The Plight of the Aging Musician
Comparing Bob Dylan and Dead & Company
In any creative field, people have spent untold hours arguing about who the greatest of all time is in any given art form. Probably just as many hours have been spent arguing that such a person can never exist when quality is justly understood as subjective.
This is the team I’m on. I firmly believe that nobody can truthfully be named the greatest at anything. I also firmly believe that Bob Dylan is the greatest lyricist of all time. No, the paradox doesn’t really bother me — in fact, you basically stop noticing after a while.
If you haven’t closely followed Dylan’s career after his heyday, you might be surprised to hear me say that he put on the absolute worst concert I’ve ever had the misfortune of attending. If you’re a fellow fan, you’d probably grimace in agreement — or maybe you’re part of the third category, die-hard hero-worshippers who insist on his continued brilliance to this very day. I’ve long suspected, though, that these fans are secretly part of a CIA-led psyop engineered to undermine faith in our own quality judgments.
Granted, the terrible show I experienced wasn’t totally Dylan’s fault. It took place in the athletic center of Ithaca College, which had terrible acoustics and smelled like rubber. Twice the extremely pushy security team forced me to return to my seat — and the second time I wasn’t even doing anything wrong. The threat of ‘go back to your seat or we’ll have to ask you to leave’ lost most of its punch considering the steady trickle of people who started voluntarily leaving as soon as Dylan began to sing — if that’s even the right word for what he was doing on stage. A better threat, perhaps, would be to force anybody who wouldn’t behave to stay for the whole show.
I’ve complained about him before and will likely do so again. But his poor performances raise a broader question — what is an aging artist supposed to do as their faculties diminish? Dylan is wealthy enough to live more than comfortably without having to play live ever again. The fact that he’s continued to tour means that he does it because he wants to, and nothing would be more inappropriate than to suggest that a counterculture icon like Bob Dylan shouldn’t do whatever he pleases.
At the same time, I felt as though I’d been ripped off, that Dylan didn’t care about his audience, and that for some reason he couldn’t be bothered to put in any effort into his performance.
Dylan, to me, represents the absolute worst-case situation for an aging musician. On the other side of the spectrum lie the surviving members of the Grateful Dead. They’re just as far from their youthful peaks as Dylan is, but astronomically outpace him in terms of performance and enthusiasm.
The most recent Grateful Dead offshoot is Dead & Company, which contains original Dead members Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzman, and Mickey Hart. Dead & Company is by far the most popular of all post-Jerry Garcia projects, due in no small part to the contributions of Jeff Chimenti, Oteil Burbidge and John Mayer — musicians from a younger generation who bring a new energy and excitement to the music.
This element is sorely lacking in Dylan’s performances. His backing band is great, no doubt about it, but it’s still very much a Bob Dylan show. Dead & Company’s younger members are equal participants in the music, and their shows are better for it.
It seems to me that Dylan and Dead & Company’s most fundamental difference is their relationship to their respective audiences. Dylan has a history of polarizing his fans: perhaps the most iconic moment of his career was the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he enraged folk purists by performing a set with electric instruments. The audience famously booed, and continued to boo at his electric concerts for years to come.
On the other hand, Jerry Garcia once said that “We didn’t really invent the Grateful Dead, the crowd invented the Grateful Dead, you know what I mean?” The idea of the audience being responsible for the band’s entire existence, of mutual gratitude between performer and listener, has been carried over to Dead & Company. It makes the occasional forgotten lyric or too-slow performance more forgivable. Bob Weir’s mistakes seem endearing, while Dylan seems apathetic at best and condescending at worst.
I’m not saying that Dylan should retire or hire a new band — it’s not my place to suggest that he should or shouldn’t do anything. All I can say is that, if Dylan decides to tour again, I won’t be wasting my time or money. But to alter a popular phrase — if Dead & Company came to town, I’d beat my way in with a tire iron if necessary.