Behind the Scenes of the Bob Dylan Center's 'Going Electric' Concert
Hanging with Lee Ranaldo, Emma Swift, Robyn Hitchcock, John Doe, and more
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Last Saturday night, Tulsa’s historic Cain’s Ballroom — onetime home of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys — hosted the all-star concerts Going Electric: An Evening of Dylan Songs Circa '65. Presented by the Bob Dylan Center in honor of their new exhibit of the same name, the two shows, one early one late, showcased an all-star group of musicians covering Dylan songs from what Robyn Hitchcock called “The Momentum Years”: 1963-1966. Not entirely coincidentally, this was the same period covered in A Complete Unknown, which currently has its own exhibit at the Center.
The lineup they pulled together for this tribute concert was certainly impressive:
Thanks to the show’s music director Lee Ranaldo and Dylan Center director Steven Jenkins and his team, I got exclusive backstage access at Cain’s, hanging out there all day with the artists, watching the rehearsals, and interviewing every single musician who appeared onstage. Plus, of course, I stuck around for both performances: the early seated show, which I watched sidestage with the musicians themselves—some quietly singing along as their peers performed—and the late standing show, which I watched from the middle of a rowdier and more enthusiastic crowd.
So today, I take you behind the scenes of the Going Electric concerts, with quotes from everyone involved and video clips of all the performances for those that couldn’t be there in person.
Note: I could only fit a sentence or two from each musician in this initial recap, but many had a lot more to say about Dylan than that! So I will be running “Bonus Track” Q&As in the coming weeks featuring much longer versions of my interviews with many of this artists—Lee Ranaldo, Robyn Hitchcock, John Doe, etc—that delve deeper into their Bob appreciation. Those Bonus Tracks will be sent out to paid subscribers only. Join here:
(I’ll also be attending my first Dylan shows since March this coming weekend, and sending dispatches to paid subscribers, so it’s a doubly good time to upgrade)
I was eating lunch backstage with Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth, Mikael Jorgensen of Wilco, and John Doe of X after our interviews. We were discussing all the posters on the walls showcasing Cain’s concerts of yesteryear. As we were chatting, I noticed, hung right over Doe’s shoulder, a poster for a show he himself had done at Cain’s years before, an X/Violent Femmes co-headline tour.
It was that kind of lineup. I’d be surprised if many people on the bill didn’t have a poster on the Cain’s wall somewhere.
Lee Ranaldo told me they first tried putting this show together last year, but “it just kind of fizzled out.” Energy was renewed a few months ago with the new exhibit, feeding off the enthusiasm A Complete Unknown generated for this period and tied to the 60th anniversary of the Newport '65 show, the exact date of which was the night before the concert. The fact that all these out-of-town Dylan nuts were in town for the conference was a bonus. Doe gently ribbed us about it from the stage: “How many people out there are going to the conference? Lotta talking out there…lotta facts and figures. Not here.”
The idea was to reunite The Million Dollar Bashers, the house band of the I’m Not There soundtrack, “a pivotal contribution to the wider world of Dylan interpretation” as Center director Jenkins put it. It wasn’t possible to get everyone—original Bashers guitarist Tom Verlaine died, original Bashers bassist Tony Garnier was playing a gig with someone else—but Ranaldo brought back his Sonic Youth bandmate Steve Shelley and Wilco guitarist Nels Cline for the Going Electric house band, augmented by Wilco keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen and Howlin’ Rain bassist Ethan Miller, who plays with Shelley in the avant-rock group Orcutt Shelley Miller.
The two Wilco guys had just come off a European tour—and tonight will join the Outlaw tour with Dylan himself—but they squeezed this in. Cline noted that he and Jorgensen are actually the only two members of Wilco who are not Dylan scholars, but said they were happy to be there anyway. “It’s almost ironic that I’m here playing, but it's also really cool because I like getting inside things and learning about them,” he said. “And I quite often end up doing things that are not exactly in my wheelhouse because I have respect for it and I need to know more.”
“We don’t get to hang out with these guys that often, and that was part of the impetus,” Ranaldo noted. “Two Sonic Youths, two Wilco.”
