"Going Through These Things Twice"

The Ritual of a Bob Dylan Concert

Eyolf Østrem

Two Beginnings

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"Deus in adiutorium meum intende."

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"Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen! Would you please welcome Columbia Recording Artist Bob Dylan!"

Another beginning, in sound this time

Why bring together these two sound clips?

In the case of the gregorian invitatory, we "know" that this is about ritual, a Medieval liturgical ceremony. Likewise, the "good evening ladies and gentlemen" thing is just as obviously an announcement of a rock concert. So what do they have to do with each other?

The setting is of course different, but apart from that, there are actually significant similarities between the two sound events. They are both formalized ways, repeated exactly the same way every time, of introducing communal actions that involve people in different roles that are more or less fixed. They also involve an architectural space – a room – with certain specific characteristics that are fitting or even necessary for the occasion, various props necessary to complete the action, and they are both laden with meaning which goes beyond the mere fulfillment of the action.

In other words: according to this description, they can both be seen as introductions to rituals, as "calls to worship", as it were. That is: they are ways to focus everyone‘s attention on ritual and all that it entails.

My point is not to say that a Dylan concert and a medieval vespers service are the same kind of ritual, but rather to circle around the double question: What will a ritualistic perspective add to the understanding of a Dylan show? and vice versa: what may the application of this perspective on a Dylan show add to the understanding of ritual? – what is really ritual about a medieval service; and what do we mean by really ritual?

The External Similarites: Ceremony

It is not difficult (whether or not it is meaningful, is a question to which I will return) to regard a Dylan show as a parallel to a medieval church service. We‘ve already heard the invitatory. Since c. 1990 this announcement, "Ladies and gentlemen …", has been repeated in exactly the same way at just about every single concert – to the extent that to the audience (or congregation) it no longer is an announcement but an element belonging to the proper order of things – a liturgical item. [1] But even what precedes the invitatory is fixed: the preparation of the hall with buckets (literally) of Nag Champa incense, and portions of Aaron Copeland‘s Rodeo suite form the sound system, while the audience (or congregation) fills up the venue; then house lights off, invitatorium, and then – then the show begins.

Even here there is a "liturgy". A common – far too common – phrase in reviews of Dylan shows is that he‘s so unpredictable. A brief look at his setlists will reveal the opposite. A Dylan concert always involves fixed and variable elements. During most of the 90s he always played All Along the Watchtower as song #3, and other songs have had similarly fixed positions in the ceremony over shorter or longer stretches of time. Then there is a group of songs that are chosen among the songs that an "average listener" – the ones who have three or four Dylan albums at home – would want to hear: Like A Rolling Stone, Blowin‘ in the Wind, Mr Tambourine Man etc. Finally, there is almost always one or two songs for the die-hard fans: a rarely heard song from an obscure 80s album, an old hillbilly standard or an unlikely cover song. All in all: a sequence of songs that could very well be described in terms of the ordinarium and proprium of the medieval mass: some songs that will be heard every night, like a Kyrie or a Credo, and others that belong to the specific feast day, and which will make that particular show unique.

During all this, the celebrant(s) and the congregation alike perform certain acts, well aware of their respective roles. A Dylan concert is usually a seated thing (maybe due to the average age of his faithful fans…) but after c. 2/3 of the show, there is the so-called stage rush: the moment when, as if on a given sign, the initiated rush to the front of the stage, to spend the rest of the concert at the Master‘s feet – as a latter day communion. Post-concert talk within this group of people tends to bring up whether or not one got eye-contact with his Bobliness (or – as a second best – with one of the guitar players; Tony, the bass player, doesn‘t count, since he smiles all the time anyway).

The Internal Similarities: Ideology

Dylan himself, then – how does he relate to all this? Ambiguously. This is mainly owing to the fact that he has a double role, being both the celebrant and the object of veneration. On stage he acts with the unemotionality of a celebrant who performs an office he knows goes beyond himself, thereby underlining the "objective" character of the ceremony/concert, and downplaying the personal: he hardly ever speaks on stage; he does move, but not with the normal "look-at-me" gestures of your average rock star, but with quirky knee-bends, looking like a cross between Elvis and a shy kid from Hibbing, Minnesota. He is just up there, doing what he happens to do best: being "just a song and dance man" as he expressed it - jokingly, but truthfully - in an interview in the mid-60s.

