Two years on, Bob Dylan’s Shadow Kingdom: the disc

Updated from my review of the original video concert, published on this blog on 18 July 2021

2 June 2023 saw the addition to the official Bob Dylan canon of the audio component of the video film streamed on 18 July 2021 and recorded in Santa Monica, California with Israeli-American Alma Har’el as director. under the title Shadow Kingdom – The Early Bob Dylan. It now appears as an audio CD (there is also a vinyl issue) under Sony’s Columbia Legacy imprint. The full video was also made commercially available as of 6 June 2023, but this review will concentrate on the CD. To avoid entanglements over genre, the original Dylan performance, as replicated on the audio disc, will be referred to as ‘the concert’.

Nothing in the Dylan world stays exactly the same, and before anything else it is worth affirming that for the maestro’s followers their reaction to this CD release cannot be identical in all respects to their response to this music first time round. Two years have come and gone, the COVID panorama of the original concert has receded, and Bob Dylan is touring again! Shadow Kingdom now looks like a precursor to what we now know as the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, featuring five songs that would reappear on the future tour’s base setlist – including lyric variations, one song (‘To Be Alone With You’) being almost totally rewritten. Shadow Kingdom thus appears retrospectively as a testing-ground for a putative tour.

The CD is somewhat minimalist in its packaging, offering only a track list and some black-and-white stills from the video – no booklet, no sleevenotes. The subtitle The Early Bob Dylan has gone – we may say for the best, as it was something of a misnomer, considering that the originals’ date range is 1965 to 1989 whereas ‘early Dylan’ would surely suggest the acoustic/protest material of the first three albums (not represented here: there is nothing older than Bringing It All Back Home). Reduced to Shadow Kingdom, the set’s title remains enigmatic – a characteristic shared with other recent Dylan titles (think of Fallen Angels, Fragments or The Philosophy of Modern Song, or, indeed, Shadows in the Night). The shadow image may suggest the American Gothic of Edgar Allan Poe, whose poems ‘The Raven’ and ‘Eldorado’ memorably use it as motif (indeed Poe wrote a story entitled ‘Shadow’). The title also points back to the shadow imagery in a number of Dylan songs, including ‘Jokerman’ (‘It’s a shadowy world’), ‘Not Dark Yet’ (‘shadows are falling’) and ‘Forgetful Heart’ (‘like a walking shadow on my brain’).

Dylan’s performance consists of thirteen songs and one instrumental, recorded with a five-piece band. The instrumentation includes acoustic and electric guitar, bass, accordion and mandolin: Dylan plays guitar or harmonica on some of the songs (no piano). All thirteen songs are Dylan originals (no cover versions, Sinatra or otherwise!). The instrumental, ‘Sierra’s Theme’, is new to the Dylan canon and is not attributed. The back cover proclaims ‘All songs written by Bob Dylan’, but strictly speaking an instrumental is not a song, and  meanwhile the small print gives the track a copyright notice that differs from that for the others, suggesting it may not be a Dylan original: its status is thus, for now, unclear, but its enjoyability, as a lively Ry Cooder-style guitar and accordion piece, is not.

Musically the concert is excellent, occupying a terrain somewhere between the worlds of country and electric blues. Above all, Dylan’s singing is remarkably good. No blurred vocals this time round: every one of those words rang true, with the clearest of enunciation and the sensation of a Bob Dylan no longer tired of his creations and revelling in the power of his own wordcraft.

This review will look at the thirteen songs played from the viewpoint of two different kinds of sequencing that mark Dylan concerts – first, the order of the songs played as reflected in the setlist, and second, the historical chronology of the originals of those same songs. We should add that the following songs – five in all – would later be featured in the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour: ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’; ‘Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)’ (promoted to oldest song on the setlist); ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’; the rewritten ‘To Be Alone With You’; and (promoted to opener) ‘Watching the River Flow’.

** 

The Shadow Kingdom concert opens with ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’ – the only song repeated from Dylan’s last pre-pandemic live performance (in Washington, DC on 8 December 2019): for the rest, we were regaled with a totally refreshed setlist. ‘Masterpiece’ is given a country-rock treatment and features some rewriting of the lyrics, the most arresting change being that the lions now have a ‘mean and hungry look’, which is interestingly close to Cassius’s ‘lean and hungry look’ in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Dylan’s clear enunciation already impresses.

