Gig Review: Bob Dylan, Rough and Rowdy at the London Palladium
In my younger years, teens through to twenties, I was a massive Bob Dylan fan. At one stage I had a stack of Dylan CDs that formed a pile that reached about to my hip height, and which constituted everything he had released up that point. However, I have never seen him live, and have been told, multiple times, that these days the quality of his live performances varies wildly. That sometimes he doesn’t seem to care, and pretty much just speaks his songs. Well, he’s 81 now, and who knows how much longer he’ll be performing, and so, when it was announced that he’d be playing at the relatively intimate London Palladium, I thought it was time to tick that box and see, just this once, what Bob Dylan has left to offer as a live performer in 2022.
The staging of Dylan’s show was aesthetically simple and beautiful. A handful of musicians, were arranged in a line across the stage, with a long golden curtain behind them. When the lights dimmed between numbers they were somehow turned into a perfect silhouette, as if they were cut out of black cardboard and stuck there, or like the ending of Bergman’s Seventh Seal, only hipper. Dylan, however, spent the entire concert hidden behind an upright piano, with only his trademark frizzy brown hair on view for the faithful to gaze at. He was so inconspicuous, in fact, that for the first ten minutes of the show I found myself staring in rapt attention at the wrong musician, who was standing to the left of the stage dressed in the kind of riverboat gambler outfit that Dylan adopted around the time of the Love and Theft album. Thankfully Dylan did step out from behind his piano from time to time to show himself to the congregation. He appeared slim, slightly bent over, wearing loose fitting, casual clothing, and had a bounce in his step. Each time he emerged, which he did three or four times, he’d take a little bow and disappear again.
His singing was actually good. Or, no, it was bad, but bad in a way that sounds good, if that makes any sense. His voice is pinched on the high notes, and turns into a breathy growl on the low notes. It’s a lived-in sound. Whiskey not wine. Or like an old jacket, that’s ratty with age, and all the better for it. Authentic is the word I’m looking for. Anyway, he didn’t just speak his songs. For this show he was fully engaged, and used what’s left of his voice to deliver whispered drama and wailing intensity.
One thing I would say, is that it’s probably best to know the songs before attending a Dylan concert. That’s because his diction is very bad, and at times it’s hard to understand what he’s signing. The sound of his voice is thrilling and different, but it’s almost impossible to make out the words. Occasionally a clever turn of phrase slips through, and one can make out the choruses which are simple and memorable… “I contain multitudes…” “I have crossed the rubicon….” But beyond that it’s just sounds. Unfortunately for me, Dylan played a large number of songs from his recent albums, which left me a little at sea. This was certainly not the best way to hear his new work for the first time.
The songs I did know were completely re-invented by the band. I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight, which sounds like a country waltz in its original iteration on the John Wesley Harding album (1967), here started off with a lusty piano vamp, Dylan hissing the lyrics like a seedy barroom chanteuse, before the guitars kicked in turning it into the kind of jittery Spanish-inflected rock that one could imagine being played in a Mexican bordello. Dylan also found a moment to play Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s American songbook classic, That Old Black Magic, which gave one or two people the opportunity they’d been waiting for, to lift up and visit the loo, but it made me laugh aloud with pleasure, and feel a bit sorry for (superior to) the kind of Dylan fans who reject music of this sort. Perhaps the most impressive re-invention of a song, however, was Gotta Serve Somebody, which on the album Slow Train Coming (1979), is smooth and slightly synthetic sounding, but here became something hard-driving, relentless to the point of incandescence.
“We might have been attending a sermon, except for the explosions of applause that broke the tension at the end of every song.”
Throughout all of this the audience remained seated, silent, full of concentrated attention, as if desperate to drink in every word (understood or not) and every sound. We might have been attending a sermon, except for the explosions of applause that broke the tension at the end of every song. Then all too soon the gig began winding to a close. Dylan introduced each member of his band, and quoted his old friend John Lennon’s famous line about rattling our jewellery. There was just one more song and then it was all over. For the last time Dylan emerged from behind his piano, holding up his hand as if to tell his audience – now on their feet, pouring out their admiration in full – to stay calm. It was a difficult gesture to interpret. After a few moments, he and his band had left the stage. We stamped our feet, we cheered, we screamed “encore,” but there was no encore. Bob Dylan had gone and that was that. It was a pleasure to share the same oxygen with the great man for one short evening’s entertainment. Box ticked.
