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From pitt!dsl.pitt.edu!pt.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!uhura.cc.rochester.edu!sunybcs!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!bu.edu!dartvax!eleazar.dartmouth.edu Fri Mar 9 08:24:14 EST 1990
Article 1228 of rec.music.dylan:
Path: pitt!dsl.pitt.edu!pt.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!uhura.cc.rochester.edu!sunybcs!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!bu.edu!dartvax!eleazar.dartmouth.edu
>From: buck@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Rebecca A. Buck)
Newsgroups: rec.music.dylan
Subject: Dylan at Sheffield, May 1, 1965
Message-ID: <20171@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
Date: 8 Mar 90 20:18:53 GMT
Sender: news@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU
Organization: Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
Lines: 68
Notes from the past, #11
Ever wonder about the rest of the story from the reporter who
stood in the phone booth in the Don't Look Back movie reading
his story of the poet to the Manchester Guardian? Probably not,
I didn't, but I came across it, so here it is:
BOB DYLAN AT THE CITY HALL, SHEFFIELD GUARDIAN, 1 MAY 1965
They gathered on the grime-encrusted steps of Sheffield's City
Hall, blue-jeaned, bearded, many of them Jesus-haired, and they
radiated a religious fervour suggesting that they might have
been happier gathering foot-stomping at the River.
They were waiting patient and brooding an hour before time for
the second coming of Bob Dylan, their singing Messiah. It
wouldn't have been surprising had someone called, successfully,
for a march to Aldermaston; many of them looked as though they
had just returned anyway.
Dylan, 23 years old, a waif at L85,000 a year in the world of
modern music, appeared in England last May for the first time
and every seat at the Festival Hall was sold. For the 3,000 who
filed ecstatically into the City Hall last night life since then,
it seems, has been poor and barren: "We can live again tonight,"
said a youth who walked with two friends from Doncaster, "because
Bob Dylan's back and we're swinging again." It is a profitable
return; Dylan's eight concerts this spring are sell-outs and
45,000 people will hear him, said an associate feverishly
computing the number of tickets sold on the back of an envelope
bearing a Chicago postmark. Many of the 45,000 will be puzzled.
Dylan's voice is not the voice of the traditional "popular"
folk singer, that tortured bleater of chain-gang reminiscenses.
His voice is a jeer, a protest. It is harsh. It is nasal.
But it is intensely and uncomfortably compelling, and is
perhaps the only instrument that could match perfectly the vivid
anguished lyrics that he creates.
He is a small man. hair-erupting. Shabby in jeans and jacket
that might have hung yesterday in an army surplus store. And
yet his presence dominates the hall and while he sings there is
no interruption: every sad or scathing line is clear. Nothing
much is sacred he chants, nothing much is sacred in a world
that has everything from guns that spark to flesh-coloured
Christs that glow in the dark. No, nothing much is sacred at all.
Politicians, the bomb, the voice of the bigot, all are
contemptuously dismissed.
Dylan makes most "pop" satirists sound like refuees from some
long-gone workers playtime. He is bitter in the below-belt style
that was the hall-mark of the chanting American protesters of the
sit-in '30s. The men who said "they can't tie a can to a union
man." He is above all a poet (a book of his lyrics will appear in
August) of awareness seeing his Guernica in the dead-red nigger-
lynching world of today.
Money doesn't talk, it swears, trumpets Dylan. Oh, obscenity,
he cries. And the plaintive sound of so unlikely an instrument
as the mouth organ sighs through the hall, lonely as the sound of a
hooting train at night across a prairie. There is no lonelier sound.
There cannot be, it seems, a lonelier man than Dylan as he rasps his
protest among 3,000. He is not so much singing as sermonising; his
tragedy, perhaps, is that his audience is preoccupied with song.
So the bearded boys and the lank-haired girls, all eye-shadow and
undertaker make-up, applaud the songs and miss perhaps the sermon.
They are there; they are with it. But how remote they really are
from protest marches, sit-ins, strikes, and scabs, and life.
The times they are a-changing, sings Dylan. They are when a poet
and not a pop singer fills a hall. For this ultimately is what
Dylan is. His singing, a superb medium of interpretation and of
emphasis. With his voice the lyrics are astonishing; without it, in
print, they are poetry.