Rolling Across the Decades With Dylan
By JON PARELES
Published: November 11, 2006
Bob Dylan’s songs stand up to changes. Plug them in or unplug them, snarl them or whisper them, shift the beat or ignore the melody, and somehow their flinty insights and wary tenderness still come through. Mr. Dylan toys with his music at every performance, and so do his admirers.
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“The Music of Bob Dylan” presented 22 Dylan songs performed by 21 different lineups on Thursday night at Avery Fisher Hall, in a benefit for the nonprofit music-education group Music for Youth. Mr. Dylan wasn’t there, but his many stances were: lover, goad, wiseacre, preacher, tale spinner, judge. And the more his songs were knocked free of their original versions, the better they sounded.
No song was transformed more than the Roots’ version of “Masters of War,” which was trenchant two nights after the election. Normally a hip-hop group, the Roots were a rock trio on Thursday night. For the first verses, Kirk Douglas, playing guitar, sang “Masters of War” to a different tune that it fits: “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Then the Roots turned the song into a hard-rock waltz, its verses defined by Ahmir Thompson’s snappy drumming. In interludes, Damon Bryson played “Taps” on the sousaphone; Mr. Douglas switched into the riff of Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun.” Each condemnation of war profiteers hit home anew.
Another indictment, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” went to a different extreme: somber minimalism. With Philip Glass at the piano playing his trademark steadily rippling eighth notes, Natalie Merchant sang the verses slowly and mournfully, for an elegy growing bitterly angry.
Ryan Adams and his band turned the cracked adventures of “Isis” into rangy Southern rock, working up so much momentum that they inserted another Dylan song, “Love Sick,” as a reggae interlude.
The New Orleans pianist Allen Toussaint, performing solo, gave “Mama, You’ve Been on My Mind” a rolling syncopation that made the song both a lover’s lament and a Crescent City remembrance. Jamie Saft, a pianist leading a jazz trio, made “Ballad of a Thin Man” into splashy, two-fisted honky-tonk. And Jill Sobule, with Cyndi Lauper and a small group, gave “Ring Them Bells” a Salvation Army Band makeover. Al Kooper, who played organ on the original “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” reworked it with a soul vamp and a horn section.
Still, folk-rock and roots-rock dominated the night. which could have used more variety (surely Mr. Dylan has fans beyond guitar slingers). Some of the more straightforward renditions were radiant: Rosanne Cash singing a righteous, bare-bones “License to Kill,” Joan Osborne finding all the longing in “Make You Feel My Love,” Patti Smith crooning the enigmatic “Dark Eyes,” and Warren Haynes, joined by Ms. Osborne, using slide guitar solos to build the hymnlike conviction of “I Shall Be Released.” Phil Lesh made the night’s stage band lilt like his own Grateful Dead in “Thunder on the Mountain.” Cat Power traded her assigned song, “Moonshiner,” for another traditional song from Mr. Dylan’s repertory, “House of the Rising Sun,” and sang it in sultry, suspenseful slow motion.
The concert had its duds. Some performers merely imitated Mr. Dylan; some imposed annoying mannerisms, like Sandra Bernhard treating “Like a Rolling Stone” as an afterthought to a self-important anecdote. Even so, striking phrases and ideas popped out of the music. Mr. Dylan’s songs were still buttonholing listeners.
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