Various moments are the best way to experience the stage work of Bob Dylan. We are not in short supply when it comes to concert recordings, officially released or otherwise. Golden Vanity, a compilation kicking around on YouTube, has been remastered by those dedicated bootlegger hands and it makes for an interesting listen. This is a period where Dylan had, frankly, given up. He still toured, he still performed, it was and is his calling. But the magic seemed to have died out a little bit, the touring felt more like muscle memory than anything fresh. Oh Mercy, as great an album as it is, would not be as invigorating as the MTV Unplugged and Time Out of Mind releases to follow. Golden Vanity is an interesting piece because it tries to paint a broader picture, rather than a specific show we get a feel for the four years of touring.
Dylan was still well received; you can hear that for yourself with the whooping and out-of-body experience one man has while hearing A Roving Blade. But you can hear the fatigue which was resting on Dylan’s voice at the time. Moments of brilliance, of course, but the whinier, higher pitch which he was struggling to adapt into a new form are the biggest problem for his tour around this time. Not the instrumental adaptations, not the changes to the tempo and pace of these traditionals, but the voice. This is, irrespective of that vocal shortcoming on a few songs, an absolute must-listen for those interested in hearing Dylan cover the classics. Little Moses and When First Unto This Country highlight not just the previous periods of Dylan as both a religiously inclined songwriter and trail song master, but his subtler influences. Dylan is an artist who wears his influences openly and yet never seems to be pinned down to one artist or another.
What Golden Vanity does then is give listeners a chance to reflect on which songs Dylan has been affected by most. You can get that feeling from his Triplicate release but that has the studio polish. Sometimes you want a bit of grit, as you can get on That Lucky Old Sun and Two Soldiers. These are songs Dylan has performed more than a handful of times. Wild Mountain Thyme would never feature in a setlist again after this performance while A Man of Constant Sorrow would be trotted out on the Love and Theft tour from time to time. Golden Vanity comes from a period before Dylan was utilising cover songs as a testing of the waters, but instead as a bridge from hit to hit. Remove those classics and focus on the covers of the great artists and it becomes apparent Dylan never lost his love for music but had hit a rut for his own work.
Creativity ebbs and fades, but all an artist can do to revive it at times is to revisit why they began creating in the first place. Golden Vanity is a marvellous occasion to reconnect with what Dylan was doing for himself. There’s a playfulness to his performances here, often just an acoustic guitar and his vocals. That’s all you really need for the likes of Waggoner’s Lad and Lakes of Pontchartrain; anything more and it overwhelms the purpose of the song. Dylan has an obvious love for the classics, and it goes beyond having a different interpretation of them. These are healing processes for a period in which Dylan had suffered some of his worst reviews, his poorest reception, and seemed to be grinding to a halt. Hearing the instrumental sentimentality, the vocal brilliance of the 1990 performances and onward which feature on Golden Vanity is nothing short of delightful.
