When I was 16 or thereabouts I saw Bob Dylan and the Band on the world-changing "Judas" tour of 1966. 1998’s Bootleg Series Volume 4 offers a check for non-believers on just how astonishing and liberating those performances were.
But here we are in 2003, at son Richard’s suggestion, boring our way down the M1 to Sheffield. It’s Dylan time again. Obviously he is old and crack-voiced and washed up and living on past glories to pay his tax bills, alimony, child support and whatever else. But we’re going because Richard loves the man’s recordings and it would be nice to pay homage to the old guy.
But the traffic turns the short drive from Leeds into a three hour grind. We get there. Miraculously, with the house lights still up and an uncanny feeling that we’re arriving at a late starting Premiership game. Beer and hotdogs have to be sold and the stragglers have to marshalled in. So we’re spun round the cattle-pen fencing and down to our seats by cow-eyed attendants. We sit, the lights go down, 12,000 snap out of their seats like they’d been slapped and for two hours there’s nowhere on earth you would rather be.
Just like 1966, you really knew how good Dylan was, and just like 1966, you’re stunned into the realisation that he’s even better than you thought. The recordings go round and round the same however often you play them. But Dylan as a performer is so far ahead of the game that 40 years on, we’re still chasing to keep up with him. He’s playing brilliant covers of his own best songs, transforming them for one evening only into the most profound and wonderful experiences you could want.
He starts with Maggie’s Farm as a quiet warm up (for us, not him). It seems subdued and introspective. He’s too far away at the end of the Ice Hockey Arena. And then a new song sets off with a luxury pedal steel guitar … well, it seemed like a new song. But "It’s All Over Now Baby Blue" has turned up with another new suit of clothes. Tragically beautiful. Emotionally ravaging. Floods of tears. This is THE stuff.
"Cry A While" is the first of four from the recent "Love and Theft" album. There’s a meaty guitar break with Dylan off for a relaxed wander from his electric piano command desk on a tour of inspection: and the band just storm it. That two speed thing works a treat. Rock and trucking Roll or what?
"Desolation Row" stands up on a high cliff and growls at the pretenders on the beach below. The band’s suppressed power threatens to burst out into a full throated assault at any moment. But for now they just rein it in and let you know it’s going to go up a click or two with each number. The Bob Dylan Blues and Western Swing Band. (or "and His Band" as the posters and T shirts have it) are as good for 2003 as The Band were for 1966. And The Band were immense.
But it’s Dylan’s voice that makes it Dylan. Dylan has never been the Kermit the Frog of legend. People who crave the unobtrusive and shun anything that draws attention to the truth will never get the fact that Dylan is a mighty fine singer. He takes a song from out of the sky and puts it straight into your soul. And he’s still trampling over boundaries, mixing all-out singing and sharp plain talking within single words, stretching vowels, spitting consonants, sighing, swooning, rasping, barking, cajoling and hypnotising – all with a little "tonal breath control". And it will all be different for tomorrow’s show. He plays some harmonica on Desolation Row too, like there was nowhere else to play it.
"It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)" has "don’t hate nothing at all except hatred" and a tough-as-nails John Lee Hooker kind of riff. And of course, Princes George and Tony get their lights-up howl at the naked President line. In its glittering train, a barely recognisable "Girl From the North Country" traipses in next, looking and sounding a Christmas Special, with upright string bass and finger style guitar chiming sweet as you like with Dylan’s electric piano arpeggios. This is grown-up nostalgia that hurts.
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But we have a rock and Roll band on stage, so next it’s "Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee" done in the light-fingered, heavy-bottomed rockabilly swing style that Mark Knopfler always wanted to do but never quite managed. A cracker. Then the mournful and beautiful story song "Man in the Long Black Coat", followed by an abrasive "Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again, thick with Duane Eddy guitar and pulsing with floor tom battering.
The set has been ramping up tune by tune. At this just-beyond-mid-point, we get the fiercest, raspingest spat-out lyrics so far. We get hard-blades-on-granite guitar with a stupidly good rendition of "Highway 61 Revisited". The power of the song and the band eclipse everything else tonight as their sheer weight passes over the sun. It’s unwinding from now on out.
But there’s still "Every Grain Of Sand", "Honest With Me", and on to a pause before a Mexican cantina kind of band ambles into an urbane and resigned retrial of "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll". The shocking softness of it gently mocks us, till the rage of the last chorus is entirely our own - no cheap protest slogan given to us by this year’s token conscience-bearer. My notes say "tough love" and "visionary".
"Love and Theft’s" "Summer Days" charges across the dance floor and demands that you experience that great feeling of swinging a laughing partner with your arms. Joyous stuff. (This is Dylan, for God’s sake … and he’s having a party tonight, twinkling like an elf in his black clothes as he skips across the stage or dances at his piano with a grin that you can see at 70 yards.) The band lift it higher and higher, and the break is in sight.
Thunderous applause, a short gap and the three-song compulsory encore gives us "Cat’s in the Well", to keep the party spirits up, "Just Like a Rolling Stone" because everyone wants it and "All Along the Watchtower" because it’s the best short rock song ever written. "Rolling Stone" is sad and lonely, stranded by it’s fame and bruised by its own iconic iconoclasm. "Watchtower" leans towards the Hendrix treatment, but retains its gaunt, apocalyptic clarity. With winds beginning to howl, once again and the Princes keeping their narrow-eyed view, this is sobering stuff.
And Richard, at 16 or thereabouts, has seen Dylan for the first time. It feels that way for me too. I had forgotten, to my shame, that Dylan is no mere entertainer.
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