A nubile, dark-haired woman, sporting lingerie and white feathered wings, prances coquettishly. Bob Dylan’s battered face appears, quickly and suddenly, augmented by an erstwhile tangle of black hair, a creepy pencil-mustache, and gently-swiped eyeliner. Dylan freezes and squints, expressionless, save a fleeting bit of blue eye-twitch, wherein it momentarily seems possible that he’s about to start snickering out of his nose. A remix of 1997’s “Love Sick” blares. The clip cuts back to the model, now glaring confrontationally, quasi-seductively arching her back. A logo appears.
My favorite thing about Bob Dylan’s Victoria’s Secret commercial is the (not so farfetched) possibility that there are viewers in America who won’t recognize Dylan’s smarmy mug, and, incapable of sketching a line from his figure to the song playing in the background, must contend with an otherwise preposterous cameo, a wrinkled, peculiar-looking man nonsensically interrupting the provocative struts of an underwear model selling prepackaged titillation. Without the proper context, it’s impossible to know that the weathered face peering awkwardly at the camera once hocked his very own brand of shockingly alluring taboos, as furtive and dangerous as pink satin bras and lace-edged panties.
Despite the fact that Bob Dylan has been steadily burrowing deeper and deeper into the studied Americana canon, he was once the voice of the counterculture, slouching shoulder-to-shoulder with Allen Ginsberg and the radical left. That Dylan was previously embraced by the anti-establishment seems perfectly apropos—liking Bob Dylan in 2004 is, as it was nearly 40 years ago, an entirely counterintuitive move. His voice, nasal and impossibly garbled, is one of the pitchiest and most uncompromising in the history of American popular music. He’s generally cranky, a seething and cantankerous figure in interviews. He has been touring forever, playing bad venues for stupidly high ticket prices, occasionally forgetting the lyrics to his own songs and puttering around onstage, distracted and annoyed.
Live 1964, recorded on Halloween night at New York’s Philharmonic Hall, is Bob Dylan’s first all-acoustic live record, and is most noteworthy for its gooey formative circumstances: This is pre-Dylan Dylan, an impeccably recorded portrait of the guitar-toting folk singer, the giggling, sheepish heir to Woody Guthrie’s dusty proletariat throne, a Dylan who had yet to wail electric at Newport, convert to Christianity, or write and star in Masked and Anonymous. Charming and curiously personable, Dylan seems deliriously comfortable on stage, engaging an appreciative audience (no hollers of “Judas!”), even enlisting their help with the first verse of “I Don’t Believe You,” asking, after a bungled opening, “Does anyone know the first verse of this song?” Featuring only longtime-cohort Joan Baez (who appears on four tracks) and his own harmonica and guitar, Live 1964 is a spare, earnest portrayal of neo-Dylan-in-training, a man who, having long mastered one form, is just a few years away from revolutionizing another.
October 1964 was a tumultuous time in America, both politically and socially: American presence in Vietnam was gradually swelling, Communist China had successfully detonated its first atomic bomb, and, with civil rights battles still raging strong, racial tensions made for profoundly tense streets. The presumed anti-politics of Another Side of Bob Dylan, released just three months earlier, had already earned Dylan a slap on the wrist from the more radical folk factions, who resented Dylan’s irresponsible dip into personal whimsy. But a couple listens to Live 1964 promptly reveals the post–Another Side Dylan as the same defiantly stubborn protest singer, as staunchly concerned with the fate of his country as he was with his own heart.
The sixth installment in Dylan’s Bootleg Series, Live 1964 includes the infamous “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” which inspired Dylan to stroll off the set of The Ed Sullivan Show earlier that year (unsurprisingly, network officials wouldn’t let him play it on-air) and didn’t earn official release until 1991. “Talkin’” sees Dylan caustically mocking McCarthyism and mumbling, “It’s a fictitious story,” before jovially belting about his induction into the John Birch society, wherein he scours his sofa, rose bush, chimney, and toilet bowl for “commies,” and finally indicts both himself and Betsy Ross (who mistakenly included red stripes in the American flag).
Dylan’s comedic timing was at its apex in ’64, growling perfect punchlines (“I heard some footsteps by the front porch door/So I grabbed my shotgun from the floor/I snuck around the house with a huff and a hiss, saying hands up, you communist!/It was the mailman/He punched me out”) every single time. Even Dylan’s muttered introduction to “Who Killed Davey Moore?,” a wordy indictment of the media-fueled death of boxer Davey Moore, is caustically hilarious: “This is a song about a boxer. It’s got nothing to do with boxing, it’s a song about a boxer. And it’s not even having to do with the boxer, really.… This has been taken out of the newspapers, and nothing has been changed. Except the words.”
Over the course of two sets, Dylan enthusiastically strums his way through now-classics “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and “Mr. Tambourine Man,” but some of his lesser-known wonders are the most impressive: “Mama, You Been on My Mind” (later covered by Johnny Cash on 1965’s Orange Blossom Special) sees Baez diva-howling before turning expectedly to Bob, who grumbles, “I don’t do that.” Both Baez and Dylan seem to be perpetually swallowing laughs, bellowing together in a weird, perfect harmony.
Live 1964 isn’t Dylan at his most explosive, or most innovative, but it does capture a Bob Dylan just starting to shed his folkist skin, folding in bizarre bits and signs of what would later become a full-on folk apocalypse. As primetime television so eagerly attests, a lot has changed since Bob Dylan first played New York on Halloween. But he remains fiercely anachronistic, a little out of place, and always on the verge of a big, snarky chortle. And that self-satisfied air of mystery might just be sexy enough to sell some underwear.
