dark-haired friend said. “We’re talking about a Bob Dylan concert. Look at it from the Dylan-can-do-no-wrong angle, which is how I look at it. All through his career, Dylan has been a highly elusive figure. He always manages to free himself from the expectations of his audience. When they were expecting folk songs about the struggles of the thirties, he gave them folk songs about the struggles of the sixties. When they were expecting a revolutionary anthem with all the answers, he gave them a revolutionary anthem that was all questions. ‘The answer is blowin’ in the wind’—was there ever a better summing up of the intuitive, improvisatory, unreflective approach of what we used to call ‘the Movement’? When people expected acoustic, he gave them electric. When they expected funk, he gave them mysticism. When they expected psychedelia, he gave them simple country love tunes. When they finally learned not to expect anything in particular except genius, he gave them mediocrity. So. The first half of the concert felt strange—a little disappointing, a little disorienting. Dylan sang too fast, in a sort of strong, high chant, and he virtually obliterated the melodies—to no purpose. Or so I thought at intermission time. But in light of what happened in the second half of the concert, I look upon the whole first half as a necessary softening-up process for both Dylan and the audience. The room was full of complicated yearnings, after all. He was singing his old songs, and he had to avoid the dangers of a ‘Dylan’s Greatest Hits’ atmosphere, so he recast them in such a way that you had a hard time recognizing them and a rather hard time enjoying them. He was nervous but not hostile. He had to establish the right mixture of friendliness and distance. He had to make it plain that he goes his way and others, including the audience, go theirs.”

“And the second half of the concert?” we asked.

“Ah,” our dark-haired friend went on. “Dylan came out all alone, small and brave, with just his harmonica and his acoustic guitar. I was too far away to see the details of his face, but I could see his hair, curly and mousy, and that tense, crabbed stance. He sang ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ ’ and ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ and ‘Gates of Eden’—still too fast, still in that almost strangled high chant. Then, halfway through ‘Just Like a Woman,’ it started to get magical, and when he sang ‘It’s All Right, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ it all fell into place. He was still fooling with the melody, but with a purpose. I felt I was hearing that song for the first time instead of the thousandth. When he sang the line about ‘But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked,’ everyone cheered, of course, but they cheered even louder for the line ‘And it’s all right, Ma, I can make it.’ After The Band came back on again, he sang a couple of very pretty new songs, and then ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ People began streaming down the aisles, and everyone stood up—there was no particular cue; we just all stood up at once. Dylan’s accompaniment for the chorus was the whole audience—twenty thousand people singing ‘HOW DOES IT FEEL?’ at the top of their lungs. The houselights were turned on, so we could all see each other, and four huge klieg lights went on behind Dylan, making everything—Dylan, us, the music—seem half again as big. He did two encores: a reprise of ‘Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine),’ much more melodic and accessible this time, and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ I’d never heard him sing it quite that way, before. He never does anything the same way twice. His voice was clear, strong, and true. He pulled it off—he kept the myth intact.”

“Personally,” our blond friend said, “when it comes to mythic figures I prefer the ones like Elvis Presley, who stay mythic in spite of themselves. Dylan was never really a successful archetype, if you know what I mean. He was only someone who seemed to be somewhere we thought we ought to be. That’s why people worried so much about his changes of style. People worried about where Dylan was and what he was doing because they wanted to know where they should be and what they should be doing. The style changes prophesied—falsely, perhaps—some kind of movement, and that mercurial quality of his appealed to our generation’s love of novelty. But now, you see, he has run out of ways to seem some distance ahead, and has fallen back on devices that will allow him to seem (at all but a few carefully chosen moments) some distance away. It’s a little sad to fight so hard for Mythic Distance.”

“But that’s precisely what I like about him,” said our dark-haired friend. “He lives by his wits.” ♦