Glad I went to the sold-out Bob Dylan / Willie Nelson gig Friday night at Doubleday Field in
Cooperstown, N.Y., where they launched their summer tour of minor league
ballparks before a crowd of about 12,000 fans.
Loved the Hot Club of Cowtown, the
opening act. Hot Club plays western swing — lots of their own original
songs and jazz standards. I’ve got a crush on Elana Fremerman’s
voice, not to mention her fiddling. You won’t find a better
musician than Fremerman, a Kansas native who started out playing classical violin and viola. And
try finding a guitarist as fine as the Hot Club virtuoso Whit Smith (from Connecticut, of
all places) or someone who slaps a bass as well as Jake Erwin,
their crack bassist (another Kansas native).
Full disclosure: A friend of mine, Joe Kerr, plays piano on couple of their recordings, including their recent “Ghost Train.” Here’s a sample. And here’s another opinion.
Especially enjoyed Willie’s 45-minute set. He opened with “Whiskey River” and closed with
“Texas Flood.” I was looking forward to hearing Dylan, too, but after the fourth or fifth number,
his set sounded like pure aggression. It became monotonous, too. Everybody else seemed
to love his performance.
The crowd was peaceful, though it moved toward the stage like a tidal wave when Dylan
came on, trampling blankets that people had laid out. There was no point in sitting. To catch a
glimpse of Dylan’s regal doings onstage, everyone was forced to stand shoulder to shoulder and
crane their necks for more than an hour and a half.
Dylan played keyboard, which you couldn’t hear over the wall of sound from the huge drum
kit and the wailing electric guitars. Dylan didn’t sing, of course; he growled into the mike. I liked
his growl, but naturally the words were unintelligible. When he played harmonica, the others
piped down a bit so you could hear him. Even so, there was no way his tooting could hold up
against all that electrified screed. The harmonica sounded feeble.
Also, except for the rhythm changes from tune to tune, you almost couldn’t tell one song from
another. (Well, I couldn’t.) And some of them sounded exactly alike. Dylan seemed so remote,
frankly, the crowd might as well have been cheering a pharoah.
