I hear Adam Granduciel singing before I see him. He’s backed by a ton of accompaniment, at least a dozen people, but the frontman of The War on Drugs’ lead vocals are coming through high and clear as I walk into Cain’s Ballroom a little after 5:30 pm on Friday to scope out the sound check for that night’s tribute to Blood on the Tracks.
He’s rehearsing the first verse of “My Back Pages,” and as I round the gigantic sound booth I can see he’s up there with 16 other people. Fresh singers rotate in on each verse: Kevin Morby, Amy Ray, the actor Michael Shannon, Robyn Hitchcock, Emma Swift. Whether they’re in front of a microphone or not, everybody on stage is really leaning into the chorus: “I was so much oooollllllder then, I’m younger than that now.”
They run through the song three or four times, casually but professionally. In between takes Shannon reads out the day’s headlines: “It’s 61 degrees in Cupertino.” The A-list musicians banter among themselves, friendly and warm. Elvis Costello appears and they rehearse “I Shall Be Released,” the other encore number they’ll play later for a sold-out crowd of Bob Dylan Center members and their friends. Among them was the actor Ethan Hawke, who two days later would call it “the best concert I think I’ve ever been to in my life.”
It seems improbable, but at 83 years old, Bob Dylan is once again having a moment. A Complete Unknown just grossed a cool $64 million at the box office and garnered eight Academy Award nominations, including one for its lead, the acclaimed actor and human marketing stunt Timothée Chalamet, whose performances of “Outlaw Blues,” “Tomorrow Is A Long Time” and “Three Angels” on Saturday Night Live inspired emergency podcasts this weekend across the Dylan internet. (If somebody working for Tim reads this, please, I will move heaven and earth to get you a limited edition The Pickup-branded hat.)
An industry with more self-awareness would’ve probably stopped making music biopics after Walk Hard, but the genre has stuck around as a reliable means for introducing old musicians to young audiences. Dylan and Chalamet will now forever be intertwined for millions of Zoomers, which is different from how I was introduced to him: as the mysterious, bird-looking cartoon guy on the Blood on the Tracks CD that my dad played in the car growing up. A source at the Bob Dylan Center told me that traffic to their and the nearby Woody Guthrie Center’s websites are both way up since the hype machine for the film started.
Downstream of all this sits good old Tulsa. Even before it opened nearly three years ago, the Bob Dylan Center has been attracting both talent and new tourism dollars into town, leveraging the attention into one-of-a-kind programming. It’s probably not easy to be the chosen keeper of Dylan’s mammoth legacy, and the Center has gone to great lengths to connect Dylan to Tulsa. For me, Friday night’s show—billed as “Shelter from the Storm,” a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Blood on the Tracks—represented the peak of its effort so far to educate the public about Dylan and his restless creativity.
That all said, the show just fucking rocked. Futile horns were blown, buckets of moonbeams were held in hand. Friends arrived and disappeared. At turns it kept to the album’s roadmap and detoured into originality. Master of ceremonies Luke Wilson periodically reminded the audience of Blood on the Tracks’ mythology. Four of the original players on the Minnesota sessions for the record performed, and one of them, Kevin Odegard, even played one of the guitars from those sessions, which is typically kept on display at the Center. The house band Chatham County Line (Greg Readling, John Teer, Dave Wilson) with Brad Cook, Phil Cook, Doug Keith and Darren Jessee mostly stuck to a rich, slow country-rock tempo as the default for the evening. It was a musical choice that let us appreciate Dylan’s songwriting in full clarity, as well as the interpretation of the singers performing it.
The evening consisted of two sets: Blood on the Tracks performed front to back, followed by a break and a hodgepodge of Dylan songs before a two-song encore. Adam Granduciel’s vivid “Tangled Up in Blue” would’ve kicked the night off a lot harder if it hadn’t been plagued by sound issues. Fortunately those issues only intermittently returned, and Diana Krall’s “Simple Twist of Fate” proceeded as planned, the only solo performance of the night. I thought Amy Ray’s rich, sultry take on “You’re A Big Girl Now” was the best of the album’s A-side. She rendered Dylan’s image of “a corkscrew” to the heart as both intimate and domestic, the pain at the center of one of rock’s great breakup records.