At the same time, he is well aware that every movement he makes is being monitored and interpreted by 7,000 pairs of eyes. One of his more mysterious songs, Dark Eyes (1985) ends with the phrase "A million faces at my feet, and all I see are dark eyes", most easily interpreted as the performer‘s reflection on how idolization looks from the idol‘s side. But two other phrases in the song opens up for the possibility to regard the whole song as something heard from high up on a cross: "A cock is crowing far away and another soldier's deep in prayer". "The French girl, she's in paradise" – a possible allusion to the thief on the cross.

During his career Dylan has related himself to this duality in different ways. Let me just point to three examples.

The Rolling Thunder Review

During the late 1975 and the early 1976 Dylan with friends went on the road with a show that was called the Rolling Thunder Revue. The grand idea behind the tour was that it was supposed to be a never-ending touring circus, where the artists on the bill would change all the time. The revue would also be self-served with sound equipment etc. so that they could make landfall here and there without much prior planning, and without having to go through the administrative treadmill of managers, concert organizers etc. In this perspective, the RTR was an expression of Dylan‘s wish to be nothing out of the ordinary, just another musician, at any time replaceable with any other member of this creative community.

isis.gif (171837 bytes)One striking element of these concerts was the use of masks and facial painting. Dylan would frequently come on stage with his face painted white. A powerful scene from one of the concerts shows Dylan holding his hands crossed in front of him, as an incantation. In other words: the concerts involved a play with symbols of various kinds, symbols that are easily associated with religious ritual, but without a clear symbolic background in the specific context in which they were used. The gestures thus appear as signs removed from a sign system that can render them understandable (which, on the other hand, does not preclude that they can still be meaningful). A similar element is the quasi-religious connections made throughout the tour to settings such as Gypsy mythology and Indian shamanism, etc.

All this is closely related to the fact that these concerts weren‘t just concerts, and the band wasn‘t just a group of musicians. Dylan had brought a film crew on the road, and just about everything that happened, on stage and behind it (and behind the tour bus), was filmed. The outcome of this was the 4 hours long cinema verité opus Renaldo and Clara, which was released in 1978. The film itself was an immediate failure. Be that as it may, the meaning of the actions on stage go beyond that of a rock concert. The movie, the songs that were newly written before the tour, as well as the "drama" that was enacted, brought up the "eternal questions": love, death, marriage, divorce, violence, trust, children, identity. This is enacted in a meta-narrative taking place both on stage and in some sort of reality, but lines between the world as lived and the world as enacted [1b] are blurred – every statement takes on a meaning which goes beyond the statement itself, because it belongs in all the different contexts at the same time: both in the "real" and in the "transcendent" media-/hyper-reality.

The Gospel Years

Three years later, Dylan "went Christian". During the years 1979–1981, when Dylan was associated with the extreme evangelical Vineyard Fellowship in Tarzana, CA, and only performed new songs, filled with evangelization and images of end-time apocalypse. The concerts from his born-again period may, paradoxically enough, serve as a contrasting example to the RTR. During the "gospel years" he made a direct connection with christian ritual, by virtually turning his concerts into Christian services. In a way, however, this is the period which is the least intersting from a ritual perspective, precisely for this reason: the message was over-explicit, in the well-established tradition of evangelical preaching – there was little left of the transcendental message of the earlier tour, only a message about the transcendental, which is a completely different thing.

The Voice of a Generation

The eptithet that has stuck most stubbornly to Dylan throughout the decades is probably that of "the Voice of a Generation". The man who said things that many felt. The religious importance of this may be gauged from the reactions when he stopped saying what at least some of his followers wanted him to say, not primarily by "going electric", but by leaving out the political message from his songs. But in fact, he has always claimed to be uninterested in politics: "I‘m just into langauge. I pick up what‘s in the air, what‘s on people‘s minds" (Interview with Elliot Landy, Woodstock 1968).

Implicit in this, and in the examples above, is a notion of the artist as a medium, as someone with special gifts who is thereby able to pick up wisdom where others just see everyday reality – the answer is blowin‘ in the wind.

