There’s what you might call a bracing antidote to Dylan adulation in Nova Scotia’s Chronicle Herald, written by one Jim Meek, who saw Bob perform up in that part of the world. It’s called “Dylan commits songicide in Halifax.”

It was a wall on inchoate sound, a melange of mumbled lyrics, an attack on melody.

Not that the musicians were bad. There was talent on the stage — you could tell during the solos.

Too bad Bob didn’t introduce the boys to each other before the concert.

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Adolescence has its charms, and Dylan has managed to sustain his for 50 years or so. (He turns 67 Saturday.)

But I did expect Dylan to display a passing attachment to his own music and incomparable lyrics.

Here was the man who had written two dozen of the best songs in pop history.

On Wednesday, he performed a few of them — notably It Ain’t Me Babe and Positively 4th Street — after putting the tunes through some kind of industrial-strength blender.

Musical rearrangements?

Heck, no — we’re talking songicide. They should add this offence to the Criminal Code.

Mind you, mine may be a minority opinion. Around the newsroom, most concert-goers gave a thumbs-up.

“Didn’t expect much, anyway,” one colleague said.

“I already knew he mumbled his lyrics,” another said.

As defences go, these were pretty lame.

Well, I think the telling thing about Mr. Meek’s point of view is his assertion that Dylan has “written two dozen of the best songs in pop history.” That he has, but the fact that many of his songs can stand as great pop songs doesn’t make Dylan himself a pop performer, strictly speaking. A pop performer is expected to go on stage and reproduce his or her hit records virtually note for note, and gets kudos for the ability to do so. Even a notable like Paul McCartney still basically does that with the Beatles’ classics. No one (apparently) wants to hear some odd new spin on Yesterday from the man who wrote it. However, Dylan has never been a pop performer in that sense. He’s always sung his songs in the moment, always adjusted arrangements and always delivered something new to his live audiences — even long before the “Never Ending Tour.” So to go to a Dylan concert and expect him to wear his guitar and harmonica and do All I Really Want To Do just like it is on Another Side of Bob Dylan is really pretty cockeyed at this point. Yet, it has to be acknowledged, a certain number of attendees at each Dylan show come with something like this expectation and leave unsatisfied. The proof that what Dylan does works, however, is his ability to keep returning to the same places year after year and to sell tickets. People are really not that masochistic. They go, and return again, because they’re enjoying what Dylan is doing, and they understand the language and purpose of his performance.

…

From Liverpool in 2001, there is a clip on YouTube of Bob and the band doing Boots of Spanish Leather. I think that it would be hard to say he ever wrote a finer song, and it would be hard to find a perfomance of it better than this one.

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