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Comrades From The North

Welcome once again to our ongoing chronicles of chaos. The Outlaw Music Festival is well underway and it has been refreshing to hear a largely different mix of songs than those on the Rough & Rowdy Ways tours. The first, eight-show leg featured a number of one-offs, debut cover versions and some numbers not played for a while. Notable amongst these were Route 66, last played in 1986, debut performances of I'll Make It All Up To You, the Charlie Rich song, Share Your Love With Me, originally recorded by Bobby Bland, Axe and the Wind, a Willie Dixon effort and two absolute stunning performances - the Shane MacGowan nugget, Rainy Night in Soho and Rick Nelson's Garden Party. Dylan was in fine form throughout these shows and even Early Roman Kings lit a fire. Thus, it was a shame that the final show of this leg, at The Gorge in Washington state, was cut short after seven songs due to a high wind alert. The second leg of the tour was due to run for eleven shows but, once again, bad weather intervened causing the cancellation of two of them. For these shows the set list was much more settled with little variation. There was room for one more debut song though – I Can Tell, originally popularised by Bo Diddley.

Readers will no doubt have heard the controversy surrounding the British rap duo, Bob Vylan (cute name, how did they come up with that one?) at Glastonbury Festival. During their set they incited the crowd to chant death threats to the Israeli Defence Force and pro-Palestinian slogans. This caused a tremendous furore and much TV coverage and column inches. This form of ‘protest’ music hits home but can lose its potency – a chant is a chant is a chant. It is not for us to discuss this particular event, others have done so ad infinitum but it is worth noting that when Dylan has tackled sensitive issues, injustices and so on he has generally adopted a nuanced view The nearest he has come to wanting someone dead, though not calling for their murder, is in the song Masters Of War where he rails:

And I hope that you die/And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket/In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered/Down to your death bed
And I’ll stand over your grave ‘til/I’m sure that you dead

This is emphatic but does not call for direct action. A similar approach was used by Elvis Costello in his song Tramp the Dirt Down, a number about then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The final verse is eerily similar to Dylan’s though it allows for a long life before death:

Well I hope you live long now, I pray the lord your soul to keep
I think I'll be going before we fold our arms and start to weep
I never thought for a moment that human life could be so cheap
'Cos when they finally put you in the ground
They'll stand there laughing and tramp the dirt down

The question one can ask is ‘Does this wait and see approach render the ‘protest’ redundant?’ When Costello sang this on one his North-Eastern gigs, a fellow-Dylan fan shouted out after this last verse 'But what about in the meantime?' Clearly the song did not hit home for him.

A different approach, one adopted by Roy Harper in his song The Black Cloud of Islam which rails against radical Islamism, is to say exactly what you mean and then accept that you become the death target because of your vehemence: Check it out. There is nothing equivocal in the song, just an acceptance that 'protesting' produces enemies and you just might become a victim yourself. Perhaps Dylan is wise to see the grey areas in life’s issues. And to acknowledge there is more than one side to every story- 'You're right from your side and I’m right from mine'.

May you climb on every rung ..........

Mike & John

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