One might ask: what is the character of this wisdom? And, again, the answer is dual, even the answers Dylan himself has given. On the one hand, he sees himself as just any other guy who goes to work with what he‘s best at: "Basically, I‘m just a regular person. I don‘t walk around all the time out of my mind with inspiration. So what can I tell you about that?" (Rolling Stone, Nov 22, 2001). Just a song-and-dance man, indeed.

In an interview from 1978, where Dylan comments upon Renaldo and Clara, we find this discussion about what he wants to do or not:

D: Let‘s say you have a message: white is white. Bergman would say "white is white" in the space of an hour – or what seems to be an hour. Bunuel might say "white is black and black is white, but white is really white". And it‘s all really the same message.
Interviewer: And how would Dylan say it?
D: Dylan would probably not even say it. He‘d assume you‘d know that.

If this is a way of saying that he does not have a "profound" message, Dylan has at the same time – at least in periods – had a quite clear image of himself as someone with a special gift. He comments upon a statment from Woody Guthrie, that all the songs are already written, floating around in the universe, ready to be picked up: "In a certain sense, there is a great deal of veracity to that" (MOJO feb. 1998). He uses a similar phrase to describe his own writing of Desolation Row:

BD: I don‘t know how it was done.
Kurt Loder: It just came to you?
BD: It just came out through me.

Concerning his currently, since 1988 ongoing tour, he describes its origin in terms of a religious experience on stage:

"It‘s almost like I heard it as a voice. … I‘m determined to stand, whether God will deliver me or not. And all of a sudden everything just exploded. … After that is when I sort of knew: I‘ve got to go out and play these songs" (Newsweek Oct 13, 1997).

And further:

"I don‘t feel like what I do qualifies to be called a career. It‘s more of a calling". (RS, Nov 22, 2001)

"I don‘t get bored singing the songs because they have a truth to them. They have a life to them … I don‘t think there is anybody playing the type of songs that we‘re playing." (MOJO feb 1998).

"I told you "The Times They Are a'Changing" and they did. I said the answer was "Blowin' in the Wind" and it was. I'm telling you now Jesus is coming back, and He is! " (Concert rap, Albuquerque, Dec 5 1979)

"I don't think I'm gonna be really understood until maybe 100 years from now. What I've done, what I'm doing, nobody else does or has done." (Jul 1 1984)

"Secular Religiosity"

Is it a relevant term to use about this, to say that Dylan is seen – both by himself and by his audience – as a secular prophet for a modern world? This would in turn imply a notion of "secular religion", but what is that, if at all anything?

In the present context, I would point out at least three areas where such a concept would be meaningful in ways that at least approximate that of religious services. One is the notion of a transcendental truth, revealed and administered by the artistic medium. This function is the prerequisite of the other two: that of creating a community and a sense of connection, and that of serving as the "soundtrack of our lives", to fall back on a cliché often used about Dylan – as that which defines our identity as historical beings, that through which our experiences are anchored to the continuum of societal time. The validity of the two latter functions ultimately hinges on the experience that what the man is saying is right, and – possibly – relevant and important for one‘s life.

Even here, there‘s an ambiguity inherent in it. The strong status of the truth of this revelation stands in stark contrast with the contents of the revealed "truth" itself: "Don‘t follow leaders", "You don‘t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows" etc. In an interview from 1984, these two opposing approaches appear in the same part of the discussion:

I mean, if I didn‘t have anything different to say to people, then what would be the point of it?

[ . . . ]

anybody who expects anything from me is just a borderline case [ . . . ] You can‘t keep on depending on one person to give you everything.

Apart from the logical sophistry that can be performed on this – which addressee does he have in mind who could in any way listen to the message without by necessity violating it? [2] – this is also an indication of the "ritual" aspect of these songs, at least as part of his current live repertory: their effect is partly based upon the assumption that words that were laid down a long time ago, can transcend their own historical situation, and can even transmit an esoteric, or at least "deeper" meaning, which goes beyond the words themselves and the acts of performing and listening to them. 

In all these areas it is possible to regard Dylan in the light of medieval representational liturgy – as the one around whom a community forms and through whom the community partakes in the revelation.

