Top of Form

When pondering what Dylan album might be crying out in the wilderness for celebration, reappraisal and re-imagining, Nashville Skyline very well might not register much of a blip on the radar screen. Its relative brevity and generalized Music City tone make it easy to overlook despite its genuine moments of poetry, pathos and paradox. Certainly, Dylan’s earlier catalogue or a smattering from the middle or late career suggest themselves as ripe pickins for a semi-major overhaul in the hands of a smart musician and producer.

But a display of Nashville Skyline in all its ordinariness and possibility at a packed La Poisson Rouge (formerly the Village Gate) right smack dab in the middle of Bleecker St. on an unusually balmy Tennessee-like Saturday night in late April, acted as an affirmation of the album’s dark country sometimes even gothic charm as if Duchamp and Poe took a whack at it.

Led by the irrepressible John Kruth (a man who wears too many hats to count on his ever expanding noggin’: musician, songwriter, recording artist, writer, educator, raconteur, catalyst, mensch), a Rolling Thunder Revue meets Vegas big band went deep into the mine and came back with something a little more valuable than Fool’s Gold.

A key to digging the essence of the Kruthian oeuvre (musical or otherwise) is to know that he has jammed with everyone from me (a barely capable guitarist and singer) to Ornette Coleman. He has traveled the globe searching for the sound and is always generous in the sharing of it.

Another key is to know that he worked closely with Joel Dorn – the late record producer s o important in the shaping the music we heard from the likes of Mingus, Yusef Lateef, Mose Allison, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Dr. John and Roberta Flack. J.D., as Dorn was affectionately known, was one of those producers who young cats in the ‘70s like Kruth and me scoured discount record bins in search of, knowing that a Dorn record – no matter who the artist on the cover – promised to be life-altering… or at least hour-altering. Joel was a master – maybe the master – at giving the music he was producing a day-glo peppermint twist. Other than Kruth, Dorn’s legacy can be gleaned in the work of the great and visionary Hal Wilner.

With an alternating and fluid instrumentation, Kruth’s new millennial “Nashville” band began the show with a couple of John Wesley Harding offerings (“Down Along the Cove” and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”), setting the tone and giving a nod to the temporally-specific Dylan chronology from which Nashville Skyline emerged.

The show was sold partly on the idea of “Why is Everybody Afraid of Bob When He is Happy?” Even the cover of Nashville Skyline is still a little off-putting: a smiling Dylan tipping his hat, Gibson J-200 in hand, against a backdrop of off-season pastoral. And this against a deeper backdrop of TET, seismic domestic social and civil tremors, Manson, Acid Rock and acid. We still tend to a sharp black-and-white image of a barbed wire Dylan – an angry scarecrow speaking in elliptically-coded tongues, casting the coldest of eyes on life, on death.

So, as the show edged into Nashville Skyline proper, it was still something of a shock to be delivered into the real of the kinder, gentler Dylan. Coincidentally, this is the Dylan we appear to have among us today – not just with the many songs of an elder beginning to make peace with things that have begun to pop up with increasing frequency on his last few albums, but as evidence in interviews and, perhaps most notably, in his “Theme Time” radio broadcasts and persona which should merit a tome of its own sooner or later.

Kruth’s band was, from what I gather, partially a gathering of the tribe that spearheaded the folk punk movement of the 1980s (Gordon Gano of the Violent Femmes, King Missile’s John S. Hall and Victor Krummenacher from Camper Van Beethoven) along with a grab bag of newer and older faces and voices (Tony Trischka, Hope Debates and Samantha Parton). And with this shifting cast, the first few numbers hewed pretty close to their Nashville Skyline counterparts: Gano and Parton recalled the Dylan/Johnny Cash duet on “Girl from the North Country,” the band tour through a hot rendition of “Nashville Skyline Rag” (itself an instrumental oddity in the Dylan catalogue), reinforced the album’s sense of unremitting romance with “To Be Alone with You” and served as a reminder that the collections is far from sugar and spice and everything nice with one of Dylan’s really sad, Hank Williams-reminiscent songs, “I Threw It All Away.”

Up until now, the show had certainly been pleasing, even moving at times. Proof of the pudding was the 20-somethings at the bar who finally began to pipe down as the power of the music overtook them.

