From the Chicago Tribune

Review: Bob Dylan at Aragon
Bob Gendron
Special to the Tribune
October 30, 2009

Bob Dylan didn't play any Christmas tunes from his new holiday album Thursday in front of a fair-sized crowd at Aragon. Performing the first show of a three-night stand, the feisty singer instead had disaster on his mind, rage in his heart and "the blood of the land" in his voice. And in virtuosic guitarist Charlie Sexton, who just rejoined the bard's group after an extended hiatus, the 68-year-old icon had a worthy foil to challenge him. In contrast to recent appearances that witnessed him hiding in the shadows, Dylan seemed reinvigorated, stepping out from behind the keyboard and moving to center stage on multiple occasions. He also took several turns on guitar.

Dressed in cowboy-style outfits, Dylan and his backing band looked as if they rode into town on horseback from a distant Texas ranch. South-of-the-border accents and chiaroscuro lighting added to the Old West atmosphere. So did Dylan's coarse singing. His raspy timbre often sounded like the cough of a soot-clogged furnace pipe--craggy, gritty, polluted. Yet it served as a natural complement to the sextet's street-tough rockabilly and jump blues, which seldom took a direct route to their destinations.

With each instrumentalist's eyes fixated on Dylan, who conducted by way of subtle gestures, songs loped and shuffled. Sexton's smooth, economical fills counterbalanced his leader's sustained organ runs and throaty harmonica solos. Loose arrangements encouraged impromptu tempo changes and accommodated Dylan's elastic phrasing. The group's two-step grooves caused all but a handful of drifter ballads and sleepy meditations to swing.

Reacting to the music's roll and tumble, Dylan and Sexton squatted and swayed, as if ducking out of the way of the sharp notes, snapping chords and fierce sentiments. Vicious currents blew through a majority of the material. Violence cast a pall over "Ain't Talkin'," while a re-imagined "Just Like a Woman" threw sarcastic daggers. Better still, the scampering "Highway 61 Revisited" and scathing "Ballad of a Thin Man" evoked sinister desires. Drummer George Recile even launched "Like a Rolling Stone" with a forceful, pistol-shot snare hit that recalled famously confrontational performances of the song in the mid-60s. Not missing the cue, Dylan answered with a nasal sneer true to the 110-minute set's outlaw vibe.

It's a Bob Christmas for Halloween

By PETER STONE BROWN

There are many ways to view or react Bob Dylan's decision to record a Christmas album, and probably all of them make sense. I always figured he'd do one eventually and when the album was announced several weeks ago, my initial reaction was, why now? I would've expected it about 28 years ago, but after 46 years of following Dylan, I learned long ago that predicting anything he's going to do is futile.

Shortly after the announcement of the album, it was also announced the album, Christmas In The Heart, would be a benefit, Dylan would be donating all royalties present and future to three organizations that combat world hunger, Feeding America in the United States; Crisis, in Great Britain; and the United Nations' World Hunger Program.

It's important to remember that just about every artist with a recording contract, and of many musical genres has recorded a Christmas album at some point, and if they haven't done a Christmas album, they've done a Christmas song of some kind, and this includes musicians as diverse as Joan Baez, John Fahey and Asleep At The Wheel. It's certainly a grand American (if not worldwide) pop music tradition. And Bob Dylan, despite whatever mantels have been hung on him, has increasingly demonstrated he's an artist in the great American tradition. Singing Christmas songs can be fun. I learned that a long time ago, when I attended a progressive private school in the Philly suburbs, and we had to learn a bunch of Christmas songs for a school show. Singing those rather intricate harmonies right beside me was one person who would go onto to found and lead America's great Western Swing revival band, and another who would write and produce a major TV show and some movies as well. None of us were Christians, though other kids in the class were. But my memory of it, after getting past the initial groans and grumbling, was that is was fun. (For the same presentation, I was also picked to play Santa Claus for all the kids in nursery school and kindergarten, even though I was one of the shortest and skinniest kids in the class, but that's another story.) A couple of weeks ago, Amazon's UK site - probably wrongly, since they were quickly removed - posted sound clips of the album. The reaction in the online Dylan community, which consists of innumerable discussion forums was pretty much a collective Yikes!

