FOREVER YOUNG

Thunderclap Newman

We all stood up, every single one of us, even before he came on stage. After all, this was Bob Dylan, this was the man who came from Woodie Guthrie's knee and who soared far beyond that songsmith's talents, who was despised and feared by the establishment as a rebellion happening just in himself, who in turn deplored and called on us to pull down the shambles of yesterday's order, who had know addiction and pain and pleasure and heartache and recovery and who continued through it all, as only a true artist can, to tell us what we were thinking.
He started off the night with 'Maggie's Farm.' Never my favourite but from the right time (not that there was ever a wrong time with Dylan). But did I like it, was this just a pursuit of a dream or something? Was tonight going to be a painful disappointment?
At times you can have doubts. As you start to get on a bit, you wonder about old faiths, those beliefs you once had locked firmly into place, those people you believed in and trusted. Ah Bob, are you the same, have you changed, am I the same, have I changed? Yes, you fool of course, but the more things change the more they stay the same and when he belted into 'Tangled up in Blue', there was nothing to worry about. It was the clarity of his vision when he wrote that song and the casualness of his almost off-hand rendition of a life story that was someone's, that he knew and recognised and saw the value of and that he shared with us. A ballad? A biography? Hell, I bet Pat Boone wished he thought of it.
And when he did 'Don't Think Twice (it's alright)' in that beautifully strangulated voice, when ugliness transcends itself and becomes beauty, when a failed love story is turned into something of beauty, when gut-ripping emotions are put into soothing and healing terms, you knew why over all the years you'd stayed firm with him. Ah, there are confused moments for us all at times and there were times when you'd let him go a bit, strayed a bit. But it won't happen again.
He gave us 'Everybody Must Get Stoned'. Well, before that they in fact had. When Patti Smith first came on, doing a Dylan song as tribute, the smoke came out in no uncertain fashion. It wafted through the crowd up the grassy slopes, into nooks and crannies, everywhere. Whenever you saw a nose-ringed, eyebrow-ringed, tongue-ringed person suddenly stop and sniff impressively, you knew straight away that they'd hit a rich spot.
And Patti Smith had been tough and uncompromising and about the third song in she sounded very, very impressive indeed. The guys in her band were working hard for her and she wasn't letting them, or the crowd, down. But she was there to warm us up for Dylan and we knew and she knew we knew it and she worked real hard at it.
Getting us ready for the Master. A bit gushy and over board, you say? Well you compare 'How Much is That Puppy in the Window?' or Frank Sinatra or that fat fart Wayne Newton and anything they did to 'Blowin in the Wind' and you'll maybe see my point of view. From the crap they fed us on commercial radio stations we went with Bobby onto 'Highway 61', we were there with 'Wheels on Fire' and we were all 'Knockin on Heaven's Door'. He did all of them and he was brilliant.
He recrafts his work. He revisits and redefines and changes a point of view and it's a new song only it's not. It stays the same and is better. When those galahs booed him off the stage at Newport Folk Festival for going electric, thirty three years ago to the day he performed in Darwin, they were setting themselves up as the ones who'd stand in the doorways and block up the halls and who he'd sing about for the next thirty three years.
He did five encores. Dylan never does five encores. He did one in Melbourne. He did all of his old tracks. He usually only does maybe one or two. He did nine or ten in Darwin. He wanted to play Darwin. His agent apparently didn't want him to play Darwin but he was always going to play Darwin. He talked to us, he looked at us funny and made faces at us and joked around and sweated down the back of his powder-blue suit and worked harder than Patti Smith and his band went with him all the way and the sound was full-tilt boogie like you don't get to hear very often at all. A master artist, a craftsman practising the trade he knows and loves, not some old once-was hack trading off the never again years.
He liked Darwin and Darwin liked him.
And the last encore, the finale, the audience rocking and screaming and throwing their arms and legs and almost everything else around in rapturous acclamation was somehow very fitting. It was 'Forever Young'. Done in that beautifully ugly way he's mastered, it was the final powerful message, an appeal from one of the most enduring and sensitively perceptive artists of the twentieth century. An attitude, a style of living - "may you stay forever young".
It summed him up, it summed the audience up, I hoped it summed me up, it summed up a whole set of attitudes and approaches to life. May we all stay Forever Young.