Then things began to get interesting right about now. Charlie Burnham, an aging, African-American fiddler who recalled the wizened eminence gris gris of Papa John Creach, took the spotlight with an archaic a cappella Appalachian Spring spin on “Peggy Day,” accompanying himself plucking and strumming his axe. He could have been standing on the corner of K.C.’s 12^th Street and Vine – if ever there was such an intersection – during the last Great Depression… a black Dust Bowl Refugee escaping the hellhounds on his trail heading to the nearest freight train bound for some kind of glory on the far side of the Continental Divide.

Hope Debates, the band’s primary backup singer had kept herself relatively hidden throughout the first part of the show, singing beautifully but not really calling attention to herself. But she emerged from the wings decked in big, wrap-around shades and a get-up that recalled Andy Kauffman’s obnoxious lounge lizard “Tony Clifton” alter ego as she harangued the crowd with a barrage of insults and counter-intuitive stage moves. There was something happening here but none of is Mr. Jones-types could say for sure exactly what it was. So, it was perhaps not surprising that when the ensemble launched into a faux Vegas schmaltz-drenched big band excursion into “Lay Lady Lay” that was so far and away over the top, a couple of hundred jaws simultaneously went slack.

Yeah, sure, right, but of course – this is how the song was always meant to be performed! And funny too! Yet, it retained hints of the original’s passionate (and bawdy) romanticism. The song (not its performance necessarily) also sparked a reminder of the idea that, at a certain point, these songs – even most of Dylan’s songs – cease to be attached in our minds to a specific album. We in the obsessive, sometimes fetishistic, field recording collectin’ inner circle preached to choir, can’t help but begin picking out and recalling versions of songs from particular performance periods. “Lay Lady Lay,” for me anyway, calls to mind not only the too many to count times the Nashville Skyline version began wafting through the speakers of a car radio or wherever, but the Isle of Wight, Rolling Thunder II in ’76 and right up though last summer in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park where it fulfilled the wish of a friend’s teenage daughter. Same is true of a few of the others Kruth and Co. trotted out the other night (“I Threw it Away” and “One Too Many Mornings”).

An undisputed highlight of the night and the ensemble’s most adventurous and inventive fancy separated the material from Nashville’s A and B sides: a reading of “On Bob Dylan,” Johnny Cash’s lyrical liner notes – something only Kruth (or a good imitation) would have ever conjured much less attempted. With many of the musicians onstage supplying oblong aural textures (‘cept played on traditional instruments), John S. Hall brought to performance life perhaps the most underappreciated aspect of the document we conveniently label Nashville Skyline and all contributing to an ersatz Country meets avant-garde meets punk version of Cash ’s fleeting impressions.

After “One More Night,” the evening’s lone forgettable foray (which I really can’t even remember barely a thing about), and a quick, very heartfelt version of the final three-hanky song on the album (“Tell Me It Isn’t True” – which, along with “I Threw It All Away” should forever dispel the notion that Nashville Skyline is a “happy” album), the show caught a final wind.

A final, unexpected twist on Nashville Skyline rounded out the experimental, middle segment of the concert when Hope Debates snatched the stage once more – this time guised as a white rapper complete with skull cap and bling for a funk soul hip-hop send-up of “Country Pie.” Talk about turning a song on its ear! The band was at its hottest here with a special nod to bassist Dave Dreiwitz who managed to sneak the unmistakable riff from the Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back.” As with their take on “Lay Lady Lay,” this display of “Country Pie” was plausible, campy, fun, funny and totally legit. Borderline genius almost even.

No way the balance of the Nashville Skyline celebration would compete with what was accomplished in its middle chapters and, wisely, it didn’t attempt to. Kruth landed his hover craft slowly back on Planet Earth with a more or less standard version of “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You” and finding a soft cushion with a trio of encores from more or less the Nashville Skyline era: a ’66-sounding take on “One Too Many Mornings,” the easily forgotten but never forgettable “Minstrel Boy” from Self Portrait and a big group sing-along version of “Wallflower.”

This was a night to be savored, music to be recorded and a band to tour.

Bottom of Form