Nashville Skyline Revisited: Bob Dylan at the Ryman
The Ryman lights went down a couple minutes after eight, revealing Bob Dylan’s silhouette ambling to a piano with an exposed wood backside like the ones elementary music teachers command at school Christmas pageants. He had a little pamphlet with him, and he opened it to the first page — still on script, I guess, for this new role he’s written in the last chapter of a half-century career that completely changed American music.
This Bob Dylan, a recent octogenarian, seemed more authentic than the strange western gun slinger in a duster jacket and wide brim hat of the mid-2000s. I still went to his shows then, but he was rapidly intersecting with a world eager to leave him behind. The voice of this generation was not him, but Kanye West.
When the dimmed house lights were just right though you could see a silhouette of that famously unkempt Bob Dylan hair — a little tamped down in Nashville, like it had recently been rained on or something. For a moment it was easy to picture that thinking man’s rebel from 1966, his polka-dotted shirts buttoned to the gills, his hair at full finger-in-light-socket glory, a cigarette dangling over a harmonica neck holder and those bad ass black shades. In those days he was accidentally iconic and in complete harmony with a higher calling to upend mid-twentieth-century music as we knew it.
That vision faded when he started singing in his nasally growl, revealing a worn-down voice, cracking, and splitting in parts. When Dylan is good, he’s reminiscent of an aged blues shouter, barking unusual couplets to a crowd that would pay to watch him take a nap. When he’s bad, Dylan sounds like a snoring pug sleeping next to an unchecked microphone. At the Ryman, we got the feisty blues howler, dressed in what seemed like half a Mariachi player’s outfit, ready to serenade Tennessee’s capital. He started with “Watching the River Flow,” produced by Nashville resident Leon Russell in New York City in 1971. The original version had Jessie Ed Davis’s stomping blues guitar flirting hard with Leon’s piano, which gave the track a southern rock swagger, one eventually perfected in Lower Manhattan.
“What’s the matter with me/I don’t have much to say,” Dylan sang from a spot just to the side of where Hank Williams played “Lovesick Blues” multiple times for a 1949 Grand Ole Opry audience that didn’t want to let him go. From that hallowed spot on the Ryman stage, Dylan played a song he recorded in Nashville at Columbia studios in 1966, “Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine).” This Blonde on Blonde number nicely showcased “that wild, thin mercury sound” Dylan had been chasing from Manhattan to Nashville’s Music Row.
Hargus “Pig” Robbins, the piano player on George Jones’ “White Lightning,” Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” and Ernest Tubb’s “The Family Bible,” found himself in a Nashville recording studio with a young Bob Dylan looking for a sound that young Bob Dylan could only hear in his head. Nobody could find this imagined sound in New York City and so he went to Nashville looking for new players to help in this sonic quest.
West Virginian Wayne Moss, who had recently played guitar on Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman,” joined drummer Kenny Buttrey, who would go on to play drums on Jimmy Buffet’s everlasting “Margaritaville.” Together, these straightforward session musicians connected with Dylan’s screaming harmonica and lyrical prowess to create a bass deprived symphony that took Johnny Cash’s thump-thump the-train’s-a-comin sound and then derailed the train.
These “Nashville cats” also created the soundtrack for Dylan’s verbal tirade against a lover, probably Edie Sedgwick, one of Andy Warhol’s muses from the factory back in Manhattan. With hipster cool, Dylan sings,
I just can’t do what I’ve done before
I just can’t beg you anymore
I’m gonna let you pass
Yes, and I’ll go last
Then time will tell who just fell
Who’s been left behind
When you go your way and I go mine
Peeking at the crowd from behind his Easter pageant piano, Dylan sang a version of the song draped in a gentler country blues veneer. His weathered voice and uncertain delivery, however, made the song sound more ominous than pissed off hipster. The song then took on a delightfully surreal quality as the band slowed the tempo to emphasize the weirdest lyric of the song, “the judge, he’s holdin’ a grudge/and he’s about to call on you/badly built and he walks on stilts/watch out he don’t fall on you.” The crowd cheered, which means it worked.
Bob Dylan, his band, the audience, and the acoustics of the 130-year-old venue came alive when the artist turned to material from his last album, Rough and Rowdy Ways. Clearly more familiar with that music than stuff he probably wrote in a time beyond recall, Dylan aced the phrasing, and his new band easily backed him up. They mastered a standout on the album, “I Contain Multitudes” — a symbolic song.
Bob Dylan does, in fact, contain multitudes. He’s been a Woody Guthrie imitator, a folk city hipster, a lyrical civil rights activist, an American-British mod, a country crooner, an embittered divorcee, an Italian carnival performer, a born again evangelical, a lost-in-the-eighties has-been, and a strange, unarmed gunslinger with a pencil thin moustache during the rise of Kanye West. At the Ryman, he just sang from the heart, “I’ll keep the path open, the path in my mind/I’ll see to it that there’s no love left behind.” He went on, “I’ll play Beethoven’s sonatas, and Chopin’s preludes/I contain multitudes.”
Before you go to a Bob Dylan concert, I think it’s best to conclude there is no such thing as Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan doesn’t exist. What you really pay to see is a musical theatrical piece written, arranged, and performed by Robert Allen Zimmerman, the awkward son of a furniture and appliance store owner from Hibbing, Minnesota. This guy, known only by a select few people — most of them close family — is the playwright and songsmith responsible for the many lives of “Bob Dylan,” an alter ego likely created in late-1950s Minneapolis.
