Le Club Bon Bon

In "Shadow Kingdom," Bob Dylan and band rule the mythical Club Bon Bon in Marseilles. 

I have watched  Bob Dylan's streaming "Shadow Kingdom" performance a couple of times and plan to watch it at least a couple of more before the streaming "ticket" expires on July 25 (as Veeps.com, the provider, announced today). 

It's one of the better performances I've seen from Mr. D and he's in relatively good voice, with a lot of hand gestures and emotion showing in his face - something that either doesn't happen much on stage or we sit too distant to see that stuff in a live concert. Beyond the questions Rolling Stone's Andy Greene asks about the show, I want to point out that this film portrays an alternate reality where the music business isn't the way it is. A performing artist of Dylan's reputation really can't go out and play a little blues club with a postage stamp dance floor, but in this shadow kingdom, it happens, and people dance, smoke and drink to it, all in black and white as though this Dylan guy was just a working the clubs in a Steinbeck novel or a noir detective story or maybe on the outskirts of town before the giant gila monster attacks the teenagers in their hot rods. The visual representations of Dylan's music have been residents of Noirville for a long time, going back at least to "Time Out of Mind" and probably back to "Oh, Mercy!" 

The time warp involved here is interesting. This is subtitled "The Early Songs of Bob Dylan." Well, yes, this 2021 and so it's been 32 years since "Oh, Mercy!" was released. That album includes the most recent of the songs included in this video, "What Was It You Wanted?" However, to me, the EARLY songs of Bob Dylan might include anything from his first three albums or before. It's hard to think of "Queen Jane Approximately" (from "Highway 61 Revisited"), just for instance, as an early song of Dylan's, since it came after his electrification, when he actually charted singles such as "Like a Rolling Stone," the hit from that same album. That being said, I recognize that this is a personal perspective. To my children and granddaughter, anything before they were born was pretty early, I'm sure. 

I've been an amateur musician, artist and composer since I was a teenager, and when I listen to Bob Dylan, I am reminded of my early fire of humanity. As a little kid, I was naive and innocent - meaning I wasn't much aware of the world beyond me - but as I grew as a writer and drew my sketches and wrote my tunes, the inner and outer worlds enmeshed and engaged with passion, ambition and just so much burning energy. I felt like I'd super-nova. That got dulled with the passage of time, but when I revisit Dylan, I get pulled into that shadow kingdom of memory and can feel that fire has not burnt out. 

And what interests me is what is this guy doing now? Why is he clenching his fists like that? Is he really moving behind the mic like Frank Sinatra, even when he's singing the oh-so-un-Sinatra-like "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue"? 

Aside from the special touches - one of the actresses casually dusting Dylan's collar during a tune, the crowd getting up and dancing and offering unheard applause, the band members all wearing masks to remind us of the year of the plague, while everyone else is maskless in this visit to an alternate reality - I'd like to focus on one tune that I know very well. 

Dylan wrote "To Be Alone With You" for "Nashville Skyline," released in April 1969. I was just a year away from high school graduation, and I hung out at a teen coffeehouse called "Mama's Illusion." A friend of mine went nuts (in a very good way) when he heard the album, and played a whole set of tunes from it. I got to play harmonica along with him as he played "Peggy Day" (which closed the first side of the album) about a zillion times that night. It was kind of a Dylan spring and summer for me that year, and I made sure to set up my reel-to-reel recorder to capture Dylan's performance on the debut of "The Johnny Cash Show" that June. The TV had a crappy speaker, but I've played that tape (as tinny as the music was reproduced) many, many times since then, even since pristine recordings have been available. 

So why does Dylan completely rewrite "To Be Alone With You" for "Shadow Kingdom"? Aside from the refrain built on the title and the first line of each verse sort of echoing the original's, the rest of the lyrics are changed. I asked  similar questions when his "Bob Dylan at Budokan" concert album was released in 1979. Songs changed so much in his hands from the original recordings that almost nothing was set except the title. Is the title the only salient element of a song? If you can change the melody completely and the lyrics are also different from the original publication - is it still the same song? These are questions that interest me as a writer and they have meaning for what you're trying to do when you write.

Of course, performance is a different medium from songwriting. If you've sung your hits a thousand times, don't you have to change them up to keep yourself interested? It seems a valid point. I have no idea how many times Dylan has sung "To Be Alone With You," because as obsessive as this particular post might make me seem, I do not follow every set list of every show. I want to suggest, though, after copying down the new words to the song, that maybe sometimes you rewrite the lyrics like you let out a suit. They don't fit you anymore. 

I, personally, like the plain-spun words of the "Nashville Skyline" version: "To be alone with you / Just you and me / Now won't you tell me true / Ain't that the way it oughtta be? / To hold each other tight / The whole night through / Everything is always right / When I'm alone with you." Contrast and compare to the opening verse in "Shadow Kingdom": "To be alone with you / Just you and I / Under the moon /  'neath the star-spangled sky / I know you're alive / And I am, too / My one desire / Is to be alone with you."

The first version, recorded when he was in his late 20s, had the perspective of someone who was settling down in domestic life, working for a living and coming home to his spouse. The "Shadow Kingdom" version, recorded either when he was 79 or since he turned 80, seems to whistle past the graveyard in its obsessive desire. That's especially true in the ominous last "Shadow Kingdom" verse: "What happened to me, Darling? / What was it you saw? / Did I kill somebody? / Did I escape the law? / Got my heart in my mouth / My eyes are still blue / My mortal bliss is / To be alone with you!"

That last part fits in with Dylan's long stay in Noirville. It also squares with a change of perception I've noted in myself. Memory was once clear and bight, but as I've aged, memory seems more like a long, chiaroscuro tunnel with images flickering like those in "Shadow Kingdom." I wonder if Dylan would have been better served to write a new tune to express this very different time in life rather than salvage the old suit. Anyway, there's more questions than answers here, and that's why I keep returning to Dylan's work. Like he wrote in a very early song, "The answer is blowing in the wind."