BACK Pinch-hitting for the Madison Blues Festival, Bob Dylan and Willie
Nelson drew 12,000 fans to the Duck Pond Friday night for the kind of
double-header that music fans usually only dream of. The seventh annual Madison Blues Festival was supposed to take place this weekend, but problems between promoter Ken Adamany and city officials prompted its cancellation for 2004. But when they learned that Dylan and Nelson had scheduled a summer tour of minor league ballparks, the two sides worked together to bring the two icons to Warner Park. The sold-out show definitely had a kind of festival vibe, with fans of all different ages standing or sitting on blankets across the entire field, facing the stage that had been erected against the center field wall. Although rain was in the forecast, not a drop fell until just after the show ended at 10:30 p.m. And while neither Dylan nor Nelson is the kind of performer one would automatically think of inviting to a blues festival, both musicians displayed a bit of 12-bar blues in their sets. Nelson's set included covers of blues songs like "Movin' on Over" and "Texas Flood," and Dylan's crackerjack backing band brought some blues-rock thunder to Dylan classics like "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding." But basically, both musicians relied on what they do best. In a way, they were perfect opposites; Nelson's band looked like a bunch of classic rockers and played country, while Dylan's band looked like a group of country gentlemen and played rock. The evening began with a half-hour set by the country trio Hot Club of Cowtown, who got things off to a rousing start with Western swing music that sounded both traditional and contemporary. Nelson made a surprise appearance at the end of their set to sing "Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone." Nelson returned for his own crowd-pleasing set with a band that featured two of his sons on guitar and drums. The stencil on the equipment cases said "Willie Nelson & Family," and the set did have a familial vibe, with Nelson the benevolent patriarch with a snow-white beard, twinkling blue eyes and hair braided down to the small of his back. With an American flag as his backdrop, Nelson opened with the wistful "Living in a Promised Land," a song whose themes echo his longstanding work with Farm Aid. From there, it was a mix of signature Nelson tunes like "On the Road Again," "Always on My Mind" and "Mommas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys." The only glaring omission was "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain," but you can't please everybody. The highlight of the set was Nelson's rendition of Townes Van Zandt's "Pancho and Lefty," a great song perfectly suited to Nelson's laconic delivery. He's less suited to bringing out the anguish and bitterness in songs like "Crazy" or "Funny How Time Slips Away," (which he wrote for other singers) and wisely chose to understate both songs. Following Cowtown and Nelson, Dylan certainly looked like he belonged, nattily dressed in a black suit and cream-colored cowboy hat with the sides curled up. But while he might have looked ready to play songs off his country album "Nashville Skyline," Dylan instead delivered a fierce and energetic rock 'n' roll set. The last couple of times Dylan performed in Madison, he played guitar. This time around, he chose to play the entire 100-minute set on keyboards, and the change-up seemed to have visibly galvanized him. He leaned into the microphone, knees bent as he sang, his head bobbing along with the beat to songs like the opening "Drifter's Escape." During the ferocious rocker "Honest With Me," he even left the keyboards to wander into the middle of his four-piece band, pointing at each member in a manner that, dare I say it, approached the definition of dancing. The set list drew from Dylan's entire 40-plus years as a musician, from early folk tunes like "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and "Mr. Tambourine Man" to songs off his most recent album, "Love and Theft," like "Honest With Me" and the set-closer, "Summer Days." Dylan changes his set every night, and between songs would huddle with his band like a quarterback calling plays. The early tunes were almost unrecognizable, recast by Dylan's raspy voice and the sonic muscle that the band put into the songs. The change was really felt in the urgent "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding," which had a churning blues-rock riff that perfectly matched the venom in Dylan's voice. It's probably pointless to speculate whether the inscrutable Dylan has any modern-day targets in mind when he spits out lyrics like "even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked," but the words still rang with the same conviction. Nelson came back out midway through Dylan's set to duet on "Heartland," a song they co-wrote for Nelson's 1993 "Across the Borderline" album. It was a great choice; sung from the viewpoint of a farmer who is about to lose his farm, it taps into both artists' sense of social justice and compassion for the common man. And despite their radically different styles, their voices meshed well together, with Nelson's voice warm with sorrow and Dylan's voice harsh with bitterness as they sang the same words
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