My own response to the clips was Self Portrait Revisited. Another friend suggested that perhaps Dylan was getting too comfortable with a decade of good reviews and hit, often number one albums, and had to do something to shake things up. However before the clips appeared, another friend, author, CP Lee, who has written two books on Dylan wrote me that he considered it "Dylan's greatest master stroke. As he gets older you can see little lumps of the 1950s chrystalising/forming around him."

Some of the Amazon clips, especially the ones with total white bread sounding backup vocals suggested schlock of the highest order, and generic instrumental backing. However, those clips, for whatever reason were ultimately deceptive. On the album, Dylan is backed by three members of his regular touring band, bassist, Tony Garnier, drummer George Recili, Donnie Herron, on steel, trumpet, mandolin, violin and trumpet, and David Hidalgo returning on guitar, accordion, mandolin, and violin, as well as Patrick Warren on keyboards and celeste, and a crew of background singers, including the duo, The Ditty Bops. Dylan as usual, is guitar, electric piano and harp.

The arrangements are perhaps the most carefully crafted of any album Dylan has released. Everything is deliberate. The backup vocal parts, complete with rounds, were absolutely thought out. The playing is uniformly excellent, with not a misplaced note, with Donnie Herron, again showing why he is one of the most valuable members of Dylan's band, something that isn't necessarily apparent at Dylan's live performances, where his work is often buried in the sound mix. For the song selection Dylan chose the route (for the most part) right down the middle of the road, mixing classic carols with pop music Christmas songs. There are of course Christmas songs in every genre, traditional folk, bluegrass, blues and rock and roll. Dylan may have had Minnesota in mind, but it doesn't matter. In keeping with his last two albums, and in keeping with an onstage exploration of American music that's been happening at his concerts in various forms and at various times, during the past 15 years, if not his entire career, that he chose this route makes total sense. That said, (not that I'm ever going to tell Bob Dylan what to do), there's a couple of songs I would have liked to hear him sing. Leadbelly has a cool song called, "Christmas Is Coming," and I think he could have done a great job on "Go Tell It On The Mountain," and I can also imagine a fairly rocking, "Children, Go Where I Send Thee."

What makes Christmas In The Heart perhaps the most unique Christmas album ever is that Dylan's voice has been shot for a while now. He's not quite in Tom Waits territory, but close, perhaps with as another friend suggested, a touch of Jimmy Durante. I once wrote he was a young man with an old man's voice. He is now that older man, and the years of going after the sound of the great old blues and country singers, the years of singing with a different voice on every album, not to mention probably a million or more cigarettes have take their toll. But like all great singers - and Dylan is a great singer - he's found ways to work within his limitations. So against this very smooth, often exquisite backing, you have this singer with this extremely rough voice. There are times, when you think he's never sounded more tender, or more gentle. There are times you can imagine him playing with his grandkids, and there are times where he's never sounded more sincere. In other words, he's really singing, and some of these melodies are the most demanding and challenging he's ever done. The tension, and there's never been a Bob Dylan album without some sort of tension, especially on the first couple of listens is whether he's going to hit what he's going for, and he usually does. It may be some of the roughest note hitting you've ever heard, but he does get there.

This is an album where mentioning standouts doesn't matter. Dylan sounds most at home for obvious reasons on "The Christmas Blues." The most fun track is a dead on cover of Brave Combo's polka rendition of, "Must Be Santa." Yes, that's right, polka! Complete with accordion, and it's a riot. Everyone sounds like they're on the verge of cracking up singing it too. This of course brought a worldwide collective WHAAAT!!!!!??? among Dylan fans when the sound clip emerged. There's also the Hawaiian, "Christmas Island," where you half expect Leon Redbone to drop in for a guest verse at any moment. Dylan is at his most gentle on "Little Drummer Boy," a song I always knew that if he ever did a Christmas album, he would do. Both "Winter Wonderland" and "The Christmas Song," have touches of western swing in the arrangements. Unfortunately, they don't have original song credits, so I don't know if Herron is doubling on fiddle and steel, or if the fiddle is David Hidalgo.

The traditional carols are the ones I keep going back to. "O' Come All Ye Faithful" has an arrangement that is close to baroque music with trumpet and bowed string bass, and incredibly enough, Dylan sings the first verse in Latin, which is something I never thought possible.

