Dylan, Like The Beams Of A Balance, Is Always Varying

I had an absolute blast writing this review.  The gig was such great fun (I think Bob was having more fun than everyone), and whilst 20% of the time I was laughing at some clunker of a wrong note or something, the other 80% of the time I was giggling with joy at the playfulness of it all.  Sincerely, every old rocker's gigs should be like this, hats resolutely off. to the man.

Archivists can note that I don't actually know who the promoter was; there wwre probably about 17 involved.  Hats off to the PR person for getting a brace of guest passes for little old Nutshaft, though, that was brilliant.

BOB DYLAN, NEW THEATRE, 4/11/22

The crowd pouring out of The New Theatre seemed to be split on whether this was a good or bad gig. Certainly it was gloriously odd. That Bob elected to play piano throughout was eyebrow-raising, but that he sat at a rickety old upright heroically out of tune with the backing quintet was a free temporary facelift. Even weirder, the nearest mic to the piano appeared to be 6-feet away, leading to a fuzzy, sub-aquatic mix straight from a David Lynch soundtrack (anyone who thought they’d been dreaming when they saw the gig announced might suspect they’d never woken up). And Bob did nothing to dispel the unreality, striking the ivories with authoritative spareness like Thelonious Monk via Les Dawson, and keeping the band on their collective toes with odd rhythms. Songs from the last album were played relatively straight – although they already sound like beautiful half-forgotten ghosts of drawing room ballads – but old tracks bore almost no resemblance to the original composition: they played “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” like they’ve never heard it before, and “Gotta Serve Somebody” like they’ve never heard any song ever, words crammed into an ill-fitting melody like a Nightshift writer trying to fit into their teenage jeans. These are not cock-ups, but deliberate playful decisions, risks that are entertaining regardless of whether they pay off.

 Received opinion is that Dylan’s voice is a batrachian croak for which the concept of individual notes is a faded memory. Certainly, for much of 1992’s Good As I Been To You he sounds as though he’s actually dying in the vocal booth (and then come back as a tipsy zombie for 2009’s inexplicable Christmas In The Heart), but after a decade of studying the urbane stylings of Sinatra, his voice has become a warm, avuncular buzz somewhere between Bing Crosby, Tom Waits, and Vincent Price. His singing tonight is sweet and melodic, and even if the mudpie mix means we catch maybe 10% of the words, his timing is impeccable, by turns dramatic and hilarious. Wayward phrasing is his super-power; maybe he was bitten by some radioactive rubato in Greenwich Village.

It’s a joy to see an elder statesman onstage who neither plays everything fixed-grin safe, nor cynically runs out the clock with half an eye on their bank balance. If this were a Dylan tribute, you’d bottle them offstage; if this were a new act, you’d be raiding their Bandcamp on the bus home. Fixing any of the oddities would have made this a better gig. But being a better gig would have made this a much worse gig.