With the house band in place, Ranaldo (a former guest contributor to this newsletter), Jenkins, and other Dylan Center folks cast around for singers. Jenkins suggested two musical couples, Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips (of Dean & Britta and Luna) as well as Robyn Hitchcock (also a former guest contributor to this newsletter) and Emma Swift (also a former guest contributor to this newsletter), who he calls, correctly, “one of the great contemporary interpreters” of the Dylan catalog with her 2020 album Blonde on the Tracks. Steve Higgins, who oversees both the Dylan and Guthrie Centers, suggested John Doe, who himself suggested folk-punk singer Sunny War, the youngest singer on the stage. Many of the people on their wish list were actually at this year’s Newport Folk Festival, which hosted its own Dylan tributes, but they soon found enough to fill out the lineup. Doe signed on first and, as Ranaldo said, “Once people heard John was gonna be here, they wanted to come.”
The next challenge was picking who sings what songs. Even given the chronological limitations of '63-'66, there were a lot to choose from. Ranaldo created a master list of the options. He said:
The guidelines were Freewheelin’ through Highway 61, with “Like a Rolling Stone” kind of being the capper of it. But my feeling was to push it a little bit into Blonde on Blonde because that’s really where the period ends. I made a list of all the songs on those records, then I crossed off the ones that I wasn’t interested in doing or that I thought would not work. I sent this mega-long list to all the singers and said, “What do you want to sing?” Any 16 songs you shuffle the cards and deal out from this period is going to be an amazing view of his work.
On the setlist, Ranaldo endeavored to put the songs in chronological order by date written, going so far as to consult experts like archivist Mark Davidson and biographer Clinton Heylin for help, though he noted that in some cases it’s simply unknown exactly when a given song was written. But where there was clear evidence, that dictated the song’s setlist position; “Mr. Tambourine Man” appeared earlier in the set than it might have otherwise, since Dylan first attempted to record it for Another Side.
The musicians mostly arrived in Tulsa on Friday afternoon for their first rehearsals together, the day before the shows. They had not practiced with each other before (in a few cases they hadn’t even met). “I was expecting it to be harder than it was when we got here, but it all flowed so smoothly,” Ranaldo said. Of the arrangements they pulled together, Cline said, “I feel like everybody’s being pretty reverent to various either live or studio recordings. I’m definitely not trying to bring the language that I use in my own music to this.”
Rehearsals continued Saturday afternoon at Cain’s, when I was there. The band remained onstage the whole time, the singers came and went. What I witnessed backs up Ranaldo. It seemed pretty smooth, with many songs only being run through once to soundcheck them. The main things they worked on were how to start and stop the songs, and trying to match Dylan’s varied meter, as on many of these songs he changes how many lines each verse had, or how many bars appear between verses. One funny moment was watching Ranaldo practice his rack-mounted toy siren for “Highway 61 Revisited.” “It’s too close to the mic,” the sound person told him. He backed off.
Most impressive of all in rehearsals was Emma Swift, whose flight from Wisconsin (she was mid-tour) had been delayed repeatedly. When I arrived in the early afternoon, staffers were worried whether she would make that evening’s shows at all. She finally did near the end of the rehearsals, rushing to Cain’s straight from the airport, and immediately went onstage. To an audience of just three people—Hitchcock, Jenkins, and myself—she gave a performance every bit as powerful as the two she’d give later that evening. Many of the singers I saw rehearse were, understandably, “saving it” for the shows. But even straight off the plane singing to an almost-empty ballroom, Swift brought magic.
Rehearsals wrapped up and everyone recused to the backstage area to change into stage clothes and wait for showtime. Naturally, Heaven’s Door whiskey was on hand. The musicians signed a stack of posters to be given to sponsors. I conducted some more interviews, which were often interrupted as everyone did their last-minute preparations. My tape with Ranaldo includes John Doe coming over to sort out a chord change on “Maggie’s Farm.” My tape with bassist Ethan Miller includes Ranaldo coming over to play the studio version of “Love Minus Zero” on his phone so they could figure out how many bars were in the intro. Robyn Hitchcock and I tried to help Lee write his opening speech (Robyn was more helpful than I was; Lee used his “momentum years” line for the second show). It was that kind of vibe. As the only person in the room not actually part of the performance, I tried not to get in the way.
