By now you may have noticed a certain similarity among the venues of greater recreation on our fair Island. The Jones Beach Theater, its renovation completed only last summer, seems to have followed the lead of the Mets’ Citi Field in lifting your wallet in a remarkably user-friendly kind of way.
The jaunty signage, the well-lit food stations with their tempting menu items, salty to fatty, the picnic areas, the games of cornhole, the acres of concrete somehow rendered pleasing by the seaside, open-air setting.
But most of all the alcohol. It was a hundred bucks for five cans of beverage Friday night at Jones Beach, each 16 ounces, sure, but two of them contained only water. Still, no complaints here. It’s all attractively designed, and another reminder of that John Updike line about America, “a vast conspiracy to make you happy.”
Color me happy, John. I could’ve stayed at the theater for hours. Make that “further” hours, as we — a family of five — were there for at least six: tailgating, buying a would-be comedian’s hawked souvenir hat in the parking lot, and then from the cheap seats taking in act after act in Willie Nelson’s 10th Outlaw Music Festival.
What’s good about those cheap seats, of course, is the unbeatable view past the darting barn swallows — throbbingly green marshes with the occasional bright white egret stepping through its hunting motions, a few boats at anchor, the distant beaches of deep, soft, ample Long Island sand, and, if you crane your neck just right, the Jones Beach Water Tower rising like a monument to Robert Moses’s phallic generative power as urban planner.
Frankly, there’s no bad seat in the house. About the performers, it is respectfully submitted here that several years after powering through a stroke, Lucinda Williams may be best at playing the music of others, as in her rousing closing number, one of mainstream rock’s angriest, Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World”: “There’s one more kid that’ll never go to school / Never get fall in love, never get to be cool.”
Interesting, too, that Wilco is now a scruffy jam band, even breaking out the Grateful Dead’s “U.S. Blues” for Jerry Garcia’s birthday.
But about the Great Man — no disrespect, Willie, that would be Bob Dylan — he’s as much an enigma as ever. Would a casual observer call out as dismissive his sitting at the keys to knock out one song after another in quick succession while refusing to address the audience, the band set a ways back on the stage, and the two jumbotrons turned off? Probably.
On the other hand, he reached back into the footnotes and acknowledgements section of his songbook for tunes only a Dylanologist could name, and this was as welcome as his skillful transformation of the couple of 1960s standards he did play — “Desolation Row” and “All Along the Watchtower,” both rendered almost unrecognizable.
And for this, much thanks. He was keeping it fresh. For him and for us.