music
“You think I’m over the hill,” Dylan sang late in his set at the John Paul Jones Arena. “Think I’m past my prime.” Lines to a lover buried deep in “Spirit on the Water,” from his most recent release, Modern Times (2006). But it was a high moment: The crowd was ready for him, shouting “No!” to each phrase, which Dylan duly followed with the remaining couplet: “Let me see what you got/ We can have a whomping good time.”
Well, we did, all of us not quite past our prime. A graying boomer audience, many with kids in tow (I had mine), seemed to resonate mostly with Zimmy’s older stuff, and nothing wrong with that—we could use a weatherman right about now. But a steady minority hung on every line of songs written in the last decade, which constituted a third of the set. In typical mysterioso fashion—I didn’t see him smile once, and he only spoke to the audience to introduce the band during the encore—Dylan juxtaposed distant past and all-too-present in a show attuned to the stubborn realities of middle age in a moment of high political anxiety.
The Bob, he is a-wailin’: Dylan and His Band delivered a stellar set of classics and modern tunes at the John Paul Jones Arena. Hell, we could even tell the new from the old!
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As the opener, Elvis Costello had gotten to these matters already. (True, the not unpleasant Amos Lee was the real opener, but he lost me with his cover of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” which was as thoroughly unconvincing as those other crimes against music, Dave Matthews Band’s cover of “All Along the Watchtower” and Green Day’s cover of “Working Class Hero.”) Thirty years after My Aim Is True, Elvis tore into one of its signature songs—“And I won’t get any older/ Now the angels wanna wear my red shoes”—like the line had taken on new meaning.
He reached back to what he said was his very first recorded number, which charmingly included snippets of Van Morrison’s “Jackie Wilson Said.” But there was also a useful insistence on the present in newer topical material about the war in Iraq, complete with cracks about our snarling Vice President. While Elvis was in fine voice and delivered a passionate set, I found myself missing The Attractions, and since pretty much Everybody Hates Dick, the political plays didn’t really stir me.
Which is why Dylan’s more oblique approach was so satisfying. Taking the stage looking like the rounders and gamblers Dylan sang about on World Gone Wrong (1993), Dylan and his band opened mean (“Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”) and closed that way (“Ballad of a Thin Man”). As is his custom on recent tours, Dylan played the first few songs on guitar and then switched to an electronic keyboard that sounded like a cross between a wheezing carny calliope and the organ on “Like a Rolling Stone”—aged and timeless, that is to say, like the Hank Williams suits he wears, or his almost spectral croak that has become a multipurpose instrument in its own right. It seemed to take a few numbers just to get the phlegm out, but by the time Dylan got to “Blind Willie McTell” and “The Levee’s Gonna Break,” he was dug in deep and sustained an astonishing pitch of intensity all through “Workingman’s Blues #2,” “Tangled Up in Blue” (with some new lyrics and recast in the third person) and the stunning “Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”
Funny how there always seems to be a fitting context for a song like “Hard Rain.” Where once he sang with a young man’s impertinence, Dylan’s older than that now, and his busy-being-born commitment to high seriousness and solid groove gives even greater political weight to material he conceived ages ago. Sure, he was outrageous and funny all night, with shout-outs to Alicia Keys (“Thunder on the Mountain”) and one-liners galore; most hilariously, his Oscar for “Things Have Changed” (from the film Wonder Boys) was perched atop an electronic console behind him. But hey, “Thin Man” was simply mesmerizing, and by the last encore, the inevitable “All Along the Watchtower,” the ace band spurred a hunched, lunging Dylan at the keys: “Let us not talk falsely now/The hour is getting late.”