What makes it particularly relevant to bring up this in a medievalistic context, beyond the loose analogy of cultural phenomena, is the setting in which this is presented: the concert genre. This way of presenting music has in itself firm roots back to medieval ritual. The polyphonic mass of the late Middle Ages, the Abendmusiken and the church recitals in seventeenth-century protestant cities, and, last but not least, the cult of the genius in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are all practices where it is hard to draw sharp lines between the religious and secular functions of the music – between worship and enjoyment.

What comes in addition to this general aspect of Kunstreligion inherent in the concert genre itself, is the bringing together of this tradition with popular culture, in its two incarnations, as folk culture and mass culture. Dylan – along with other artists – has started over again, so to speak: from a genre which was originally functional in a way similar to medieval ritual music, only fulfilling other functions, such as dance music, the "news reports" of a folk ballad, or the pure entertainment, has evolved a new concert genre where, at least to some extent, the music is the carrier of the "real" message, in a way that is comparable to the aestheticization of the functional mass music in the fifteenth century.

This is a genre that spans the whole continuum from mindless entertainment – even the commercial mass appeal, as evidenced by the blatant advertisment of the Columbia Recording Company in the "invitatory" – to the deepest seriousness, which encompasses meaningfulness, world view and ideology. A Dylan audience is usually very quiet, hanging on to every word that comes from the stage. But there is also dancing in the aisles, and visits to the bar (and, consequently, to the restroom) by the less faithful. Thus, a Dylan concert has fundamental similarities with, but also differences from, e.g. a Britney Spears concert, in that it takes it raison d‘étre (as a genre) from the common understanding that something is offered which goes beyond entertainment. The action carries a level of meaning which transcends the surface level of the action.

 

Ite, missa est

We can now return to the question implied in the introduction: is a Dylan show "really" a ritual?

The ambiguities I have pointed to in connection with Dylan correspond with a fundamental ambiguity in the lexical definition of ritual. The latin word ritus has two different meanings. The first definition is relatively unproblematic in relation to a medieval service: the form and manner of religious observances; a religious usage or ceremony, a rite. But when we talk about ritual today, we usually mean more than that: various ritual scholars have emphasised things like the connection with myth and the way ritual and myth consitute the world view of a culture. And in everyday language, just about any action that is repeated the same way every time, and where the way it is done is ascribed some kind of meaning, can be called a ritual. This corresponds with the second definition: a custom, usage, manner, mode, way. Ritual, then, is no longer a religious term.

It would be difficult to claim that a Dylan show entails religious observance – there are no ontological overtones, no dogmatics, no "theology" (or "bobology").[3] But still, the fact that surprisingly many people lead their lives, make their choices in life and form their outlook on life in accordance with what Dylan says, does, sings, means – not just by nodding symphathetically to the words of his songs, but in more profound ways – indicates an approach that borders on the religious.

Mutatis mutandis – and with no further comparison – the anthropologist Diana Smay has suggested that the dramatic rise in cases of obsessive compulsive disorder over the past fifty year or so, may be related to the abandonment of traditional – religious – forms of ritual in the Western civilization. I‘m not sure if I subscribe to her entire line of argument, in particular her suggestion of a biological basis for ritual behavior seems problematic. But apart from that, her overall approach to the question of ritual is intriguing.

Dylan fandom ranges from the deep appreciation of a musical and lyrical artistic production, to the almost religious obsession with everything that is related to him. But both extremes imply both the sense of community created by repeated, communal activities, and the resonance of one‘s own experiences with expressions – musical, literary or others – that have acquired a canonical status.

If these three criteria – community, iterativity and canonicity – together with the ascription of meaning of a kind that goes beyond what actions are actually taking place, in any way comes close to a modern understanding of what constitutes a ritual, and an understanding which can also be applied to medieval religious ceremonies, then there is certainly a connection between the two, despite the distance in time and the obvious differences.

And the attempt to "find out what price / we have to pay to get out of / going through all these things twice", to borrow an expression from Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again, may indeed be contrary to the "meaning" of Dylan shows as ritual. Going through things twice, one necessary condition of ritual, is something I personally am looking forward to do (in this particular case, anyway), as many times as I will be offered the opportunity.