Bob Dylan makes a perfect and pious opening act for Willie Nelson in Texas
on the Outlaws Tour.

Around 1 PM on Sunday, July 6, my sixty-year-old friend John Quinn and I
(with my 73 years) headed out from Bastrop, TX, now (in)famous as the home
county of Elon Musk's Boring Corporation. We were traveling back roads
towards the Woodlands on the north side of Houston's urban sprawl. Our
chief aim was to see two American music masters who have 25 and 17 years
of wisdom on our average age, Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan. I had last seen
them together in Madison, Wisconsin during the legendary minor league
ballparks tour August 27, 2004.

This version of the Outlaws Tour had the powerhouse lineup Tami Neilson,
the Mavericks, the Avett Brothers, Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson at center
stage of the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion. It took about thirty minutes
along state routes 21 and 290 to get back to the kind of Texas of which
legends like Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Townes van Zandt, Gary P.
Nunn, Billy Joe Shaver, Jerry Jeff Walker sang. Long gone-but perhaps
coming back-is the ethos captured in the previous period in the songs of
Jim-Crow Texas by the likes of Mance Lipscomb and Juke Boy Bonner.

Threading our way through Giddings, Brenham and Hempstead, we actually did
see a few vistas of cattle out on sprawling ranch ranges. We also saw hay
baling and hay bales and a precious few stores and diners that were not
affiliated with Seven-Elevens, Wendy's and Buc-ees. But the days when
Luckenbach with its population of one boasted that everyone is somebody in
Luckenbach are receding in our rearview mirrors at an ever-accelerating
rate. And sure enough, during our drive, we stood still in several
stretches as our backwoods state highways are being expanded by torturing
the timber and stripping the land and laying down cement for highway lanes
and adjacent malls and gas stations and convenience stores and fast-food
joints that far outdoes the Roman empire.

Our trip was extended and our arrival delayed by a good hour of such
work-site stoppage. There were no workers on site on a Sunday. Still two
lanes became one in highly commercialized stretches around the cities we
named. And so our arrival mimicked Willie's "broken-promise land".  From
then on, every one of our expectations was exceeded.

We could hear Mick Jagger singing "Beast of Burden" clearly as we walked
from a close-by FREE parking area along the well-marked paths through the
beautifully preserved woods that surround the performance pavilion and its
natural picnic-blanket bowl. Couples were sitting and families were
strolling in the environs. The Mavericks were already singing
accordion-based conjunto songs that could be heard perfectly for free.

Once inside and taking our seats stage left 17th row, we had the best of
both worlds. We could see the performers on stage well and with a slight
turn of our heads see them up close on the mega screens and later witness
the tears glistening in Willie's eyes as he sang sentimental numbers like
"Ain't It Funny How Time Slips Away" and "Angel Flying Too Close to the
Ground."  The crowd through all the acts was respectfully enthusiastic. No
one in our orbit was talking or using their mobile phones except to take
photos and make videos.

The Mavericks channeled the spirit of Doug Sahm and gave us Tex-Mex music,
conjunto and blues-inflected rock, bringing us in the crowd to our feet
with "All You Ever Do is Bring Me Down" sung with smooth conviction by
Raul Malo. The Avett Brothers next played their hearts out, too, in varied
styles, from Banjo and acoustic guitar duets, to Doc Watson covers, to an
up-tempo my-heart-goes-boom-boom-boom rocker like "Kick Drum Heart" to a
song memorializing heading north via a sentimental, perfectly
slow-piano-paced "I and Love and You" and its plea "Brooklyn, Brooklyn,
Take Me In."

When Bob and band took the stage at 8:10 PM, the evening shadows and the
stars had still not appeared. But I am sure he could still feel our love.

We in the audience were almost exhausted from taking in the two large
multi-instrument let's-have-a-night-to-remember bands letting us know that
the embers of sincere humanly played music are still alive in the wreckage
of our way-beyond-1984 capitalism-on-steroids culture. A low-key
staccato-crooned virtually solo piano-driven "Serve Somebody" with its
revamped lyrics that even threw words sung in Singapore four months back
out the window didn't so much kick the set off as let us know that the
time for high-volume gospel-music preaching was over. Anton Fig on drums,
Bob Britt & Doug Lancio on guitar and Tony Garnier on bass were all
riveted to Bob sermonizing on piano. At several points Fig held drumsticks
poised for four, five, six seconds before using them to emphasize a
stanza's end.

We deduced that we had best hear a sermon spoken and take note that, in
the current stream of misinformation with narcissistic ignorance ruling
where MLK and late JFK reason is required, knowing whom to serve besides
ourselves is the major challenge of daily living.

