Dylan, Haggard defy the years

Bob Dylan and Merle Haggard are such masters of their craft that they make it hard for critics not to look like pushovers, especially at a concert as warm and frequently thrilling as the freewheeling one they put on Monday at the Pantages Theatre.

Rather than take their audiences down a predictable memory lane of greatest hits each night, Dylan and Haggard, who are touring together for the first time, shuffle their set lists to fit their moods and muses -- making each night an adventure.

On the tour, which started March 7 in Seattle, Dylan has alternated relative rarities, such as “Drifter’s Escape,” and signature tunes, including “Just Like a Woman,” to round out a set anchored by the scintillating songs from “Love and Theft,” the 2001 album that offers one of his most joyful musical excursions. Haggard, too, has reached into the outer limits of his vast repertoire for material and he promised more surprises in the engagement that ends Saturday.

Though they didn’t perform together, there was a unifying spirit to the evening that opened with a brief set by Amos Lee, a young singer-songwriter whose blues-influenced folk style has the gentle, yet wise and wry tone of some of James Taylor’s early work.

Dylan and Haggard have admired each other since the ‘60s, when many of their fans, no doubt, were on opposite ends of many social and political issues. Dylan’s folk and rock music celebrated a changing social order, championed largely by young liberals. Haggard’s country songs were built more around traditional values, cheered by conservatives.

On Monday, however, there was common ground in their vital artistry and their mutual respect.

Haggard must have caught lots of the Dylan fans off-guard late in his 50-minute set when he sang a few lines of a new song toasting marijuana.

Was he repudiating the sentiments of “Okie From Muskogee,” the conservative anthem from the ‘60s that listed marijuana as one sign the country was going to pot?

While the head-scratching was still going on, Haggard playfully offered that song’s famous opening line, “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee/ We don’t take our trips on LSD.”

When he cut the song short, it looked like he had revised his feeling. But then he complicated things by going into a vigorous rendition of “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” another conservative favorite from the ‘60s that, with lines such as “if you don’t love it leave it,” chided Americans who were running the country down during the Vietnam War.

Haggard confused things again when he played “That’s the News,” the 2003 song that chided the Bush administration and the media for declaring prematurely that the Iraq War was over.

Clearly, Haggard is a complex figure whose views on social issues have evolved over the years.

There’s never been any doubt about Dylan’s complexity.

For anyone seeing Dylan for the first time in years Monday, it was easy to think he was wearing a western suit and cowboy hat in salute to Haggard, but he has favored that country bandleader look for years.

Similarly, his band continues to play with a roots-based intensity that feels like it grew out of the same honky-tonk circuit as Haggard’s group, the Strangers.

With a lineup that includes flashy Elana Fremerman on violin and Donnie Herron on banjo and pedal steel guitar, Dylan and the six-piece unit roared with the fury of a locomotive, barreling down the tracks so fast that if you missed a note or a vocal line you’d be run over.

It’s fascinating to remember how many years Dylan had to fight against his own fans’ taunts when he refused to just play only the hits and when he freely rearranged songs so dramatically that they were almost unrecognizable.

Yet this freedom has clearly fueled him as a performer -- as has shifting from guitar to piano, where he appears more comfortable and can better interact with the band members.

By now, audiences not only expect him to shake things up on stage, but look forward to it, cheering mightily when he stretched some of the recent material, including “Summer Days” and “Honest With Me,” into marathon excursions, or when he turned “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” inside out to make the folk tune into a modern locomotive express.

Seeing them back to back, it was also revealing to note just how different Dylan and Haggard are as writers. Working with many of the rules laid down in the ‘40s by Hank Williams, Haggard writes in a straightforward, yet graceful way that stresses economy of language. When he sang “Today I Started Loving You Again” on Monday, the beauty of the song was in its simple eloquence:

Today I started loving you again

I’m right back where I’ve really always been

I got over you just long enough to let my heartache mend

Then today, I started loving you again.

By contrast, Dylan’s songs are a mixture of folk music and epic poetry traditions, so the lines are more complex, the meaning more challenging. The reward is in the elasticity of them.

Yet the common ground of their passion and craft was underscored when Dylan generously opened his encore segment by singing “Sing Me Back Home,” a Haggard tune about prisoners on death row.

Listening to it, you recall how Dylan has also dipped into country tradition and written with such economy that Haggard would have felt right at home singing one of those Dylan numbers, especially “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

It would have been a treat to hear Haggard and Dylan perform a song together, but just having them on the same stage for a night was, ultimately, magical enough.

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Dylan, Haggard

Where: Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood.

When: Today, 7 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 7:30 p.m.

Price: Sold out

Contact: (323) 468-1770