Finally, after a delay due to the will-call line stretching down the block: Showtime.
I’m going to go artist by artist in setlist order, writing about the performances and sharing what they told me behind the scenes. Though most did one song in the first half and another in the second, I’m grouping everyone’s two songs together. As noted, I spoke to everyone. They explained why they picked the songs they did, and you can watch part of each performance as well. Play it f***ing loud.
The Million Dollar Bashers — Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I Go Mine)
Ranaldo’s chronological-by-date-written setlist would start on the second song. He wanted to open just as Dylan had opened so many Tour ’74 shows, with a wild “Most Likely.” “I had this notion that that title kind of speaks for Dylan’s career in a way,” Ranaldo explained. “Everybody from the beginning has wanted him to be a certain thing. ‘We want you to stay a folk singer.’ ‘We want you to stay a visionary amphetamine poet.’ And he just went his own way.”
Drummer Steve Shelley told me they tried the tune several different ways. “I started off with the '66 version, but then the band were all listening to Before the Flood, so Lee’s like, “Check that one out.” Levon’s just ripping on the snare drum. It’s totally different.”
You can see Shelley ripping on that snare drum himself in the clip.
Emma Swift — The Times, They Are a-Changin’ & Queen Jane Approximately
As noted earlier, Emma Swift is no stranger to singing Dylan. Her wonderful covers album Blonde on the Tracks made quite a splash in the Dylan-fan community, and deservedly so. “I’m very comfortable wearing the Bob Dylan cloak, for better or worse,” she told me. One of the songs she did at the shows, “Queen Jane,” she also performed on that album (though this live version hewed closer to the original). But she had not covered “The Times” in concert before. She said the song felt particularly important in this “fascinating and confusing and potentially destructive, but hopefully ultimately hopeful, time that we ‘re living through right now. I feel like it’s a really poignant song to be singing. It makes me feel quite emotional.” She added: “It feels optimistic when Bob’s singing it, and my twist for tonight’s show is that it’s a little bit mournful.”
Good news for Blonde on the Tracks fans: A sequel is coming. Eventually. There’s no tracklist yet, but she’s been singing “Sweetheart Like You,” “Not Dark Yet,” and “Visions of Johanna” in concert. The sequel’s temporary title, that she notes will probably change, is More Blonde More Tracks (ha!). But first, she’s dropping her debut album of originals this fall, The Resurrection Game, followed by an album of Lou Reed covers titled—another good one—Sweet Hassle.
Joy Harjo & Doug Keith — Mr. Tambourine Man & It’s All Over Now Baby Blue
The only two Tulsa locals of the night—at least among the singers, shoutout harmonica ace Chebon Tiger who sat in on some songs—poet Joy Harjo and singer-songwriter Doug Keith were up next. Harjo, the first Artist-in-Residence at the Dylan Center and a former U.S. Poet Laureate, noted to me that she’s the only person on the bill who is not a musician first. “I didn’t start singing really until not that many years ago,” the poet said. “I thought, ‘Well, my mother said I’m a late bloomer.’” As a Tulsa native, she also has deeper roots at Cain’s than most of the musicians: “My parents danced at Cain’s Ballroom. My mother used to write songs here in Tulsa. Leon McAuliffe’s got one of those stars out here on the sidewalk; the one time I saw my mother sing, she sang with the Leon McAuliffe band.”
Dylan podcaster Laura Tenschert noted that Harjo gave perhaps the most Dylan-esque performances of the night, sounding more like how Dylan himself might reinvent the songs today. Her accompanying guitarist Doug Keith said their “Tambourine Man” arrangement sounded like “woozy Ramones”—and that’s not even counting the sax solo. “That’s what I do,” Harjo said laughing. “I mean, I honor classics, but if I’m gonna do something, I need to figure out a way to do it that works for me.”
