Chasing Bob Dylan Down Dark Alleys, Provoked by His Debut Livestream Performance
This is my first official review of an artist and a piece of their body of work. My qualifications are iconic memories, personal insights, and fascination on the topic. I don’t claim to be a Dylan historian or “scholar” or any other obscene title Dylan himself would no doubt roll his eyes at, as he intentionally seems to avoid being categorized.
During his Rolling Thunder Review tour in 1975/6, Dylan went on stage in white-face - not clown face - but blank-face. I’m choosing to interpret that as him giving us permission to see whatever we do, which may very well be simply reflecting back to us what we have already projected onto him.
Dylan nerdology aside, I do know a thing or two about signs and symbols that seem to pop up regularly in pop culture, literature, and religion. Dylan may be the Artful Dodger, but I have been studying the art of dodging for a while and am “simply” observing patterns and themes.
That being said, I legit did not expect this article to turn into whatever it ends up being. I was planning to try my hand at a brief review of a strange performance. But it kept unraveling, with no direction home, causing me to split the darn thing up into two installments; You'll have to get up, turn the record over, and enjoy the second half next week.
I read an article that pointed out nearly 100 college courses have been centered around interpreting his lyrics, and numerous PhD candidates dissertained on the matter. (I wonder if Dylan gets any kickback from colleges raking Benjamins off his artwork.) Thus, summing it up in a blog…let’s just put it this way: see this as a rough take off a Bootleg Series, with a false start and a missing verse.
This past week, Bob Dylan, who turned 80 in May, debuted his first livestream event, fashionably late to the obligatory online Covid concert phenomenon. The name hit me foremost: Shadow Kingdom. Bob Dylan may be enigmatic, baffling, and playing the jester, but he’s no fool; he’s deliberate. The fact that he would name the show in the first place is interesting, rather than just “Bob Dylan in Concert.” Titling something assumes a theme/thesis. What could Bob be trying to tell us with this title?
That’s a haphazard question, because Dylan seems to consistently tell us that he’s not trying to tell us anything. Fans scoff at this almost pretentious elusiveness because the lyrics in his songs convey so much: from the abstract “Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” that could have come from the book of Revelation, to the overt “Hurricane” which is a rhyming news report, something is clearly being told.
Many were assuming and anticipating this livestream would be performances of material off his newest (39th studio) album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, released in June of 2020, during the height of the pandemic and pandemonium provoked by the death of George Floyd; rough and rowdy ways indeed…oddly prophetic indeed. But in typical Dylan fashion, he went the total opposite direction and gave us 50 minutes of early material, much of which has not been performed in decades.
PEOPLE ARE CRAZY AND TIMES ARE STRANGE
Shadow Kingdom. What images does that phrase conjure for you? If you resonate with what gets discussed and alluded to here at Everyday Exorcism, you’re probably on the same track as me: the devil’s kingdom of darkness, perhaps the Jungian “shadow self” - the sinful nature that lurks in the unilluminated corners. Shadow Kingdom also hints at the hidden hand - the deep state, banksters, the global elite, the mob - all of which is described literally as the shadow government. Such are the nefarious “powers and principalities” mentioned in the Bible.
A shallow Google search brought up “Shadow Kingdom'', a 1929 fantasy pulp fiction story about a post-cataclysmic world with battles between barbaric Atlantians and underworld serpent men, and Shadow Kingdom the record label for heavy metal bands, featuring the song “Nightmare Beyond” on their homepage. It is also an extremely intricate computer game about the Holy Roman Empire, arguing that despite the fact that Italy is part of a larger empire, they continue to act independently, clandestinely. In real life, Vatican City is in a sense exactly that. Cases in point, the ominous scent I’m picking up is not off the mark.
Shadow Kingdom would make sense as a title if Rough and Rowdy songs were being performed. The album was described by critics as "equal parts death-haunted and cantankerous", “grim, gallows-humored conviction”, and “cryptic cauldron of truths and clues, philosophy, myths and magic.” The final track is an unrelenting 16+ minute epic about the assassination of John F Kennedy called “Murder Most Foul.” Another track, “Crossing the Rubicon” references Caesar’s insurrection. Surely political characters and infamous historical events warrant the theme of Shadow Kingdom.
Likewise, if Dylan was hankering for older material, he could have mined his 1997 album Time Out of Mind, or 2001’s Love and Theft, both with tracks more apropos. He did choose one haunting song, “What is it You Wanted,” from 1989’s Oh Mercy, from which almost anything would have clicked, specifically the pessimistic tracks “Political World,” “Everything is Broken,” and “Disease of Conceit” (though funnily enough, cranky critics didn’t think the O Mercy song qualified as “early works”, considering Dylan’s been recording music since the early 60’s). Yet as it turned out, many of the songs selected for the show don’t seem to fit the theme nearly as well.
What did fit the theme was the film itself - the set, the direction, and the cinematography. Filmed in sharp black and white, the ambiguously pre-recorded show was set in a fictional half-saloon half-jazz club somewhere in the 40’s or 50’s, with a staged, costumed audience of quasi-interested cowboys and retro glam girls. Dylan fronts a 4-piece band that waxed vintage Americana and Parisian tinpan. At first they play acoustic, but as the night wears on, they go muted electric (with unplugged guitars, giving away their secret), eventually coaxing the crowd to take to their feet, wobbling to wraithlike grooves.
Though the mood is melancholic and bluesy, there is a wry playfulness in the heavy-handed chain-smoking bottoms-up indulgence the actors engage, keeping a theatrical wink in the air. That air, thick with cigarette plumes, creates the iconic cloudy noir atmosphere, making the mostly-obscured Dylan a mysterious Humphrey Bogart/John Wayne/Frank Sinatra amalgamation starring in a David Lynch film; truthfully it seemed like a bar somewhere in Twin Peaks.
And all of that makes sense in our Shadow Kingdom: Bogart the handsome Hollywood seducer, Wayne the rebel outlaw, Sinatra the twinkle-eyed musing mafioso, and Lynch the unholy architect of cinematic underworlds himself - all archetypes for the upside down, with sophisticated subtlety. At first the vintage vibe comes across as quaint, nostalgic. But there’s something unsettling about it. Something is off. You don’t quite trust the audience members. They feel like they’re either on their way to or from a crime scene.
Dylan did directly embody Sinatra in 2015 with the release of an album consisting of all standards popularized by Sinatra, who had known mafia ties. The title of the album: Shadows in the Night. Shadows in the night? Wasn’t the famous Sinatra song called “Strangers in the Night?” The official music video for the song “The Night We Called it a Day” suggests a foreshadowing of the noir Shadow Kingdom. Similarly filmed in high contrast black and white, Dylan enters a Sinatra-era bar again filled with smoke and vintage vamps. He ends up low-key murdering a man and his fiancé and getting away, perhaps driving straight to his Shadow Kingdom gig, handgun still in the glove box. When asked why he would do a cover album, Dylan responded that he was not covering these songs but rather resurrecting them: “Lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day.” Dylan the necromancer.
Back at Shadow Kingdom, by the time the 10th song starts up - “Pledging My Time” (1966) - the disorienting camera shots tell you just how many drinks you’ve had - or maybe you’ve been slipped something…the song evokes the Mississippi Delta, where musician Robert Johnson infamously pledged his soul to the devil at the crossroads…the focal point of a long camera shot is an undulating black man suckling a bottle - the ghost of Johnson? And you’re spun into the next song, “Wicked Messenger” (1967). A Dylan biography titled The Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan in the 1960’s, states that “Pledging My Time” "hints at a dark betrayal that is both portentous and frighteningly devoid of meaning", comparing it directly to a Robert Johnson song.
Other resonances worth mentioning are Dylan’s February 1964, appearance on a Canadian television special, singing 6 songs in a Cabin with some burly Canucks milling about, seeming half-attentive in the same way the mildly mused audience in Shadow Kingdom appears. Though naturally that television show was in black and white due to the technology of the day, it strengthens the connection. Then there’s the Western cowboy Dylan in his 1973 project Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, characters who are probably lurking somewhere in the Shadow Kingdom outlaw crowd.
Above: The zoned out Shadow Kingdom crowd; lil Bobby serenades the Canadian woodsmen; Outlaw Dylan in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY
After a careful second viewing, and in light of the research I began to pull together for this article, the livestream began to reveal itself as a liturgy in a pagan ritual. The first lines from the song “Paint My Masterpiece” has Dylan opening up the show and setting the altar with:
Oh the streets of Rome are filled with rubble Ancient footprints are everywhere You can almost think that you’re seeing double On a cold dark night by the Spanish stairs Gotta hurry on back to my hotel room Wash my clothes and scrape off the grease Gonna lock my door, turn my back on the world for a while I’ll stay right there until I paint my masterpiece.
The references to Ancient Rome (the aforementioned Holy Roman Empire?), and the storyteller purifying himself and turning his back on the mundane hints at entering a religious sacred space. The “seeing double” connects to the room full of ecstatic congregants high on secular sacraments.
The show/ritual ends with lines from “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue”:
Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you The vagabond who’s rapping at your door Is standing in the clothes that you once wore Strike another match, go start anew And it’s all over now, Baby Blue
The references to leaving your stepping stones and you’re dead behind for that which beckons do have a Christ-calling tinge to them, though could also be entrance into a cult or secret society, into which you are reborn as enlightened and those on the outside are the spiritually poor: the vagabond vestiges of your old self. Striking another match and starting anew is lighting the sacrifice upon the altar, like Burning Man, the Wicker Man, the Cremation of Care ceremonies. It’s all over now.
In fact, the show takes place on a checkerboard floor, which is the groundwork in every Masonic temple, and a tell-tale sign of witnessing a Masonic-kissed event.
Freemasonry is the social club and religious cult of the real-life Shadow Kingdom, with pledging members in all branches of society, very common in politics and Hollywood/entertainment industries. The black and white of the checkerboard represents the duality of good and bad, yin and yang - not good versus evil, but rather a co-existence that each are necessary parts of a whole. Perhaps this is also why it was filmed in black and white.
Darker, the checkerboard also represents the “grand chessboard” upon which we are all pawns and playthings to be moved about as necessary for the sake of the show by the hidden hands. As Shakespeare put it, “All the world’s a stage/and all the men and women merely players.” No one knows this more intimately than the song-and-dance man, one who signed a contract with a record label, or taken the oath into the club…the contract at the crossroads.
Above: Checkerboard floors of Masonic lodges; David Lynch‘s disorienting take on the yin yang flooring in the Black Lodge of Twin Peaks; Notice the trippy swirl-lights behind Dylan’s head during Shadow Kingdom: Halo? Hypnosis?
Shadow Kingdom suggests something else: another Kingdom. You cannot have a shadow without a light source. There are only two kingdoms, only two religions. There is the Kingdom of Light - The Way of Christ/the One True God - and there is the Kingdom of Shadows - Mystery Babylon/the occult. Occult means “to hide or conceal.” Used in the context of spirituality, the occult refers to hidden “truths”, secret information, exclusive groups and clubs - hence Mystery Babylon.
Above: Dylan’s concert in the early aughts with a hypnotic Egyptian/Babylonian eye of Horus wearing a crown, with the heavy blood-red curtains reminiscent of the Black Lodge; The occult/Masonic symbolism of the all-seeing eye; In contrast, Dylan unabashedly leading a praise and worship concert during his Gospel era.
Dylan knows of the two kingdoms. In his song “Gotta Serve Somebody,” he makes it clear that this is not a “yes-and” situation; this is an “either-or.” No matter who you are or what your preferences may be, you cannot remain neutral:
“It may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.”
So whose side is Dylan on? Well…
STAY TUNED FOR SIDE B!
Our tour of the Shadow Kingdom continues as we examine the man from Minnesota, who contains multitudes - the perfect shadow in which to remain masked and anonymous. Together we will cross the Rubicon and find the Jack of Hearts on the watchtower overlooking the Burlesque Empire, only to have him tell us, “I’m Not There.”
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