Over the past decade, Bob Dylan has been working on an ongoing series of paintings he calls The Beaten Path, devoted to depictions of a particularly American landscape that’s probably on the edge of disappearing forever, but which he stubbornly insists still stubbornly exists, if you only looked: a handmade place of lost highways and forgotten barrooms and city lights in smeary rain; of lonely drive-in movie lots and funky diners and juke joints that all seem to float in some unfixed time that could be anywhere from the early-1930s to early tomorrow morning.
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Shadow Kingdom – the title Dylan has given to his “Exclusive Broadcast Event” for the Veeps livestreaming service – looks and sounds like it could be taking place inside one of those paintings; except that where Dylan’s canvases vibrate with solid colour, this show takes place in a shimmering, liquid black and white world. Directed by Alma Har’el, the setting is a small roadside dive, with Dylan and his band crammed onto a tiny stage or shoved into the corner of the chequerboard floor, playing to a scattered audience of comically chainsmoking patrons who seem vaguely disinterested to begin with, stay that way for most of the time, then finally start dancing under the paperchains strung across the ceiling just as time begins to run out.
As well as Dylan’s paintings, the setting stirs up a kaleidoscope of associations: of the Depression-era staging for Girl From The North Country, the recent Broadway musical based on Dylan’s songbook by playwright Conor McPherson; of Dylan’s 1983 video for “Sweetheart Like You” set in an empty dive; of a half-hour black-and-white TV special that Dylan made back in 1964 for the Canadian series Quest, in which the 23-year-old singer played his songs in a workingman’s bunkhouse while weary woodsmen drank and smoked cigarettes and ignored him; and of an incredible performance one of Dylan’s acknowledged masters, Howlin’ Wolf, filmed for The American Folk Blues Festival that same year, set up in the corner of an abandoned afterhours barroom.