I had my 65th birthday on April 22. A few days later, we sat before the throne of the aging and ageless, Bob Dylan, in a 10,000 seat auditorium in Birmingham, England. Amidst the accompaniment of the unbelievably loud acoustics of his band, Bob Dylan spoke/sang in his increasingly nasal, gravelly, throaty voice through some 18 songs, around two thirds of them drawn from two albums, 2001 and 2007, along with a handful of songs from other decades. The band of musicians overshadowed his voice by a ratio of two to one. That was I suspect mainly due to the overamping of the guitars. Partway through the concert, we could tune in more easily to Dylan.
You don’t go to listen to Bob Dylan in terms of any expectation that the 67 year-old man with a thin moustache, wide brimmed white hat, police trousers with a white stripe, and black coat, that has become his uniform at his concerts, to look or sound remotely like the Bob Dylan of the past. There is no room for nostalgia with Bob Dylan. To paraphrase with poetic licence – he’s got everything he needs; he’s an artist; he don’t look back. At the end of the concert, we could hardly hear him say the names of the musicians; he rattled them off with barely a space between the words.
Among the songs we listened to were Desolation Row, Ain’t Talking, Workingman’s Blues, (a superb rendition of) Like A Rolling Stone – and a Motown style Blowing in the Wind as closure for the evening.
I have a dozen Dylan CDs, as well as on my computer and i-River MP3/recorder. Dominika and I sat in block E, a pretty accessible view of Dylan on stage. We listened with rapt interest to Dylan, occasionally thumped our fist in the air, yet it would sometimes take a couple of verses before we recognised some of the songs. He completely shifts the melody and the sounds into a fresh order that bear some, but not much, relationship to the way he sang the same songs donkeys years ago. He’s genuinely iconoclastic in his entire demeanour.
Take a look on Youtube for the standardised format of his concerts though the songs vary regularly enough and usually ending with one of his anthems.
He doesn’t play to please, to win public affection, or to let the audience indulge in the past. He doesn’t even face the audience. Playing the keyboard, he stands with his left shoulder facing the audience while he faces the band in front of him, with the very occasional turn of the head to the fans. Those seated on the right hand side of the auditorium could only see his back. For 20 years, he has been on his never ending tour, more than 100 concerts a year. He’s not much interested in publicity, nor in photographers, nor in tributes, nor in any kind of dialogue with the audience. Judging from his demeanour, big audiences, small audiences, popular, unpopular, yesterday’s man, today’s man, seems much the same to Dylan.
Though his lyrics often come across pretty clearly on the CDs, Dylan is not only self-effacing on stage but so are the hard to hear lyrics, unless one is up perhaps in the very front rows. There is no huge screen for those seated hundreds of metres away at the back of the auditorium. For those at the back or in the upper galleries, Dylan is a speck on stage.
He is still prolific in his song writing addressing as wide a range of issues imaginable on love, change, the personal and social interfusion, with the creative poetic flourish in numerous songs. He refuses to fall into any category whether in terms of style of music or what he sings about. Dylan is Dylan. Non-conformist as ever. Hats off to him. He certainly has passed through many phases in 50 years of singing. He seems to be currently in a period of extolling the poor, working class roots of American music.
Two days before the concert, his new CD came out appropriately titled ”Together through Life”– the third CD in the past eight years. He didn’t sing any songs from his latest album. Why should he? Mind you, without any promotion on his part, the album shot to number one in the UK – the oldest singer ever to have a number one since charts began about 50 or 60 years ago.
While Bob sings on stage week in week out, some of us continue to work down in the trenches week in and week out reminding people, as unambiguously as possible, that the times they are’a changing, a hard rain is gonna fall, that we all stayed a day too long in Mississippi and there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.
Thanks, Bob. A memorable evening.