Dylan and Petty

Press, 7 February 1986, Page 4

Dylan and Petty

Bob Dylan, with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, at Athletic Park, Wellington, Wednesday evening. Reviewed by Stan Darling. Oh, Mama, can this really be the end? To be stuck inside Athletic Park with the Bob Dylan blues again. As Dylan and Tom' Petty and the Heartbreakers were lurching about the stage, a young blonde woman was lurching through the crowd, flailing her arms, and burrowing straight through the tightly packed standing throng. She did not know where she was. She came back a few minutes later, from the same direction that she had come before. The great mystery of the concert, apart from the selection of songs performed, was how she had got back to her starting place. A man standing next to me, with binoculars and a tiny tape-recorder (not your average bootlegger) said a similar thing had happened when Bob Dylan first came to New Zealand in 1978. At the Auckland concert, a big man had lurched towards the stage, shouting that he had waited 10 years for this. Nothing was going to hold him back.

On the ferry to Wellington, the Highway 61 gang was heading north, quietly, with other Dylan fans, ranging from oldies to teenagers. In 1978, Dylan had greeted them from the stage. He didn’t greet anyone this time. A crowd drinking trayloads of beers in the ferry bar were belting out "The Mighty Quinn,” in preparation. jjylfln was in fine form. He even took off his dark His sidekick, Pettv. wore a • black top hat, and looked like a mbdern ’ ” version of Huckleberry Finn, with a’

long cigarette drooping from his mouth.

Stevie Nicks, the lead singer of Fleetwood Mac who was reportedly seen leaving Dylan’s plane in Auckland, did not appear — much to the disappointment of crowd members who kept asking where she was. Some were prepared to scrawl their telephone numbers on boards and hold them up for her to see.

Dylan started his concert with “Like a Rolling Stone” using the same arrangement he used in 1974 American concerts with The Band, where the song was the climax. Echoes of other concerts were heard in the arrangements of later songs, but he tossed in a lot that was new.

In 1974, I had gone on another train to see him in Seattle ("Glad to be here in Seattle, the home of Jimi Hendrix”) with other members of the Chimes of Freedom commune, a loose-knit outfit in Washington state that grew a popular form of lettuce which could be smoked when it was dried. The commune was dedicated to that lettuce, along with weekly trips to the Black Angus Steak House to see how the other half lived.

Dylan never wrote a song about lettuce, but he was still our main man. When we got home early the next morning on a Greyhound bus, we found that Bert Guns, the Yakima County Sheriff, had sent out his deputies to confiscate our lettuce crop. Things were never the same again. The commune is now called Cadillac Ranch, which shows how much Bruce Springsteen has taken over in our absence.

You would not have guessed that Dylan was in fine fettle from the com-

ments of a Wellington writer yesterday. He said Dylan had sung one delightful new song, “Across the Borderline.” He sang it, but it wasn’t his, and it wasn’t new. The Ry Cooder song, written with John Hiatt and Jim Dickinson was performed by Freddy Fender. It was on Cooder’s soundtrack for the film, “The Border,” a few years back. At the end of the song, Dylan said it was not better across the borderline. We were better off where we were. A man in the crowd called out that he was better off where he was.

Dylan energetically threw In a bit of everything — gospel, country, oldies, “Lonely Street” — and gave Petty and the Heartbreakers the chance to do only four songs in the non-stop concert. Two of them were by others, including The Byrds’ “So You Want to be a Rock and Roll Star.”

Petty’s “Refugee” was the big hit of the night, judging from audience response. Dylan finally had to have a smoke, he poked a cigarette on the top of his guitar and rambled on. He had trouble with his scarf getting in the way during one song, and tried to flip it over his shoulder. When it did not stay, he tucked an end of it into his jacket He did the gospel music loud, with percussion pounding through. He played his anthem to Lenny Bruce, the man he says was the brother we never had. Dylan does not fill that role. It ain’t him, babe, as he keeps telling us.

In spite of critics who have kept a watching brief on what they say is his twitching musical corpse, the man showed that .-there is plenty of danc®n the old boy yet