The Wallflowers
Tulsa Theater
Tulsa
Sept. 22, 2024
I don’t think “ordinary” is pejorative. Without at least some artists finding contentment as part of a greater tradition, what would happen to jazz or ballet or opera? The extraordinariness of these art forms stems from constant contact with their deep and familiar roots. What about rock ‘n’ roll as we know it?
Jakob Dylan, the creative force behind thirty-something-year-old band The Wallflowers, would be hard pressed to find a tour stop more beholden to his roots as an artist and as a human than the Tulsa Theater, which sits a couple of blocks from both the museum bearing his famous father’s name and its partner museum, named for his father’s songwriting idol.
With that pressure in the air, I was happy to find Dylan onstage expressing a joyful, content ease inside the timelessness where he lurks: He is simply a good songwriter playing good rock music with a good rock band. That is his aim, and that is what he is doing. There were no pyrotechnics, no costumes, no light show — underscored by Dylan stopping at one point to politely ask the house engineer to dim the lights shining on the crowd’s faces because he was “trying to be a rock band up here, but it feels like we’re in a living room.” There wasn’t even a tastemaking stab at choosing his own opener; the band’s tour is supported by local bands added by show promoters.
After walking onstage to Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” — the least congruent musical moment of the night — The Wallflowers performed a career-spanning setlist. The second level was curtained off and the floor of the Tulsa Theater mostly full of middle-aged and older concertgoers, some of whom proved devout Wallflowers fans and some of whom were there to revisit another era of their lives.
A few songs in, at the opening slide guitar notes of 1996 single “6th Avenue Heartache,” you could feel the titter of the crowd escalate. The first single from the band’s 1996 album Bringing Down the Horse, the track was performed faithfully by Dylan’s touring band, none of whom were in the band at its outset and one of whom joined only this year. Despite that, they all shared a remarkable chemistry onstage, with Dylan giving a heartfelt introduction to each of them and hyping the crowd to cheer louder after solos.
I’ll pause here and say that there are a few bands I won’t name from this particular era who have bandaged together their original and sometimes-feuding specters to relive something on the casino and state fair circuit. This isn’t that. The Wallflowers is largely a solo creative project now from a songwriting perspective, and newer songs like “Roots and Wings” from 2021’s Exit Wounds have the same timelessness of structure and temperament as the rest. Dylan has stayed the course as an artist in the same way that Tom Petty’s 1990s records hit much like those from decades earlier.
His setlist from the evening contained a handful of songs that could have been massive if not for the changing landscape of music listeners: “How Good It Can Get” from 2002’s Red Letter Days has a stellar and memorable melody, and that “Closer to You” hasn’t been covered a thousand times by would-be pop stars is frankly a waste of a love song.
And then there’s the elephant in the room. I, an elder millennial who spent her formative tastebuilding years glued to MTV, understand intimately the ubiquity of a true hit song before streaming was a thing. At one point in 1997, I turned a radio dial to find “One Headlight,” The Wallflowers’ second single from their new album, playing on three different radio stations at the same time.
When the band hit the opening guitar riff of this song, the polite Sunday night crowd erupted immediately. Cell phones shot into the air to capture video. I’ve been to a lot of concerts for the sake of nostalgia, and they’ve mostly been tinged with irony or disappointment or maybe a finality of sorts, closing a chapter or saying goodbye to something that doesn’t mean much to me anymore. This wasn’t that. It was surprisingly emotional, not only because they played the song faithfully to the version we all recognize — something his father famously refuses to do — but because Dylan seemed as happy to see us sing it as we were to see him. As he ages, I will say, the way he curves around his melodies sounds more and more like Bob Dylan except (sorry, modern Bob Dylan fans) pleasant to listen to.
They closed with a newer song, then left the stage before returning for an encore with a couple of Petty covers and the last nostalgia hit of the night, “The Difference,” the third single from Bringing Down the Horse.
“You keep playing your music,” Dylan told a reporter in 2023, “and they keep coming for the same reasons.”
Do you remember “The Difference”? It was nominated for a Grammy but perhaps a little overshadowed by its behemoth predecessor. “The only difference that I see,” Dylan sings on the hook, “is you are exactly the same as you used to be.”
