What, exactly, should one be hoping for while on their way to a Bob Dylan concert in 2024?
Historically, the safest bet has been to prepare for disaster. The 83 year-old has long harboured a reputation for putting on shows incomprehensible to even the most loyal followers, bizarre rearrangements of old songs paired with an indifference bordering on disdain for his audiences. Generations of bewildered fans have left concerts echoing the words of the critic Greil Marcus, who, after listening to Dylan’s 1970 album Self-Portrait for the first time, began a review in Rolling Stone magazine with the simple question: ‘What is this shit?’
That said, Dylan is generally understood to be enjoying a late purple patch: 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, his first record of new material since 2012, received widespread critical acclaim and 2023’s Shadow Kingdom offered a beautiful revisitation of several old songs, drained of all their former acerbic venom and announcing themselves instead like a collection of mournful lullabies.
His notoriety as a discordant live performer has also faded; the setlist from the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, which returned on Friday for its ninth leg after a six-month hiatus, is drawn mostly from recent albums, along with a reliable scattering of classics. The reviews of the fanatical Dylan concert-goers have been overwhelmingly positive, although these should be taken with a huge pinch of salt, coming as they do from a fanbase who refuse to accept the fallibility of the man responsible for 1990’s Wiggle Wiggle.
In short, it is very difficult to know what to expect. Maybe he’ll turn up, plonk himself down at the piano, and furiously croak his way through some of the old bangers, ideally keeping a wide berth of most of the 1976-1997 catalogue. He might surprise us, equally, by delivering a full October rendition of 2009’s menacing Christmas from the Heart.
Either way, it is impossible not to feel a little excited, as a life-long Dylan fan, when the lights go down and the four-piece backing band walk on stage. And there he is! Shuffling towards the grand piano in a dark-black suit, dotted, I think (the press tickets we’ve been given are high in the rafters) with small, shimmering sequins. He gives a small nod of acknowledgment to the crowd’s ecstatic applause, and we’re away.
The first thing to say, and I wish I had something more sophisticated to offer, is that his voice is gone. It’s absolutely gone. This is nobody’s fault, certainly not his, and it feels unkind to mention, but it is true. Maybe some of the hardened regulars have grown inured, but for the average listener it is this inescapable truth that is most immediately apparent. You can feel a ripple pass through the room, a collective beat being taken for a moment of fortification, as people say to themselves: ‘Oh shit. There it is. Yeah. Okay’.
In many ways, Dylan’s voice fits perfectly with the apocalyptic turn his songwriting has taken in the twilight years. On songs like Ain’t Talkin’, it is transformed into a thrilling asset, hissing at you to “hand me down my walkin’ cane” as he slouches “through the world, mysterious and vague”. Alongside the live band in a big arena, however, the effect is lost, the soft menace of his voice drowned out by the noise.
This is thrown into sharper relief by the first track of the evening, All Along the Watchtower, a song Dylan wrote in 1967, but now so completely associated with another artist that it feels an awkward choice, impossible not to unfavourably compare to Jimi Hendrix’s version, as the words splutter and catch in his throat.
In general Dylan fares better (but only marginally) with his more recent songs, which are mostly unchanged from the album versions and best suited to his current vocal range. Black Rider is unsettling, like a nursery rhyme gone wrong, and is one of the few moments where you can feel the room leaning forward to hold its breath. False Prophet is also better live, the veteran singer standing and rocking on his soles while he thumps at the piano.
Going to a Dylan concert, especially for a first-timer, can feel a bit like going to see the Parthenon or Stonehenge. Even if there is technically not much going on, it’s still possible to just sit back and wonder at the cultural enormity of what is in front of you (in this case: the distant outline of a fuzz of grey hair bobbing behind a large grand piano), especially as the band launches into an up-tempo Desolation Row. Here, though the faster rendition is only a distant cousin of the original, there is a unifying sense of gratitude at the privilege of listening to such a gorgeous, lucid piece of poetry, being performed nearly 60 years after it was first written.
Yet, in truth, these moments are scarce. Cross the Rubicon drags on interminably, and people shuffle in their seats as the band dives straight into Key West, another song coming in at just under ten minutes. A young couple behind me look increasingly confused.
For any artist that’s been around as long as Dylan, especially one prone to such dramatic metamorphoses, the question of how to approach your old material is obviously tricky. The singer has traditionally grappled with this by simply refusing to play his most famous songs, or distorting them beyond recognition.
This is absolutely his right, and there is something impressive about an artist so determined not to live as a ghostly tribute act to themselves. It must also be irritating feeling like a significant chunk of your audience might secretly prefer to be at an ABBA-style ‘Dylan Voyage’ concert, watching a 1966 hologram of Bob wearing a sleek black turtleneck and snarling his way through Ballad of Thin Man, while normally mild-mannered folk enthusiasts lose their shit and hurl biblical epithets at him.
