Word: concertant
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...towel anchored Arab-style by a pillbox chapeau. But the imperious stare, the twitching extremities and the spindly silhouette of Bob Dylan, 32, belied the Bedouin disguise. The erstwhile revolutionary folkie, rock-'n 'roll innovator and countrified cop-out was back after an eight-year absence from concert touring. Perched atop a hotel couch in Philadelphia (the second of 21 cities in his current six-week tour), Dylan was solidly re-ensconced as the reigning song-poet laureate of young America...
...those of us who first grasped for maturity during the decade past, a Dylan concert is a three-hour detour through deja vu. Like images on Plato's cave, Clearasil coeds with Joan Baez hair and men silently hunkered inside thick pea jackets appear and quickly pass- yesterday's graduate students, now headed toward paunch or pregnancy. Dylan concerts draw people who inhabited the fringes of campus teach-ins, rode Mississippi freedom buses and marched down endless University Avenues searching for an end to the draft...
...Dylan's return, illuminated by the slow flicker of thousands of matches, the old spirit seems to emerge anew. At each concert, the hush of anticipation, the buzz of uncertainty and the applause of recognition are extensions of young people again listening to his words and looking for their meaning. Arms linked together, swaying in unison, chanting in time to the psychic current, a generation's anthem- learned in adolescence, sung in protest but not finally understood until periods of adult crisis-is being sung once more...
Dylan's skill and judgment were spectacular. His set on acoustic guitar was disappointingly short, but he paced the concert perfectly. In a fairly smoothed-out version of his old-style folk-blues voice, Dylan sang forcefully, sometimes threateningly. He must have spent some of his time in Wood stock practicing harmonica, because his accompaniment to "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" showed more skill on the mouth harp than anything he has ever recorded. Even Dylan's single piano solo was dramatic: "Ballad of a Thin Man" was one of the evening's most striking per formances...
...Does his message lie in the passivist, more than the pacifist strain in his music? Or does Dylan's appeal still lie in the undercurrent of moralism, the attractiveness of a message like that of "Blowin' in the Wind," the song with which he chose to begin the evening concert's second half? The one time Dylan attempted manifesto was two years ago with "George Jackson," a song which for blandness alone deserves its present obscurity. But the plea for freedom still rings powerfully, even if in middle class, individualistic terms...