![]() ![]() Under the influence of his kids, Dylan would leave his Malibu home and slip into shows by the likes of L.A. It was exactly the type of music that excited Dylan’s three teenage sons and, by extension, their dad. “It was fast, aggressive, and mean,” Quintana says of the Plugz sound, “but it was also graceful and beautiful.” While Dylan was coming down from his Christian experiment by experimenting with mild reggae, Quintana, Marsico, and Holiday were playing sneering and lean Latin-inflected punk-rock. In the early 1980s, Dylan was living in Malibu, about an hour from the Plugz’ Hollywood base but a musical world away. After that night, Marsico never played music with Bob Dylan again. It wasn’t a dream, but it might seem like one now. “At the time we were so young and dumb,” says Marsico, thinking back to that show. punk band the Plugz - backed Dylan on three songs that night, a fierce “Jokerman” and a perfectly raucous “License to Kill,” both from Dylan’s then-new semi-return-to-form album Infidels, and a swaggering cover of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Don’t Start Me Talking.” For 12 minutes or so, the musicians proved that Bob Dylan could be jolted out of the perfunctory performances he’d been accustomed to giving then, and suggested a future beyond the living relic circuit. Holiday, drummer Charlie Quintana, and bassist Tony Marsico - the latter two of whom were members of the L.A. Instead, standing behind Dylan, all dressed in ratty black suits, were three unknown 20-somethings - and they were killing it. Nor was he joined by any of his old Greenwich Village cronies. His backing musicians that night didn’t include any members of his old running buddies the Band, or high-profile hired hands like ex–Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor or Dire Straits’ front man Mark Knopfler, who’d both worked with him during that period. ![]() On the show in question, after Liberace finished a segment wherein he cooked his famous egg casserole, Dave introduced a “legend of the music world,” and the camera panned over to the singer, showing something that even the most deeply learned Dylan devotee couldn’t have anticipated. (Though the fact that a new-ish late-night talk show with a deeply irreverent, acerbic host was able to book Dylan was perhaps a testament to the latter’s diminished status at the time.) Related Stories Studio 6A had hosted some memorable acts, like R.E.M.’s network debut, but no one of Dylan’s status had yet performed on the show. Still, Dylan was Dylan, one of the most famous musicians alive, and his booking on Late Night was a coup. Indeed, circa 1984, Dave was far more of more of a counterculture hero than Bob. Dylan? Well, he was about as irrelevant as he’d ever been, having frustrated his audience with the musically slick, lyrically hectoring series of evangelical christian albums that he’d released in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Letterman, just two years into his run - which concludes this Wednesday night - was a comedy sensation, bringing a new level of sarcasm, irony, and Bud Melman–centric humor to a late-night format still reliant on the smooth unflappability of Johnny Carson. More than 31 years ago, Dylan arrived at the Late Night studio at a moment when he and the host were moving rapidly in different directions. The three-song gig also, arguably, still holds a spot as Dylan’s premier televised performance. It’s a big occasion to be sure, but the performance almost certainly won’t match Dylan’s first Letterman appearance as the best, or, considering how it came about, strangest set that the musician has delivered within earshot of Dave’s desk. Tonight Bob Dylan will return to The Late Show for the first time since 1993 and bid farewell to the retiring David Letterman as the host’s final musical guest. ![]()
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