Bobby Dylan at Brandeis: 1963

Music review: Pre- “Freewheelin’“ Bob Dylan “In Concert” at Brandeis

By The Burg Staff on Apr. 20, 2011
BY MATT ASHARE

The release this week of “Bob Dylan In Concert: Brandeis University 1963” might very well be a mere footnote in the context of Sony/Legacy’s ambitious and ongoing campaign to reissue remasters of the entire Dylan catalogue. Recorded at Brandeis University’s First Annual Folk Festival in May of ’63 — just two weeks before “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” elevated the 21-year-old singer/songwriter to prophet-like status — the recently discovered tape looks like meager fare next to the expansive “Bootleg Series” collections, which hit “Volume 9” last October with the arrival of the two-disc, 47-track “The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964.“
     There are just seven songs here; that includes the two minutes of an incomplete “Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance” that starts the set. No “Blowin’ In the Wind.“ No “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.“ No “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.“ But, as Dylan scholar Michael Gray puts it in the liner notes, “This is last live performance we have of Bob Dylan before he becomes a star.“
     Gray may be understating his case: “Freewheelin’“ didn’t just make Dylan a “star,“ it began the rapid process of enshrining Dylan as an icon of the ’60s protest movement, a mantle he bristled under, profited from, and eventually disavowed. As Dylan notoriously wrote in his 2004 memoir “Chronicles, Volume One,“ “I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of.“
     I’m not so sure about that. But in light of the recent criticism Dylan’s been subjected to for taking what Greil Marcus has dubbed his “Never Ending Tour” to China for two dates earlier this month, the “Brandeis” recording suggests we should consider cutting the dude some slack. Even if Dylan’s embrace of the burgeoning neo-folk scene of the early-’60s was opportunistic, he played his chosen role awfully well.
     In his “Brandeis” performance of “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,“ for example, he strikes the right tone of bemused innocence to satirizes the rabid American anti-communism of the era. “Following some clues from my detective bag/I discovered there was red stripes on the American flag,“ he sings with a knowing wink before delivering one of several well-timed punch lines, “Oh, Betsy Ross. . .“ Nobody ever did Lenny Bruce as folk troubadour better than that.
     Dylan registers a more somber tone for “Ballad of Hollis Brown,“ a seven-plus minute dustbowl murder ballad that would later turn up on 1964’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’.“
It stands as a timely reminder that the young Dylan was more than just a “protest singer.“ Then again, there’s something eerily and devastatingly prescient about “Masters of War,“ an anti-military salvo delivered with chilling defiance here, over a year before the Gulf of Tonkin resolution marked the official start of the war in Vietnam.
     Regardless of his intentions, in ’63 Dylan was in the midst of perhaps unwittingly penning songs that would inspire, embolden, and even embody the anti-war and civil rights movements that would go on to define the decade. Indeed, a big part of what makes the “Brandeis” set such a compelling document is the sense you get that the audience, and maybe even Dylan himself, can already feel that the times are a-changin’. Given the continued power of his presence, one can at least hope that Dylan’s performances in China, whatever the motivation, might have a similar impact. As “Brandeis” intimates, it wouldn’t be the first time.
Ashare, a freelance writer based in Lynchburg, is a former music editor for The Boston Phoenix.http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/music_review_pre-_freewheelin_bob_dylan_in_concert_at_brandeis