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Bob & Willie at the Ballpark
The Natural wasn’t as natural as that
by Barry Henderson
Anybody who hasn’t seen a live performance by Bob Dylan or Willie Nelson has missed a sizable chunk of the last five decades of the American music experience.
The term “legends” doesn’t fit those two exactly. “Two icons,” says Willie’s longtime harmonica man, Mickey Raphael, who’s waiting in Nashville for Willie to come in from Hawaii to join the Bob Dylan Show’s late summer tour of minor league baseball parks across the Great Plains and the Eastern States. Sevierville’s Smokies Stadium is on the tour. At $45-a-ticket, a kid under 12 free with each adult ticketholder, the show is better than a bargain. And it’s a fabulous promotion for baseball in the bush leagues.
From Aug. 6 in Cooperstown, N.Y., to Sept, 4 in Kansas City, Kan., the Dylan/Nelson tandem will play 22 dates, all in the sort of small ballparks that suit them, somehow, better than Madison Square Garden, where they’ve played together before, or any of the super-stadia or oversized auditoriums each can fill on his own.
When Dylan of the passionate monotones and Nelson of the nasalized perfect pitch collaborated to write and perform together the soulful 1992 ballad, “Heartland,” mourning the decline of family farms, they said as much about themselves and their ideals as they did about the state of America’s breadbasket. And they sounded like the wind raising dust devils on the prairie when they did it. That wind’s sure to arise in Sevierville. The Aug. 18 date at the pretty park, 20 minutes east of Knoxville on I-40, is the 10th in the series, which came about after Dylan played some Midwestern ballpark concerts on odd occasions in the last four or five years.
“We wanted to do markets that didn’t have a giant amphitheater,” says Don Sulivan of Jam Productions Ltd., the Chicago promoters of the tour. “And we wanted it to be affordable for a family.” The Jam people got together first with Dylan’s, then Nelson ‘s, managers and hashed out the tour. It was a natural, he believes. “It is Americana: Bob and Willie in the ballpark,” he says. And for a promoter, he’s convincing. He has the material this time.
Raphael, who qualifies as a mouth harp legend in his own right, says he and Willie “have always loved working with Bob. He played Willie’s 60th birthday concert, and just recently, the USA Network’s tribute to Willie. Willie played the tribute to Bob at the Garden in ’93, and you know they’ve written and recorded (“Heartland” on Willie’s At the Borderline CD) together.
“This is the first time we’ve had the chance to tour with him. We’re all excited about it.”
Nelson, who hasn’t performed in the last two months and is recuperating from surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome, a guitar picker’s nightmare, has been in post-op therapy and is now playing every day and champing to get back on stage, Raphael says. “He’s doing fine, but at 71 you don’t snap back quite as quick as you used to.”
No, but it’s what Willie does: play and sing and entertain. He’s likely to do it as long as he’s able to crawl up on a stage. Dylan is the same type. He’s 63 going on 100 to look at him. Both have written songs everyone hums or sings sometime, and both seem sort of timeless in the great scheme of American music. This is the time to see them if you haven’t, or even if you have. It’s better than a bargain. Take the kids. They’ll never forget it.
July 22, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 30
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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