Nevertheless, you can’t help wincing a little during the inharmonious It Ain’t Me Babe and It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, thinking about the perfection of the originals, even if the latter literally ends with the words “strike another match, go start anew”, as if warning you of his obstinacy at the suggestion he might ever stand still.
Those images of the young Dylan are so vividly ingrained into the cultural canon, it can feel almost too painful to acknowledge that someone so quintessentially young, so effortlessly brilliant, is basically not up to it anymore. Indeed, you often feel that the inevitable flood of hagiographies greeting every new release and live performance tell you more about their authors than the music itself, trepidation at their own mortality bound up with the refusal to concede that perhaps the 83-year old is, very reasonably, not quite at the top of his game.
Even among the faithful, it is telling how often praise for Dylan’s concerts are prefaced with some form of admission that the sound we are actually, physically, hearing might not be, technically, “good”. A quick selection of Facebook comments from a recent concert: “It’s inevitable that we all get older, but legendary Bob and the rest of us will always be forever young as long as his music plays on”, “You don’t listen to Bob Dylan to hear beautiful, lyrically sung melodies”, “Those who don’t get it, never will!”
This last comment reveals another truth about the self-proclaimed ‘Dylanologists’. For one thing, the man who invented the term, A.J Weberman, was notorious for digging through Dylan’s garbage, looking for clues to the meaning of his lyrics. It’s something unpleasant, obsessive, self-satisfied, and suffocatingly male, the sense that this is complicated music for sophisticated, grown-up people.
It’s also something reflected in Dylan’s own shitty attitude to women in much of his work, always the blameless victim of another deception, at best perhaps shaking his head indulgently at female naivety about the hard truths of the world. In a short essay that should be mandatory reading for all Dylan fans of this ilk, Jude Rogers notes how, in his grandiose ‘The Philosophy of Modern Song’, women account for just four of the 66 songs selected by Dylan in the book, as well as highlighting some especially nasty passages.
A younger generation of critical admirers have since emerged to help remedy the monopolisation of Dylan by one group, such as Laura Tenschert, whose podcast Definitely Dylan discusses, among many other things, the role of women in the singer’s work.
Moreover, the endless forensic dissection of the man and his music seems to mistake something quite fundamental about the kind of songwriter Dylan is, or at least was when he wrote his most famous songs. Philip Larkin’s suggestion that the words of Desolation Row are “half-baked” is probably a bit harsh, but it’s true that his writing seems drawn from flashes of inspiration, allusive, and ultimately ill-fitted to the exegesis to which it is often submitted. This is something Dylan himself seems to have been aware of, at least according to Joan Baez.
But the insistence on the transcendent genius of his every word continues, easily found in the reviews of Dylan’s recent albums; one Pitchfork write-up claimed that the lyrics to Rough and Rowdy Ways are “striking—dense enough to inspire a curriculum, clever enough to quote like proverbs”.
And there are moments of subtle beauty on that record, quite a few, but there are also moments where he says things like: “I’m first among equals/Second to none/The last of the best/You can bury the rest”, or “I’m just like Anne Frank/ like Indiana Jones/ And them British bad boys/ The Rolling Stones”. Where do these fit on the curriculum? In the words of one wise critic, speaking about the rapturous response afforded to 2012’s Tempest, “nobody wants to be clueless old Mr Jones…better to insist you know what’s happening here even when not much actually is”.
Back to the concert and the evening draws to a close with Goodbye Jimmy Reed and Every Grain of Sand. At just under two hours, it’s a short set with no encore, despite the standing ovation. Apart from a couple of murmured thank-yous, Dylan doesn’t address the crowd – but does seem to become increasingly pissed off with drummer Jim Keltner, repeatedly twisting round in his seat and raising his arms in incredulity at some apparent mishap.
As we leave, removing our phones from the magnetically-sealed pouches handed out on arrival (not helping the feeling that there is a conspiracy of silence surrounding the events inside) my only real question is: why? What bleak fuel keeps the fire burning in an embittered 83-year old multi-millionaire as he goes on and on, propelled from Prague to Düsseldorf to Stuttgart to the Wolverhampton Civic Hall? The sheer physical feat of Dylan’s touring schedule is worthy of praise alone, and the sad thing is it would all make complete sense if it seemed, just for one moment, like he was having a nice time.
If Dylan can still play to a packed room of thousands who adore him, their encyclopaedic knowledge of his work meaning that whatever weird thing he chooses to do is automatically interesting, then that’s fine. It probably doesn’t matter that others might be at a total loss to understand what all the fuss is about. But it’s also disingenuous to pretend that anyone without that hinterland would find much at all to take from an evening like Saturday.