Next up is ‘Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)’, in an arrangement with accordion resulting in a countrification of the Blonde and Blonde original. ‘Queen Jane Approximately’ follows, slower and more reflective than the original on Highway 61 Revisited. ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’ is done fast and a shade raucously. The Highway 61 album is then again raided for ‘Tombstone Blues’ (on a song that he has been known to cut rather radically, Dylan sings five of the six stanzas, omitting only the fourth) and ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’ (done complete), in both of which he caresses the words almost conversationally.

‘To Be Alone With You’ has been subjected to a ruthless rewrite, with little but tune and title phrase remaining from the Nashville Skyline original. The new lyrics appear as if from the mouth of a later-Dylan narrator from Time Out Of Mind or Modern Times: ‘Did I kill somebody? / Did I escape the law?’, ‘I’ll hound you in death / That’s what I’ll do’. The result is an all but completely new song.

A strong contrast follows with ‘What Was It You Wanted?’, performed with a keen sensitivity (all seven verses complete) in a rendition close to the original with eloquent harmonica: this song, from 1989 and Oh Mercy, will prove to be the show’s most ‘recent’ number (it also throws up an interesting lyric connection with our title when it evokes ‘someone there in the shadows’). Next comes a heartfelt ‘Forever Young’, anthemic as always, followed by ‘Pledging My Time’ – not the profoundest song on Blonde and Blonde but certainly a surprise – whose classic blues sound, again, does not diverge far from the original.

The surprise factor continues with a moving rendition of ‘The Wicked Messenger’, probably this concert’s darkest song – and arguably its highlight. Against an arrangement denser than on John Wesley Harding, Dylan’s vocal is word perfect, with a dramatic elongation of ‘burning’ at the end of stanza two.

Next comes a rollicking ‘Watching the River Flow’, with some lyric changes but an atmosphere close to the original. Then Dylan returns to slow mode with an eloquent rendering of ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ – a suitably valedictory song for the concert’s last vocal performance. The instrumental ‘Sierra’s Theme’ follows, and then indeed, it’s all over.

There remains to be considered the second sequencing, namely the order of composition of the originals. The earliest song, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’, dates from Bringing It All Back Home in 1965, the latest, ‘What Was It You Wanted?’, from 1989: no doubt confounding some fans’ expectations, there is nothing ‘new’, nothing from Rough and Rowdy Ways. As we have seen, at the other end there is nothing from the ‘folk period’. Overwhelmingly, the songs chosen date from between 1965 and 1971: that is the case for eleven of them (if we include the rewritten ‘To Be Alone With You’), leaving but two hailing from later than 1971.

Dylan has not on the whole chosen the most obvious songs from his back catalogue – there is no ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, no ‘Mr Tambourine Man’: the mostly later-60s material is aimed more at connoisseurs than the general public. Be that as it may, the excellent performances that characterise Shadow Kingdom find a very much in-form Dylan magisterially sharing his past with an audience whose fidelity over the years has proved justified. We may speculate that the shadow kingdom of the title could be the realm of Bob Dylan’s past work, the products of his own creativity perceived as dark and disturbing, but also more than apt for difficult times.

Setlist (*also featured in the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour)

*’When I Paint My Masterpiece’ (More Bob Dylan Greatest Hits, 1971)  

*’Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine’ (Blonde on Blonde, 1966)

‘Queen Jane Approximately’ (Highway 61 Revisited, 1965)

*’I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’ (John Wesley Harding, 1968)

‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’ (Highway 61 Revisited, 1965)

‘Tombstone Blues’ (Highway 61 Revisited, 1965)

*’To Be Alone With You’ (Nashville Skyline, 1969 – rewritten)

‘What Was It You Wanted?’ (Oh Mercy, 1989)

‘Forever Young’ (Planet Waves, 1974)

‘Pledging My Time’ (Blonde on Blonde, 1966)

‘The Wicked Messenger’ (John Wesley Harding, 1968)

*’Watching the River Flow’ (More Bob Dylan Greatest Hits, 1971)

‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ (Bringing It All Back Home, 1965)

‘Sierra’s Theme’(instrumental; debut recording)

Note added 13 September 2023: This review received publication in print form in The Bridge (Gateshead, UK), No 76, Summer 2023, pp. 17-23