On Friday night, Bob Dylan played Queen's Forest Hills Stadium for the first time in nearly 51 years. The original show—August 28th, 1965—had been Dylan’s first since going electric at the Newport Folk Festival that July, and most in attendance remember it as one of his best. New Left mods booed during the rock songs, and rockers expressed their approval by running onto and across the stage. Dylan, according to accounts like the one organist Al Kooper gives in his memoir Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards, didn't capitulate to either side, though in one particularly theatrical moment he did stand on the piano and tell Kooper to repeat the “Ballad of a Thin Man” intro until the crowd quieted.
So it was a cool coincidence that he has back here after so many years. Surely many of the ticketholders knew—the connection had been established by previews in the Post, the Times, even Esquire—but if the singer cared, he certainly fooled everyone in the crowd. Has anyone ever pointed out that this guy is a little enigmatic?
Dylan may have lost the lift to climb atop the piano, but he's found new ways to hold his fans' attention. In her opening set, Mavis Staples had commented on how much she loves the way he swings his shoulders as he walks—"swag” was the word she used, and her description actually understates the strange gusto with which he moves across the stage, wandering around like a human Roomba, walking one way and then doing a little sashay as he pivots and changes direction. Much of the setlist came from his two recent standards LPs, Shadows in the Night and Fallen Angels, so any time the drummer concluded an old Sinatra song with a little cymbal patter, Dylan would hold out his arms and wiggle his fingers. Curiously, he also did this on a few songs that ended abruptly.
The setlist swang back and forth between these standards, delicately played, and more upbeat Dylan originals from the last 15 years: “The Night We Called It a Day,” Sinatra's first single away from the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra; then a sharp, loud “Pay in Blood"; “Melancholy Mood,” delivering on its title's promise; and onto Tempest's “Duquesne Whistle,” a ragtime number which inspired enough aisle-dancing that security had to intervene.
This enthusiasm was not just a pleasure but a relief. I first saw Dylan in 2004, on a double-bill with Willie Nelson in Cooperstown, New York. Much of the crowd left after Willie, and more left as Dylan's set progressed. I was 14 and in a cold, rainy version of heaven, but I remember a lot of grumbling: Even many of the people who were staying seemed to be doing so out of obligation.
I went back to this night as I was reading different accounts of the Forest Hills show in ’65. Writing in The Village Voice, Jack Newfield described a “bitterly divided” crowd made up of people almost all younger than Dylan, who himself was just 24. The mods actually threw fruit at the rockers, which makes you wonder: Who brings fruit to a concert? This was music as theater, and the audience had decided to make themselves a part of the cast, relishing their roles even as they protested. Here's how Kooper, who at one point was knocked off his stool by a fan attempting to escape the police, described the response to “Like a Rolling Stone": “Everybody sang along and then booed when it was over."
The rest of story doesn't need to be retold, but it's worth noting that Dylan loved the show. When Kooper and bassist Harvey Brooks arrived his manager's after-party, “Dylan bounded across the room and hugged both of us. ‘It was fantastic,’ he said, ‘a real carnival.’” Elijah Wald recovers some of this history in his remarkably nuanced book Dylan Goes Electric!, which does to the Dylan myth something like what Dylan himself does to songs like “The Night We Called It a Day.” Wald uncovers the thing that lies hidden under the myth, but he also shows how the myth was already a part of the original event, how the kids in Forest Hills already knew what their booing would signal.
Later at the party, a young woman admitted to Dylan she didn't really like the rock set. Dylan asked if she had booed, then scolded her when she said no. “Why didn’t you let me know what you were feeling?” he asked. “You got feelings, then express them. Don't keep them inside. You should have booed me. You should have reacted. That’s what music is all about."
Forest Hills 2016 had seemed as though it may be low on reaction. Most people I know who have recently seen Dylan complain afterwards about the setlist (too much new stuff) or his voice, which at this point sounds as though the cigarettes have smoked him. But this crowd was knowledgeable, patient, even fun. They danced to the old-time beat of “Duquesne Whistle.” There's a part in “Spirit on the Water,” an eight-minute love-loss-love song off Modern Times, when Dylan asks his lady if she's ever seen a ghost, and here the crowd anticipated his response with a resounding “No!” The word was yelled with even more oomph a few minutes later, after the “You think I'm over the hill” line in the song's—I just counted them—20th stanza.
The standard “Autumn Leaves,” another song without a refrain, sounded almost unbearably heavy, and the applause that followed suggested both approval and relief. Sinatra himself was closest when Dylan sang “Why Try to Change Me Now” with the older singer's exact combination of self-amusement and self-pity, reproducing the little bit of irony that hides in the seams of the original recording. This is an irony so removed from contemporary pop music that it's almost unrecognizable—not the irony of kitschy covers and sleight of hand but an irony that marks a distance, you never know how much, between singer and song.
It's a distance that Dylan and Sinatra both employ: Neither gives himself fully over to the music or the audience. For those who still associate Dylan with the counterculture and Sinatra with the martini-drinking old guard, the very idea of Shadows in the Night has caused confusion. Is Bob trolling? Maybe a tiny bit, but I think more than anything, he sees connection between him and the artist some would cast as his opposite. How many other 20th century singers have had so much projected onto their work—onto them—and yet remained so elusive?
On Friday night, Dylan's band had a slight Western vibe, wearing tan suits and boss-of-the-plains–style flat-top hats. When the bassist played upright, he'd peer around the instrument's long neck like Lee Van Cleef sizing up site of a duel. After the encore, he and his band didn't even bow: The lights went off, and when they came back on the musicians stood motionless, eyes trained to the far end of the stadium.
This time, Forest Hills wasn’t a battleground; the old conflicts were no more than memories a few times removed from their original source. Instead of fruit, the concession stand sold lobster rolls, and nobody was going to throw one of those, no matter how much they preferred Dylan’s older material. He performed 20 songs, and only two had been a part of his ’65 repertoire: “She Belongs With Me,” the one with the line about the artist who don't look back; and “Blowin' in the Wind,” which he played on piano, without comment. If the first show had drawn a line between rock and folk, the one on Friday looked beyond both, tracing the threads that stitch together all of 20th century pop. The crowd, schooled in part Dylan's last 51 years of curious Americana and vexing left-turns, welcomed the new approach, and their applause was immense.