Their “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” stayed a little closer to the Dylan version. Harjo lost a close family member recently, and said she’s doing the song for him. “That song, it taught me a lot about singing, because he’s so out and loud and up and then comes back,” she said. “He goes back and forth. I thought it was a good voice lesson.” Even in that case, though the music didn’t get as far out, her delivery of the lines veered far from the norm, hitting unexpected beats against the music. “I think it comes from her reading of poetry,” Keith said. “She has an interesting flow and cadence to it. So it’s straightforward, but it ebbs and flows a little bit differently.”
John Doe — To Ramona & Maggie’s Farm
John Doe of LA punk band X showcased two sides of his, and Dylan’s, artistry, doing a solo-acoustic “To Ramona” and a ripping full-band “Maggie’s Farm.” “To Ramona, it’s just such a sad, beautiful love song. And I can do that,” he told me with a chuckle. “And ‘Maggie’s Farm,’ you have to work hard to fuck that up. It’s just fun if you approach it the way that it was written. When it succeeds, you’re having a good time. Any time I sing ‘she’s 68 but she says she’s 54,’ I always gotta laugh at that, cause it’s so absurd.”
Despite the anniversary, the band deliberately avoided the Newport '65 arrangement of “Maggie’s Farm.” “We went opposite,” Steve Shelley told me. “For the Newport stuff, we actually liked the studio recording because some of it was a little bit laid back. There’s so much energy at Newport.” Ranaldo cited this as one of his favorites to perform: “When I listen to it and I practice it, it just goes around and around. Nothing happens really. But these songs are enlivened by the singers more than anything else.”
Doe also shared some funny stories of meeting Dylan in the '80s, which I’ll save for his Bonus Track Q&A.
Dean & Britta — Love Minus Zero/No Limit & Just Like a Woman
Britta Phillips — I’ll Keep It with Mine
Dean Wareham — She Belongs to Me
Being both a musical pair and individual performers, dreampop duo Dean & Britta got four songs between them: Two duets, and two solo vocals—though Wareham played guitar for the first, Phillips’s “I’ll Keep It with Mine.” The homage here was not to Dylan but to the famous Nico recording, with Ranaldo bowing his guitar to create that Velvet Underground drone. “We had this show that we used to do with the Andy Warhol Museum, [performing] songs to screen tests, and there’s a screen test of Nico,” Wareham explained. “So Britta performs the song in front of that because Dylan supposedly wrote the song for her.” The duo released their version on the 2010 album 13 Most Beautiful...Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests.
Wareham, for his solo number, selected “She Belongs to Me,” noting that guitarist Bruce Langhorne, who played on the original, is his favorite Dylan sideman. (Coincidentally, they screened a rough cut of a forthcoming Langhorne documentary at the conference). The performance featured a lovely harmonica solo from Tiger.
Best of all, though, were the two songs they sang together. Backstage beforehand, the two debated whether “Just Like a Woman,” assigned to them by Ranaldo, was “a mean song.” (Britta: “I was trying to figure out, is it a mean song?” Dean: “‘You fake just like a woman.’” Britta: “Okay, that’s mean.”) It certainly didn’t feel mean when their beautiful voices joined together on the lines. “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” meanwhile, was a high point of the night. Phillips noted their arrangement drew less from Dylan than from early covers by The Walker Brothers and Noel Harrison, calling it “a mashup between those two.”
Sunny War — Subterranean Homesick Blues & I Want You
When I spoke to her before the show, Sunny War expressed some anxiety. She worried she’d made a mistake picking “Subterranean” in particular. “It’s just too many words,” she said. “There’s not a lot of room to breathe.” She said she loves both songs, but was struggling to figure out how to deliver them in her own way. “I think it’s ‘cause he sing-talks,” she explained. “I feel like his voice is so unique, I don’t know how to try to sing it.” In the end, though, she got through them with aplomb. One person I spoke to afterward called her “Subterranean” the high point of the night.
I noted that the last cover I’d heard of hers was, of all things, the Ween song “Baby Bitch” on her previous album. She said, “I’d rather cover Ween, but I’d rather listen to Bob Dylan.”
