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Bob Dylan at Bethel Woods
The legendary singer makes up for his absence at Woodstock ’69
Bob Dylan
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Did you see Bob Dylan’s set at Woodstock in 1969? Of course you didn’t, because he wasn’t there.
It is still hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that Dylan didn’t make an appearance at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, especially considering his strong association with this famed Catskills town. Because it was mainly due to Dylan’s presence there that other musicians and artists were inspired to leave Manhattan for Woodstock, forming their own kind of counter-culture community. Though Dylan lived most of the 60s in Woodstock, his live appearances in the Catskills were largely limited to the local Café Espresso on Tinker Street, where he sometimes slept upstairs. Local officials were none too thrilled about the specter of “a half a million strong” descending upon their woodsy hamlet and the festival had to set up elsewhere.
By the time the tie-died masses located Max Yasgur’s farm and tried their best to “avoid the brown acid,” 43 miles southwest in the Sullivan County town of Bethel, Bob Dylan had already grown weary of the spotlight. He had rejected the mantle of his generation’s “spokesman” and headed for the hills. So even though in my imagination he played a blistering set somewhere between Sha Na Na and The Who, he had no part in the historic lineup.
But this time, with more years and decades worth of new material, he will be there. At the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts and with Willie “Legalize it” Nelson and John Mellencamp in tow, he will help to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the hallowed rock festival. This current lineup played together once before at Farm Aid and should draw a good crowd from throughout the Catskills and beyond. Look for Dylan to showcase his 33rd studio album, Together Through Life, another fine record in a resurgence that is more than ten years strong at this point. Dylan hasn’t reinvented the wheel with the new record but it is another solid batch of songs to draw from in a canon that has no rival in its sheer weight and volume. Whoever said there are “no third acts in American life” had no idea what Bob Dylan had in store for us. Do not miss this show.