Review

Jackson, Mississippi
Jubilee Jam
Downtown Stage
May 17, 2003


[Peter Stone Brown]

Review by Peter Stone Brown



It was raining in Memphis all day and some said that a tornado had touched 
down the night before on Union Avenue, and there were tornado warnings on the 
TV when my friend Link picked me up and we headed south to Jackson.  This was 
my first time in Mississippi and every Mississippi fantasy I’d ever had was 
running through my mind as the rain poured down in torrents.  We passed Jerry 
Lee Lewis’ town and I kept expecting the ghost of Howlin’ Wolf to emerge from 
behind a tree, but instead I saw lots of Mississippi cops and lots of fender 
benders as we passed something back and forth below window level.

Jackson was a couple of hundred miles south of Memphis almost in a straight
line, but I didn’t see any cotton fields or we were on Nissan Boulevard 
passing a Nissan plant that seemed to stretch for a mile and then found 
ourselves in the center of Jackson, parking by the state capitol.  

The main stage of the Cellular South Jubilee Jam was situated at the end of
some downtown mall in the shade of the Bell South building and the Southern 
Trust Band, while a yellow Pearl River Resorts blimp hovered overhead with
“PearlRiverResorts.com” painted on the bottom.  What would’ve been a nice 
corporate park under non-tornado circumstances to catch a cigarette during 
coffee breaks was instead a field of mud, deep soggy mud.  A “Cellular South” 
banner hung at the back of the stage onto which stepped Bob Dylan who launched 
into a blistering “Maggie’s Farm” which I thought was pretty funny considering 
the completely corporate setting minus the mud.  The band sounded amazing.  
Rocking hard, totally together.  Dylan followed up with “Tonight I’ll Be 
Staying Here With You” which fetured a great harp solo and then it was into a 
totally kick-ass version of “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.” 

He stayed at the piano for “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” while some loud 
drunk started complainging about the songs, so I moved away and sank into even 
deeper mud that had a quicksand consistency.  At first it seemed like Dylan kept 
coming in too early to start each verse, but by the third verse the song seemed 
to settle down and out came the harp for a strong lengthy solo.

Then it was back to rocking for “Drifter’s Escape” and Dylan picks up the harp 
and it’s the wrong one, but he made up for it quickly with an exceptional solo 
and the land is loud and ferocious.  

Given the setting, and since there was apparently no chance of Dylan actually
singing “Mississippi,” “Floater” seemed like an appropriate choice, at least
lyrically.  However it seemed to go right over the crowd’s head, and it should 
be noted that the crowd was not exactly a typical Dylan crowd, whatever that is, 
being an outside, downtown show and all.  The one good thing about outside shows 
is if someone is obnoxious, you just move somewhere else, except in this case 
each step meant sinking further into mud.  

Whatever energy had been lost on “Floater” was resurrected by a stunning 
“Highway 61 Revisited” and Dylan was having a great time boppin’ and rockin’ 
behind his keyboard.  He never stopped moving once and the guitars were smoking.  
He slowed it down for “To Make You Feel My Love” with the beginning instrumental 
making me hope beyond hope that it would turn out to be a slow majestic “Simple 
Twist of Fate,” but no such luck, though Dylan brought out the harp again for 
another way better than decent solo.

He closed the abbreviated set with high energy versions of “Honest With Me’ and
“Summer Days,”  and of course returned for “Like A Rolling Stone” which featured 
a terriffic solo from Freddie and “Watchtower.”

Whatever problems this band may have had making things click earlier on this tour 
seem to be gone and they were one, very tight, very rocking unit.  Whatever the 
show didn’t have on the Dylan mystical intensity meter, it compensated for in 
energy and I wasn’t expecting any great revelations in this situation.  I decided 
as we slogged out through the mud onto Mississippi concrete that this is Dylan’s 
“I’m gonna have fun tour,” and there’s no doubt that that’s what he was doing.

A couple of hours and hits later we were crossing “Elvis Presley Boulevard”
in a Tennessee fog and I couldn’t help but think the show I’d just seen and this
tour had a lot more to do with Elvis Presley than it did with Arthur Rimbaud.

[TOP]

page by Bill Pagel
billp61@execpc.com

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