Dylan's "Shelter From The Storm"

The Fort Collins' version reveals another side

Not everyone gets the idea of an artist “re-interpreting” one of their own songs. A song is created a certain way with a melody and lyrics and other than playing it faster or slower, softer or louder, how are you going to change it? The music is the music, the lyrics are the lyrics, right?

As he has with so many other things in his field, Bob Dylan has a different idea about that. If you’ve been to see him in recent years — and he starts back up again next week — you know that with some songs, it might take you until the chorus or until you hear the title repeated in order to recognize what he’s playing. I don’t think Bob intends to insult or offend anybody by doing that; he just has been doing this a long, long time — way longer than he or anybody else could have anticipated — and he’s trying to keep himself interested and avoid repeating himself.

When Martin Scorsese’s “Rolling Thunder Revue” film opened with Bob playing “Mr. Tambourine Man” just the way we remember it, the experience was pleasantly jolting. You might say the very same thing about the incredible turn-it-on-its-head performance of what had been one of “Blood On The Tracks” most tender, confessional songs, the version of “Shelter From The Storm” as played on stage at Fort Collins, Colorado on May 23, 1976, the day before his 35th birthday.

While it’s always dangerous to insert what we think we know of Bob Dylan’s personal life into what’s happening on stage or in the recording studio, that certainly seemed to have some bearing on this performance and this particular song. Bob would probably tell us he was influenced by a Chekhov short story here but my read is a bit different. See if you agree.

At this point, his marriage is a shambles. Though of course, he’s suggested otherwise, “Blood On The Tracks” seems to be directly about that. Whether it’s his son Jacob saying something to the effect that it’s about his parents arguing or Dylan telling Mary Travers in a radio interview in 1975 “A lot of people tell me they enjoyed that album. It's hard for me to relate to that—I mean, people enjoying that type of pain,” the album’s vulnerability and candor, Dylan’s hurt is palpable on so many songs, you can’t help but conclude that.

According to some sources, Dylan’s then-wife Sara showed up on the tour for this show, perhaps to celebrate his 35th birthday, and this posed some problems for Bob, who was “involved” with other women at the time. Clinton Heylin suggests there was a husband-wife clash before the show that perhaps impacted Bob’s performing spirit as well as a rain-splashed afternoon. This concert was to be filmed for NBC.

Whatever may or may not have occurred, Bob straps on the gaudy white National 98 guitar and decides, for the first time in memory, he’s going to play a rowdy slide guitar. What he’d recorded just a few months earlier in seeming love and gratitude to Sara, his wife and the mother of his children, as tender a number as he’d ever done. now became a undeniable five-minute and 17 second snarl, a kiss-off if you ever heard one.

“Twas’ in another lifetime, one of toil and blood. Blackness was a virtue, the road was full of mud. I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form. ‘Come in,” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm.”

Originally sung in a voice that was grateful, thankful that someone rescued him, pulled him from the wilderness, gave his life shape and meaning when he was on the verge of a crackup, drug overdose or some life-threatening event, it was as if here, now that things were almost done between them, Bob was mocking the whole thing, telling her by his sneering delivery “Shelter from the storm, my ass.”

It’s his own song, after all, he can do with it what he wants. But there was a venom, a bitterness in this rendition of the one song, the next-to-last and really the farewell song on “Blood On The Tracks,” the number that seemed to be addressed directly to his then-wife.

The version is far and away the best thing on “Hard Rain,” the show that was filmed for NBC, Bob in his turban, playing as loud and singing with as much sarcasm as will fit the legal limit. He didn’t come right out and say, “Yeah, Sara. some shelter…” but he didn’t have to. The message came across loud, clear and nasty. Raw Bob.

In his fine Dylan book called “Shelter From The Storm,” Long Riders guitarist and singer Syd Griffin puts it this way: “The sixth track on Hard Rain is “Shelter From The Storm” which ties in a dead heat with “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall” for the most ironically titled song to be wheeled out before the sodden Fort Collins crowd. (It was raining!) On it, Dylan returns to his shout-singing approach, but the fulsome arrangement seems to actually require it. The Stoner-Wyeth rhythm section is back to its economic best while Dylan punctuate the verses with the most wicked-toned, undisciplined slide guitar since Hound Dog Taylor and Brewer Phillips dueled away the nights at Chicago’s Checkerboard Lounge.”

I don’t know that Dylan ever played that white National 98 guitar again on stage after this scalding rendition. It wouldn’t surprise me if he hadn’t.

When “Blood On The Tracks” initially came out, I remember buying my copy, the one with the Pete Hamill liner notes later stricken, at the Harvard Coop and being thrilled with its intimacy, so much more personal and honest-sounding than “New Morning” or even “Planet Waves” which was jaunty fun but done in a hurry and it sounded it. The album was revelatory.

I remember Rolling Stone Magazine devoted an entire record review section to just responses to that album and after Dylan’s triumphant return to the stage in 1974, those of us who were fans of his music were jubilant. As that magazine cover said “Dylan’s back.”

Then came the Rolling Thunder Tour, which I caught at Southeastern Massachusetts University, where Dylan was so tuned into his audience’s response that, after a lovely “Sara” from “Desire,” — if ever there was a come-back-to-me song, this was it— he went into “Just Like A Woman.” And the audience’s almost respectful response, it almost seemed a confessional, made everyone, including Dylan, so uneasy that when he got to the line “I was dying there of thirst,” he rolled his eyes in camp-like fashion, as if he were Al Jolson, prompting chuckles and sighs of relief. That’s how in-tune he was with his audience then.

So much has happened since. Long-divorced and apparently silent on the topic, we’ve never heard from Sara, now 86, even though a tell-all book would easily top the charts. Dylan has remarried and divorced again. At least once. Life goes on.

Re-listening to the original version, the one that seemed to sum up all the emotion on “Blood On The Tracks,” you wonder how life creates art and vice versa. Or how it seemed to for a few months.

THE ORIGINAL “SHELTER FROM THE STORM”