If you’re looking for some answers, you might find them blowin’ in the wind near the Rye Recreation Amphitheater on June 22 at around 4 p.m.
That’s when the musician Dustin Lowman will be demonstrating his fierce devotion to — you might say obsession with — the music and lyrics of the legendary Bob Dylan.
Lowman, who will lead his audience on a journey through Dylan’s expansive songbook, knows every twist, turn, and hidden gem of the artist’s vast catalog. Sing along to iconic favorites (“Like a Rolling Stone,” perhaps as the finale…just a hunch), but listen for lesser-known songs that may surprise even longtime fans.
Presented by the Rye Arts Center, this outdoor concert is more than just a musical performance (with a local food truck on-site). Lowman weaves storytelling into the set, sharing
anecdotes and reflections that shed light on Dylan’s life, legacy, and genius.
What draws Lowman to Dylan’s work is the tension between comedy and tragedy that pulses through the lyrics. “Like in his best song,” Lowman said — referring to that possible closer, “Like a Rolling Stone” — “in one line he’s asking, ‘How does it feel to be on your own, with no direction home?’ and then in the next, ‘You used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat/Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat.’
“If you saw it in a Salvador Dalí painting, you’d grin at how ridiculous it is,” Lowman said. “Putting the absurd, tragic, and comic all into the same frame makes the emotion of the song more three-dimensional to me.”
Lowman’s Dylan journey began in Westport, Conn., when as a teenager flipping through Rolling Stone magazine’s “Best Albums of All Time” lists, he noticed Dylan’s name. His parents were into Genesis and The Who, but as a creative writer he craved artists who broke the mold. Then one day in a CD store, he picked up “Highway 61 Revisited” and listened to it. Everything changed.
“It literally blew my mind,” he said. “The adventurousness of the lyricism, the chaos of the production, the unusualness of his vocals. Everything about it struck every possible chord.”
By the time he was 18, Lowman had amassed more than 25,000 Dylan tracks in his iTunes library, mostly live bootlegs downloaded from the Internet. He has seen Dylan perform 10 times.
The Brooklyn-based Lowman not only performs Dylan, but also hosts a dedicated Dylan tribute series at Café Wha? the legendary Greenwich Village club where a young Dylan first took the stage in New York. There, he often sees audience members encounter Dylan’s deep cuts for the first time and fall in love on the spot. He expects the same in Rye, where alongside familiar favorites he’ll perform some songs only true Dylan diehards might recognize: “Jokerman,” from the 1983 album “Infidels;” “Ring Them Bells,” from 1989’s “Oh Mercy,” and even “Po’ Boy,” from 2001’s “Love and Theft.”
While many of Dylan’s songs are firmly embedded in popular culture, Lowman said, some of Dylan’s most powerful writing remains under the radar because he was an iconoclast who didn’t always align with the zeitgeist. That’s why Lowman loves introducing audiences to the songwriter’s lesser-known works.
“It’s similar to a contemporary director wanting to stage ‘Hamlet,’” Lowman explained. “I see this as the most masterful work in the genre, and I get immense pleasure from staging it and sharing it with new audiences.”
A singer-songwriter in his own right, Lowman recently released an album titled “Invulnerable,” and he just might slip one of his own songs into the Rye set to show how Dylan’s creative legacy continues to inspire him and a new generation of artists.
This show feels serendipitous, arriving so soon after the biopic “Like a Complete Unknown,” which he describes as a “a kind of Bob Dylan 101,” perfect for newcomers curious about the legend’s life and music.
“Did it spark conversations with people who saw me as some sort of Dylan authority? Definitely,” he said with a laugh. “And honestly, a world with more Bob Dylan fans is a better world in my book.”
WHEN: June 22, 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.
WHERE: The Rye Recreation Amphitheatre
TICKETS: Free, suggested $25 donation. To get tickets, visit onecau.se/livemusic.
