Dylan's "Shadow Kingdom" Looks Back to a Politically Incorrect Musical Era

What a breath of fresh air! Bob Dylan’s new pay-per-view streaming concert, Shadow Kingdom, is the exception to a whole year of mediocre, poorly produced streaming media that often redefined boredom. Dylan is in top voice, and the black and white production is so politically incorrect in these sanitized days that it brings back fond memories for those of us who grew up in smoke-filled dive bars without obnoxious “security.”?

Directed by Alma Har’tel, this is the best $25 you’ll ever spend on a remarkably creative production with some of the best music of my generation. At 80, Dylan is still killer good — shaking things up with a new band, new arrangements of classic songs, and a sultry cast of actors bringing back an earlier era when smoking was just fine and drinking and dancing ruled.?

This reminded me of “the world” described in liner notes written by Michael Thomas for Super Session, the great album with Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield, Stephen Stills and Harvey Brooks:

“Always, the best things happen after hours, by accident, while the cat’s away, when the moon goes behind a cloud and there’s no one else around; certainly the best music in America is made after twelve, deep in the rock and roll dungeons, little clubs in New York and California, when whoever’s in town and feeling restless, a bass player from one band and a drummer from another, a couple of guitar players and piano players from a couple of others, rock and roll strays, they get together and jam, sometimes they collide, more often than not they tempt each other to take more and more risks, always they discover something they’d perhaps had in mind but couldn’t quite bring home before, they dare and thrill each other, and, because there’s nothing to lose that’s not best done without, and there’s no one to please but themselves, these loose, peppery, brief encounters between an itinerant few are where musical suspicions are tamed or run amuck, it can be a rare synthesis, or can be gang-rape, but whatever happens, it’s where elemental rock and roll, and especially the blues, begins and ends.?When everybody’s gone home, all but the friends and lovers, that’s when the best things happen.”

This show will be a classic! Highly recommended!?

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