While Bob Dylan can be charming, Robert Zimmerman is a complex and frustrating guy. I’ve seen concertgoers appear to be in physical pain watching him. Why isn’t he singing anything that sounds familiar? Or as Rollingstone magazine famously asked after the release of Dylan’s 1970 album Self Portrait — also recorded in Nashville — “what is this shit?” I’ve asked myself that question on more than one occasion. A trilogy of Sinatra cover albums? WTF! But when he turned eighty last year, I decided I had to see him one last time and it had to be in either New York City or Nashville — two cities crucial to the development of his sound.
By the third song of the night, I knew the old man had mastered the character he’s playing. On “False Prophet,” Dylan tells us he may be old, but he ain’t going gently into that good night. Barking verses that sound like they were written for a rap battle, Dylan boasts, “I’m first among equals/second to none.” He then claims to be “the last of the best” and assures us we “can bury the rest.” Not done yet, he tells us to “bury ’em naked with their silver and gold” before putting them six feet under and praying for their souls. He also reminded the ladies he’s not too old for love either. “You don’t know me darlin’/you never would guess/I’m nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest.” Towards the end, he revisits the topic: “you know darlin’/the kind of life that I live/when your smile meets my smile/something’s got to give.”
After this straight-up peacocking, Dylan returned to his own personal Nashville sound from the late-1960s with the quick number “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” off of 1967’s John Wesley Harding, the album he made directly after Hargus “Pig” Robbins and the A-Team helped him perfect his wild mercury sound. The song captured the simplicity Dylan seemed to crave as the sixties wound down. His lyrical mazes, potent symbolism, Biblical screeds, and verbal tirades of the mid-1960s were replaced by songs like “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” where Dylan croons, “that mockingbird’s gonna sail away/we’re gonna forget it” and “that big, fat moon is gonna shine like a spoon/but we’re gonna let it.” It was an interesting choice of words three years after he wrote:
Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is so sense in trying
As the war in Vietnam exploded and political assassinations reached an unprecedented level, the author of “Masters of War” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” released the album “Nashville Skyline” — complete with a full throttle country and western sound. As John and Yoko protested from bed, behind an endless amount of hair, and Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison sped towards untimely deaths, Dylan trimmed up, put on a suit, and wrote songs like “To Be Alone With You,” which he turned to at the Ryman: “they say the nighttime is the right time/to be with one you love/too many thoughts get in the way in the day/but you’re always what I’m thinkin’ of.”
Far from Andy Warhol’s factory now, or the influence of Allen Ginsberg, Nashville Skyline began with a Johnny Cash duet. Kenneth Buttrey was back on drums, a thirty-three-year-old Charlie Daniels played guitar alongside Fred Carter, Jr. and Pete Drake, who had just played steel guitar for Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man.” They all joined in to complete the rest of the tracks on the album.
For those critical of Dylan’s foray into country music, his appearance on the inaugural The Johnny Cash Show, filmed in Nashville, where he sang “I Threw It All Away” might as well have been a middle finger to the talkers. Robert Zimmerman was in a country state of mind, and it just didn’t matter what anybody thought about it. So, next to the approving gaze of one of his biggest fans, Johnny Cash, Dylan crooned “I once held her in my arms/she said she would always stay/but I was cruel/I treated her like a fool/I threw it all away.”
Bob Dylan has always been strangely controversial. That’s because of his relentlessly experimental creativity, but also due to his pursuit of that artistic agenda with little reverence for the idea of an audience or a fanbase. They booed him when he went electric, refused to believe he could ever be interested in country music — even though he grew up on it — and quickly evolved into mouthy turncoats incapable of understanding the artistic evolution he was clearly leaning into. But Robert Zimmerman keeps going whether you like it or not. This isn’t about you, it’s about him finding the inspiration he needs to recast Bob Dylan in a new role. You can watch him evolve, struggle, and endlessly reinvent himself if you want, but it may hurt. If the night you’re there happens to be the snoring pug next to the bad mic, welp, thems are the breaks. You pay your nickel and take your chances.
On that windy Music Row night, March 23, 2022, Bob Dylan worked through the Nashville years and added them to his newest character — a twilight years wordsmith, lusty lounge singer, and fire-and-brimstone believer. His fan base has been mostly critical of his evangelical music and so it made sense that Robert Zimmerman would close out his show with gospel. He delivered a flawless “Gotta Serve Somebody” — it may the be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you gotta pick one.
On a new song, “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” Dylan growls for someone to give him that “old time religion” because it’s just what he needs.” He them exclaimed, “Goodbye Jimmy Reed, Godspeed/thump on the Bible, proclaim a creed.” Zimmerman concluded with “Every Grain of Sand,” a song from an era he’s trying to resurrect — the evangelical years, 1979–1983. His fanbase is critical of that era for a reason though. “Gotta Serve Somebody” is a nice rocker with soulful back-up singers in perfect place, but the lyrics seem, er, uninspired. “You may be a state trooper, you might be a young Turk,” Dylan sang, “you may be the head of some big TV network;” or, “you may be rich or poor, you may be blind or lame/you may be living in another country under another name.”
“Every Grain of Sand” is different from that. It may be the most beautifully written song Robert Zimmerman ever penned. It’s also hard to listen to. Musically it doesn’t work for me. From the beginning, through the middle, and onto the end. Emmylou Harris can’t even save it on her well-intentioned cover. So, his closer at the Ryman was off — just like it is on the album and on Emmylou’s cover.
Bob Dylan is a writer searching for a sound to serve his lyrics. In a world of musicians chasing lyrics to enable their music, this can be risky. Hargus “Pig” Robbins didn’t care what words you put over his genius on the piano because most of the time his piano won. On Bob Dylan’s “Every Grain of Sand” something else happens. The music is not nearly as good as the lyrics it accompanies, which read like Jimmy Carter era Psalms:
Don’t have the inclination to look back on any mistake
Like Cain, I behold this chain of events that I must break
In the fury of the moment, I can see the master’s hand
In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand.