‘I Love Lucy’: The classic TV show Bob Dylan watches “non-stop” on tour
Touring seems like a dream for many people. Playing in front of crowds of thousands of adoring fans? Plenty of people flocking over you? Parties every night? Where do I sign up! Well, Bob Dylan might be able to dissuade you.
The truth is, Bob Dylan has always had a pretty turbulent time when it comes to touring. He clearly enjoys it, as he has spent the majority of his life on some kind of tour, but it seems his attitude towards it is as mixed as the reviews of people who go to watch him.
Dylan has a unique approach to performing live. He isn’t like other artists, who merely play song after song in a bid to give people a glimpse into their music. Instead, he uses his songs as a backbone that he can build a haphazard skeleton around. This means a leg might end up where an eye is supposed to go, or a nose could wind up on an elbow, as his songs are moved around, the structure played with, as the show begins to resemble a silhouette of Dylan as opposed to an actual gig. Some people love this style of performance, others hate it.
“Some were hard to recognise. But nobody cared,” said Leonard Cohen when he was describing the songs played at a Bob Dylan show he went to, “That’s not what they were there for and not what I was there for […] Something else was going on, which was a celebration of some kind of genius that is so apparent and so clear and has touched people so deeply that all they need is some kind of symbolic unfolding of the event.”
Of course, while Cohen’s admiration is high praise indeed, there are others who have previously lashed out at Dylan’s performance, saying they can’t tell one song from the other and feel it’s not the reason they go to a gig. There is a love it or hate it attitude enveloped in Dylan’s tours, which is reflected by Dylan himself, who also has mixed feelings towards his shows.
While Dylan found touring and playing music as a release for a while, when he felt like an outcast at home and looked for comfort within art, touring also proved to be his downfall when he went on the road with Tom Petty. Every night when he took to the stage, he felt his inspiration leaving him, as all energy that was previously devoted to playing music became draining.
“I had no connection to any kind of inspiration,” said Dylan, “Whatever was there to begin with had vanished and shrunk … I couldn’t overcome the odds. Everything was smashed. My own songs had become strangers to me. I was what they called over the hill …The mirror had turned around and I could see the future — an old actor fumbling in garbage cans outside the theater of past triumphs.”
Dylan managed to find his inspiration for performing again. A stint with the Grateful Dead helped him do that, along with an attitude that resembled how he thought about performing when he originally started making music. The idea that he was beginning from the ground floor and slowly working his way up. Since then, he has continued playing on the road, and has discovered different ways to keep himself sane in the process of doing so. It seems these comforts are representative of once again finding a safe space embedded within nostalgia, as a lot of them are old TV shows.
“I was about 14 or 15 when we got [a TV], my dad put it in the basement,” he said, “It came on at 3:00 and went off at 9, most of the other time it showed a test pattern, some kind of weird circular symbol. The reception wasn’t that good, there was a lot of snow on the screen and you always had to adjust the antenna to get anything to come in. I liked everything I saw — Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Highway Patrol, Father Knows Best.”
Of all the TV programmes available though, there is one which Dylan constantly watches when he’s on tour. “[I watch] I Love Lucy, all the time,” he admitted, “Nonstop”.
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