John Mellencamp / Los Lobos – Wells Fargo Arena (Des Moines, IA) Bob Dylan / Elvis Costello – Carver-Hawkeye Arena (Iowa City, IA)
Following the raucous reception for “Small Town”, one of John Mellencamp’s heartland anthems that have as much resonance in Iowa as they do in his native Indiana, the Hoosier populist mentioned there was a visitor backstage who was also from a small town.
“I’ve had a friend for seven-eight years who just happens to be running for president of the United States,” said Mellencamp. “Is John back there?”
As John Edwards walked to center stage (his hair was perfect), the cheers Mellencamp had elicited throughout the evening changed to a crescendo of boos. Not that Hillary, Rudy or Obama or would have fared any better. Where Mellencamp had been embraced as a native son, Edwards was rejected as a political intruder. He spoke for less than ten seconds, said nothing about his campaign and headed sheepishly back to safety.
“You know, guys who run for president aren’t as stiff as you think they are,” said Mellencamp.
And sometimes, Cougar, they’re not even guys.
But ain’t that America?
Every four years, a nation that otherwise confuses Iowa with Ohio or Idaho turns its attention to the land of corn, wondering who the state that ranks with the oldest, whitest and most rural in the country will anoint as the early frontrunner in the presidential sweepstakes. And every four years, Iowa both basks in the spotlight and tires of it, wondering skeptically whether any of these presidential pretenders will give the state as much as a backward glance once the caucuses are over.
Yet when the campaign is in full swing, even rock concerts have political overtones, and not only the ones where candidates make cameos (or vice versa: a few weeks later, Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne sang songs at Edwards rallies, while Paul Simon had earlier spent a weekend as opening act for Christopher Dodd). And even at concerts where no candidate appears, or is even mentioned, an implicit call to action seems to resound.
Take the Bob Dylan/Elvis Costello concert a couple weeks earlier in Iowa City, where the college-town crowd could have read the set lists like political tea leaves. Not only did Dylan end his set with “Masters Of War” and highlight it with “High Water” (a tribute to Charlie Patton and a prophecy of New Orleans), but Costello gave an impassioned reading of “The River In Reverse”, his song in response to the New Orleans debacle, engaging the crowd with an exclamatory “Wake me up!” call-and-response, interspersing snatches of John Lennon: “Don’t wanna be a soldier, mama, I don’t want to die.”
He then concluded his captivating solo performance with a song he’d written with T Bone Burnett, about how “questioning government isn’t an act of a traitor, but of a patriot.” The implications weren’t lost on the politically-conscious, anti-Bush crowd.
The Dylan/Costello concert (with Amos Lee as the opening act) proved a study in contrasts, though Dylan is obviously among the myriad of musical influences absorbed by Costello, who appeared delighted to be touring with the master. He also seemed liberated to be working solo as a support act, rather than having to give the crowd what it had paid to see from its headliner.
The result was a surprising, eclectic set even by Costello’s standards, with a selection that touched on the obligatory (the opening “Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes”, a tender “Alison”) but also included a 1927 campaign song (“It’s Not Very Far From Sulfur To Sugarcane”), a new country weeper (“Down Among The Wines And Spirits”), and a song he had written for Johnny Cash (introducing “Complicated Shadows”, Costello said of Cash, “He never recorded it, so you don’t have to cheer.”)
Combining ebullient spirits with an aggressive solo guitar, he delivered a one-two punch with a version of “Uncomplicated” that morphed into Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away”, then landed the knockout with an impassioned reading of Nick Lowe’s “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding”.
If Elvis was a uniter, surprisingly so with college kids who hadn’t been born during his early heyday, Dylan was a divider. I found his set stunning, with a guitar-driven attack that made the recorded arrangements of recent material sound like blueprints. Others complained the following day that they found him unintelligible and impenetrable, particularly in comparison with Costello.
My sense is that what you get out of a Dylan concert depends on what you bring to it. And after seeing him countless times (more than dozens, fewer than hundreds), I’m amazed that his concerts still amaze me. He was back to playing guitar on the opening numbers, later changing his phrasing to rise into an almost falsetto lilt on “Highway 61” and “Like A Rolling Stone”, turning “Rollin’ And Tumblin'” (with powerhouse slide guitar by Denny Freeman) into almost Biblical prophecy (“You too shall burn!”), making “Working Man Blues” sound revelatory in its bittersweet tenderness. And it’s always a thrill to hear “Desolation Row”, the epic he had once shelved for decades.
The Mellencamp/Los Lobos ticket offered almost as many surprises as Dylan and his running mate. Perhaps the biggest was that both acts gave such short shrift to recent releases which have earned acclaim as their best in years. Though Mellencamp reclaimed “Our Country” from Chevy, he performed more material he has yet to release — he has both a new album with producer T Bone Burnett (him again) and a new musical with Stephen King on the way — than he did from Freedom’s Road.
And much of it was darker, with an aging resignation, from the death knell of “Jesus, Can You Give Me A Ride Back Home” to the world-weary wisdom of “Young Without Lovers, Old Without Friends” to the topical outrage of “Jena”. As he told the crowd toward the end, “You can’t write ‘Hurts So Good’ your entire life.”
The blistering opener by Los Lobos seemed to return the band to its days of punk urgency, while slighting the dreamier, more ambitious strains of their classic Kiko and last year’s The Town And The City. Yet the band won a lot of fans in Mellencamp’s crowd, recharging “I Got Loaded” with a chaser of “Turn On Your Lovelight”, reviving the Blasters’ “Marie Marie”, turning the obligatory “La Bamba” into a medley with “Good Lovin'”.
“We are the Los Lobos blues band from East L.A., California,” Cesar Rosas introduced the band to the crowd — eliciting a far warmer response than John Edwards later would.