So yeah, Bob Dylan made a Christmas album, a real one. And because it's Bob Dylan, is all the baggage that goes with Bob Dylan, the absurdity of it, and also the realness of it. And one could make a good case for it being another exploration of American music, 'cause it is that. And there's a bit of sly humor it as well. It may be the craziest thing he's ever done in a long list of fairly crazy things, or it could be as CP Lee said, "His greatest master stroke." And yep, it will have its detractors. But there's some great playing, and a lot of genuine real feeling. So while the rest of the world may be going to hell, be of good cheer.

Peter Stone Brown is a musician, songwriter, and writer. He can be reached at: psb51@verizon.net

Bob Dylan Redeems Las Vegas
by Sergio Zurita

To the great George Receli, who gave me an autograph that morning.

It was a thing of beauty listening to Bob Dylan sing about "trying to get to heaven" right in the middle of Sin City, officially known as Las Vegas, Nevada, this past Sunday.

The concert took place at The Joint, a venue for 2,000 people located inside the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, one of the most compelling arguments about rock & roll being nothing but a money machine.

Well, it was in that cultural desert, built upon an actual desert, that Bob Dylan decided to give the best concert I've seen of him since November 2001, when I started to go to every show that my time and money allow (this was my 47th, if I'm not mistaken.)

The night before, Bob took center-stage -as he has been doing since guitarist Charlie Sexton rejoined the band a few weeks ago. Without the protection of the guitar across his chest nor the safety net of his keboard trenches, Dylan had only one resource at hand: his singing voice. And, by God, does he know how to use it.

This is going to sound crazy for people who only like the sound of pristine vocal chords, but Bob Dylan is one of the greatest singers in the world. His voice is incredibly expressive and evocative, and he can really interpret a song and transmit images and emotions through it.

The night before Vegas, at the Arizona State Fair in Phoenix, he sang Workingman's Blues with all his might, making it the perfect song to describe these hard times. The lines "Some people never worked a day in their life/ Don't know what work even means" had a very deep resonance with that evening's audience of farmers and agricultors whose governments tell them that "low wages are a reality if we want to compete abroad".

But it wasn't just the right time and place that made the song so powerful. It was the way Dylan sang it, with great feeling and masterful technique, modulating his voice from notes of deep melancholy to dry indignation.

His very expressive hands added the right amount of drama to the song, making the singer look like the working man of the title and also, at times, like a scarecrow in an abandoned farm, telling the whole story to no one but the wind.

But I digress. We are again Las Vegas this past Sunday, at THE concert. It began with business as usual, with an ass-kicking "Leopard -Skin Pill-Box Hat". The extremely good looking and extremely talented Charlie Sexton is the frontman. Bob is on the right of the stage, playing keyboards.

Half of the jewelry-incrusted collar of his shirt is inside his jacket, the other half is not. (I mention this because in every single concert, in between songs, Dylan is constantly tucking his curly hair inside his hat and/or straightening his clothes.)

But this time he doesn't seem to mind the asimetry of his look. In fact, I don't think he could care less.

For the second song, he takes center-stage again. But instead of the sadness of Workingman's Blues, he sings "The Man In Me", one of his sexiest creations. What happens then is hard to describe without superlative phrases: Dylan swings and croons the song, he smiles at the audience in complicity, he moves his hands with masculine gracefulness. He sounds like a Dust Bowl Sinatra, like Dean Martin's smoother brother, like a pale Sammy Davis, Jr.

In other concerts, Dylan in Vegas was an oximoron. But on Sunday, he was as in place there as Bugsy Siegel at the Flamingo.

In "Forgetful Heart", the haunting ballad of Together Through Life, Dylan became Sinatra again. The darkest Sinatra, the Wee-Small-Hours-Of-The-Morning Frank. At that moment, you knew that behind the tinsel, we were in the middle of nowhere, rolling around like tumbleweeds.

In "Spirit on the Water", Dylan sang that he "can't go back to paradise no more" 'cause he "killed a man back there". And later on the show, he tried "to get to heaven before they close the door".

The truth is this: in Las Vegas, the city closest to hell, everyone who went to see and hear Bob Dylan on Sunday was accepted back in paradise and got into heaven, at least for a little while.