Robyn Hitchcock — Highway 61 Revisited & Desolation Row
Hitchcock was the only performer to do his songs back-to-back, due to his two selections appearing two tracks apart on Highway 61 Revisited. He told me in both cases, he was trying to bring the songs back to their roots:
To me, the arrangements of both “Desolation Row” and “Highway 61” on the record are definitive. So if I do them live, I’m just trying to put them in that way. I’m not trying to do them in a new way. That’s for Dylan to mess up. My role if I try and do Dylan songs is to do it as close to the feel of the original as possible. Like if you were playing a piece of classical music, you would try and get it right. Do it like Bach did it, or how we think Bach did it, rather than “Well, we’re taking the bones of this and then we’re kind of reinterpreting it,” you know?
For “Desolation Row,” freezing it in time meant enlisted Cline to approximate Charlie McCoy’s inimitable guitar lines and Miller to channel Russ Savakus’ moving bass. Miller said, “My special moment with that was in rehearsal stripping it down after all of us making a racket trying to figure everything out. There is this hushed moment where me and Nels are playing with Robyn, Lee a little bit too. Even though we’re all playing and flowing for 12 minutes, you’re really living inside those lyrics and that song.”
Hitchcock explained what the song means to him:
“Desolation Row” is just a magic song. It’s certainly one of his peaks. He wrote some great songs afterwards, after the crash, very emotionally intense songs, and still does sometimes, but he’s never produced anything like that. And nobody else has. I heard that when I was just turning 13, and it was one of the things that tipped me into doing what I’ve done.
He told me his feelings about “Highway 61” too:
It’s that little window where Dylan was very exhilarating. He was complaining—you know, he’s always been a ketch—but he was complaining in such an exciting way that it it was almost a celebration. So you’ve got all these kind of malfunctioning human scenarios and they’re all set on Highway 61. The whole human catastrophe is spelt out there in all its grotesque absurdity.
Hitchcock said it’s easy for “Highway 61” to devolve into a “colorless boogie.” To avoid that, he enlisted three key players: Jorgensen to do the distinct keyboard flourish that starts the Highway 61 version, Cline to channel Mike Bloomfield’s slide guitar, and, most importantly, Ranaldo on toy siren. This was, in fact, the exact same type of siren Dylan used on the original. Ranaldo acquired it when the Bashers originally recorded this song with Karen O on vocals for the I’m Not There soundtrack. “It comes in this little beautiful box, it’s made in England, it’s a fine-honed piece of machinery,” he said.
All — Like a Rolling Stone
The sing-along grand finale was—what else?—”Like a Rolling Stone.” The song was, as Ranaldo said earlier, “the capper” to the period in question. Onstage, by way of introduction he paraphraphased Springsteen citing “the snare drum shot heard round the world.” The entire cast came onstage and traded verses. Such things tend to be loose, and this was no exception, but in the final show the crowd was singing as loud as the band, hollering together the last words of of each line—”Pawn it babe!”—like a Beastie Boys song.
Which is not to say the band didn’t work hard on the song. I saw Jorgensen playing the famous Al Kooper lines during soundcheck, and asked him about learning them. “I think that that’s emblematic of the challenge of playing and performing this material, because it doesn’t feel like dutiful reproduction is the way to do it,” he told me. “It’s more, “What’s the spirit behind this recording? And what’s our version of that?’”
After the final show, spirits were high. I didn’t stick around long though. They’d earned a moment away from prying eyes. There’s no telling when, or if, the Million Dollar Bashers will rise again. But backstage there was already buzz about early steps being taken towards organizing another Tulsa tribute concert, celebrating another iconic period in the Dylan catalog. Don’t you dare miss it.
Alternate view from the early show:
Thanks to Nels Cline, John Doe, Joy Harjo, Robyn Hitchcock, Steven Jenkins, Mikael Jorgensen, Doug Keith, Ethan Miller, Britta Phillips, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley, Emma Swift, Sunny War, and Dean Wareham for taking the time to chat. Bonus thanks to Ranaldo and Jenkins for helping set it up.
Longer interviews with many of those names coming soon—to paid subscribers only. Sign up here:
Fabulous! Thanks, Ray!
A great read. Well done, Ray.