Call them, if you want, illuminated concerts. You're in an arena or stadium watching Springsteen, Coldplay or Madonna and suddenly the darkness lights up thanks to dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of cell phone flashlights. It is difficult to say when exactly this ritual was born. Bob Dylan's latest box set offers a possible solution to this conundrum.
It's about The 1974 Live Recordings (review here), which contains two dozen or so concerts from fifty years ago. It was Dylan's first tour in eight years, a sort of reunion with the Band that had accompanied him in his controversial electric breakthrough. It was a phenomenal success: tickets had to be requested by the public by post and according to David Geffen, head of Dylan's label at the time, two to three million letters arrived. That tour (and the album that bears witness to it) could also be remembered for being the precise moment in which the ritual of greeting the musician through real or artificial luminescence came, it must be said, to the light.
It is impossible, however, to say precisely where, when and how we got into the habit of lighting a match, a lighter or a telephone torch at concerts. It could be a custom that goes back to Melanie, aka Melanie Safka. When he went on stage at Woodstock in 1969 it had started to rain. «Ravi Shankar had just finished performing», recalled the singer who died in January, «and the announcer told the audience that lighting candles would help keep the rain away. At the end of my concert, the hill was full of flickering lights.”
It's a scene that the singer later immortalized in the 1970 pop-gospel Lay Down (Candles in the Rain). “When the song came out, it became a habit to bring a candle, lighter or matches to my concerts.”
It's a tradition that has gone on for a few years. In 1973, when Melanie performed at Carnegie Hall, fans lit candles they had smuggled in. However, Melanie was not included in the Woodstock film and so the idea that concert lights originated at her concerts has never entered popular culture. And after all, audiences also used lighters at the Toronto Rock & Roll Revival in 1969, but it took years before we saw those shots.
Photo: Barry Feinstein/Legacy Recordings
And here we return to Dylan. Writing about the tour's first date in Chicago, in January 1974, a journalist from the New York Times he noted that «at the end of the concert the audience stood up to applaud Dylan, raising thousands of lit matches as a tribute». Ben Fong-Torres also noted the same thing, writing about the tour for Rolling Stone. And Dylan himself remembered that concert in Chicago in 2016 Vanity Fair: «Someone suddenly lit a match. Someone else followed him. In a short time, entire sections of the building were full of lit matches.” Mindful of the hostile reaction that he and the Band had aroused years earlier by switching from the acoustic to the electric set, Dylan and his band believed that the scene had something “apocalyptic” about it and therefore “we began to look for the closest exit life” from stage, fearing it would all catch fire. Only to then realize that the audience was actually expressing appreciation, not anger.
Reading the reviews of the time, there were various moments during the show in which flames were lit, for example before the encore or when during It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) Dylan sang about the President of the United States sometimes having to bare himself. It was the time of Watergate and the calls for Nixon to resign were multiplying (what a coincidence: one of the props was a fire extinguisher).
In his report, Fong-Torres jokes that people had matches and lighters “to smoke the stuff.” Today he couldn't say when the tradition began. “I'm not sure it was the first time this happened,” he says of Dylan's tour. «Even groups like the Stones performed in the arenas, but it didn't happen. It's the kind of thing that makes Dylan unique.”
It went on until the last show of the tour. A few months later Dylan released the live album Before the Flood taken from those concerts. On the cover there was a photo of Barry Feinstein with the audience (we don't know exactly which city) with matches in hand. Also thanks to that image associated with a record that reached third place in the United States, the ritual became national, if not global, erasing the memory of the lights in Toronto and Woodstock. “But it all started with me,” Melanie said, “even if people don't know it.”
For longtime promoter Jimmy Koplik, who has worked with Grateful Dead and Crosby Stills Nash & Young among many, the cover of Before the Flood it's a classic. He doesn't remember the lighter ritual before Dylan's tour. He remembers, however, the flames lit at the concerts that followed, especially the hard & heavy ones, like Judas Priest. «The fire chief got really angry with us. “But what can we do?”, we replied. “We can't fire water cannons at the public”.
Whatever it is origin story of this ritual, the promoters are a little calmer now that the flames in people's hands are not real. “Thank goodness there are cell phones,” Koplik says. “You can't use them to set fire to sports halls.”
From Rolling Stone US.