After a suitable pause, Dylan then sang to us "I Can Tell," a 1962 Bo
Diddley classic that took us back to Bob's own early roots with Chuck
Berry and Little Richard and Buddy Holly.  Channeling the Sir Douglas
Quintet and Denny Freeman's band doing late fifties early sixties r&b and
rock 'n' roll Friday nights at the Saxon Pub, the Bobby Dylan Quintet was
tight and on target. I noticed lots of gray hair bobbing in time.

In a way Bob channeled Willie's tender ballads about the nature of
romantic experiences with his own extraordinary address to the (whose?)
forgetful heart. The eerie melancholy of "Forgetful Heart" was punctuated
with staccato guitar blasts. Bob took to repeating in the recollection of
love once alive and now gone: "when you were there, when you were there,
you were the answer to my prayer." This was a true highlight of musical
reinvention within the set. The instrumental solo mid song took the
emotion of the song to another plateau. It was followed by a stanza with
another emphatic repetition "Can't take much more. WHY? Why can't we love
like we did before?" Still, I missed Donnie Herron's somber droning cello.

For me, another highlight was Dylan performing his child's fairy tale
"Under the Red Sky," beginning to sing the story with beautiful guitar
bursts and without a hint of menace, all innocence, including the
beautiful promise of everything for the little girl being "all brand new"
and a diamond as big as an emphatic 'shoe'. A delightful and childlike
simple piano solo preceded the gently sung "these are the keys to the
kingdom and this is the sound."  A sprightly harp solo brought the tale to
an upbeat end.

Charlie Pride's "I'll Make It All Up to You" swung us back to Texas beer
joint promises aching to be broken. And really cleared the air for three
of Bob's best through time: "All Along the Watchtower," "Desolation Row"
and "Love Sick." "Watchtower" had its whole song pattern changed to allow
Bob's song-speaking to come across with movie-score-dramatic moments. The
menace here was delicately punctuated by an exquisitely heart-rending
guitar solo by Bob Britt. Really the kind of thing that is genius. And as
close as one can get to a non-Hendrix-electric style version in the last
57 years.

Here the man who turned folk into rock suddenly shifted gears with an
up-tempo "Desolation Row," with crystal clear lyrics. "Love Sick," too, he
sang with a subdued and eerie force that made clear that these throes of
love are well within the Lucretian nature of things.

The transition to the closing duo of songs cleared the air: Bob fronting
on piano in a quiet Texas tavern and telling us what Bobby Blue Bland,
Aretha Franklin, Kenny Rogers, Van Morrison and Freddy Fender have already
emphasized: "it would be a shame, bad, sad, a mistake, if you don't share
your love with me."

The set ended with a uniquely jazzy "Blind Willie McTell" sung as if no
other mode of performing the song ever existed, with piano and guitar
doing complementary riffs. And Bob bid us adieu with "Don't Think Twice,
It's All Right."

Bob's lower-key jazz-nightclub silver-platter serving of his music left us
in a perfect emotional state to take in Willie"s humanly magnificent set.
At 92 years of age, Willie still symbolizes and promotes deep honesty
about human feelings and how we make it through our lives. His set was
preceded by a video of "Living in the Promiseland" on the big screen,
emphasizing that the United States is the country that long has taken in
victims of violence, persecution, prejudice, and income disparity taking
place in other countries of the world.

Accompanied by fifty-something Waylon Payne, son of long-time-gone Nelson
guitarist Jody Payne, and at almost every moment acting like he wanted to
invite the whole audience up on stage with him, Willie's
jazz-improvisational feel for how his guitar should capture the essence of
the simple human truths in his songs was a veritable fountain of youth. 
On numbers like "Ain't It Funny How Time Slips Away," "Angel Flying Too
Close to the Ground," and "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain," the close-up
image on the two big screens let us see the tears glistening in Willie's
own two eyes. His newish song "Last Leaf on the Tree" added to the
transcendent mutually sympathetic feeling that filled the Woodlands
Pavilion. And classic songs by Merle Haggard, Townes van Zandt and Kris
Kristofferson helped mark July 6 as an extra special and humanly
significant occasion.

The whole program will stay with me until I breathe my last. And it got
across how good an opening act Bob Dylan was for Willie Nelson on one
wonderful night in the woodlands way out on the outskirts of town.

My favorite song performed the entire evening, and one Bob Dylan could
have written, was Willie's "Still Is Still Moving to Me."

So true, Willie and Bob, so true.