Bob Dylan’s Spring tour hits an English speaking venue (or Glasgow at least) and the mainstream media reviews come tumbling along.

From The Scotsman:

ANY Bob Dylan show is a clash between exceeded and dashed expectations, but to see the wily old troubadour playing his sunburst Fender Stratocaster centre-stage once more was reward enough for most.

Opener Cat’s in the Well was unremarkable, but the latest arrangement of It Ain’t Me Babe capably evoked the song’s alternate moods of melancholy and injustice, even as it evaded every effort by the crowd to join in.

But not all is positive:

The swinging Summer Days was a tedious contrast, deflating the arena’s atmosphere, but Like a Rolling Stone was a palpable release, the crowd enthused at finally being able to sing along.

Do you see anything wrong with that sentence? “The swinging Summer Days was a tedious contrast …”. It seems odd to call something “swinging” one moment and “tedious” a few syllables later, doesn’t it? It’s true that some people — like some of those who go to multiple Dylan shows per year — are kind of tired of hearing Summer Days at every single gig, but Dylan seems to have worn it as his signature song since 2001, and he shows no sign of giving it up. Why should he? It’s almost like his My Way, except that by all accounts Frank Sinatra didn’t particularly love My Way and it became a burden to him to sing at every gig (he was happy to replace it with New York, New York).

More unrelentingly positive is David Gritten in The Telegraph:

In Bob Dylan’s lilting Spirit on the Water, a song with immense charm, there’s a slightly coy couplet that goes: “You think I’m over the hill/ You think I’m past my prime.” When Dylan sang this lyric to a packed, supportive audience of Glaswegians, they roared their disbelief. And rightly so: Dylan may be in his mid-sixties, but he and a five-man band delivered a blistering two-hour set full of energy and verve.

By now, it’s a given that Dylan will reinterpret a few of his old classics in concert, rendering them unrecognisable except by their lyrics, but here it was notable how many of his most magisterial career-defining songs he chose to recast.

Thus It Ain’t Me Babe was given a shuffling, almost Caribbean rhythm. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues received a loping, bluesy treatment. It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) was reimagined as a slab of hard-driving stadium rock.

Nit-pick: Hasn’t Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues always been a loping, bluesy tune?

The writer wonders why Dylan doesn’t talk more during the shows, but concedes that he’s probably decided that concerts are “not the place for talking.” The review ends on an unambiguously admiring note:

This was a concert that reaffirmed his standing as a dynamic, questing artist, enjoying one of his most creative periods in the fifth decade of an unparallelled career. At the end of Spirit on the Water, he playfully sings: “We can have a whopping good time.” We did.

John Williamson in The Herald was also pleased:

That this is a near-vintage Dylan show - full of unexpected twists and wilful perversity - has much to do with the grace and dexterity of last year’s Modern Times album. Unusually, the set is heavily loaded in favour of recent material, with six of the album’s tracks featuring. The reflective beauty of Ain’t Talkin’ contrasts with the urgency of the band during Spirit on the Water and encore Thunder on the Mountain, but each is a bona fide highlight.

[...]

When tackling his sixties and seventies material, however, Dylan has spent 30-plus years, along with assorted musicians, messing with structures and time signatures. To a certain extent, this continues and even Like a Rolling Stone and All Along the Watchtower are hardly rendered in singalong format. Yet Dylan’s voice (clearer and more inhabited than ever) and new-found dexterity on the organ mean he seems to be having fun with, rather than cannibalising, his past. It makes for a convivial atmosphere and proves, most crucially, that Dylan is still in love with music - and, in his 66th year, reconciling his present with his substantial past achievements.

David Sinclair of The Times, however, remains cool, albeit reasonably appreciative:

He is a legend, a genius, an elder statesman of rock and all the rest of it, but Bob Dylan is not a very rewarding performer. Stuck on a stark, undecorated stage at this vast exhibition centre in Glasgow, he and his backing group lounged around with a minimum of fuss in the distance. There were no screens but Dylan was identifiable as the man in the white hat leaning over a microphone. The others wore black hats.

(That’s a joke. About hats.)

Dylan began with a guitar in his hands, his voice croaky and quavering as he mangled the intricate lyrics of Just Like Tom Thumb´s Blues and It´s Alright, Ma (I´m Only Bleeding) into barely recognisable shapes. The musicians maintained the deceptively casual air of a bar-band, as if playing in front of 10,000 people was really no big deal, and certainly nothing that called for any particular showmanship.

Switching to keyboards, Dylan tackled The Levee´s Gonna Break, a lively jump blues, and When the Deal Goes Down, a waltz-time tune with a wheezy, fairground organ part to accompany his wheezy vocal. Both were songs from his new album, but sounded more ancient than the ark. Dylan stayed put behind the keyboard for the rest of the show, occasionally pulling out a harmonica, but offering little variation in his delivery from one song to another.

Now that we have heard his Theme Time radio programmes, we know what a droll and entertaining communicator Dylan can be. But nothing was volunteered between songs, save for the most perfunctory of introductions to the five band members right at the end.

“You think I´m over the hill/You think I´m past my prime,’ he sang in Spirit on the Water, prompting a rare moment of engagement with the crowd, some of whom yelled their sympathetic disapproval of any such idea. Even so, with the best will in the world, it was hard to equate the spluttering rendition of Like a Rolling Stone with the incisive sneer of the original. They closed the show with a noisy romp through All Along the Watchtower, ending a display of genius that could be described only as deeply erratic, at best.

Well, give the reviewer his due: Dylan shows are generally erratic. He’s always reaching for something, and, inevitably, sometimes the reaching falls a little short. But this is also why it’s worth listening in the first place. When he gets there — when he and band click with a rearranged old standard and take it to heights you didn’t know existed — it’s exhilarating, and it carries the performances that might be less inspiring. As the writer said, it’s “a display of genius” that can be described as “erratic,” but who else wouldn’t give their eyeteeth to be able to display genius — if only erratically — on live stages at more than one hundred concerts per year?

I’m reminded of a genuinely precious quote from Leonard Cohen regarding Bob Dylan. You can find it in an article by Tom Chaffin, at this link.

BACK IN the early ’80s, I was having dinner with poet and singer Leonard Cohen, and we were talking about Bob Dylan. Cohen had had dinner with Dylan a few nights earlier, and we were discussing Dylan’s current slump in popularity.

He had recently embraced evangelical Christianity and produced a series of religious albums that troubled many fans.

Cohen thought the reaction unfair, and was particularly galled by a review blasting Dylan’s album, “Shot of Love,” because it included “only one masterpiece,” which was Dylan’s poignant hymn, “Every Grain of Sand.”

“My God! Only one masterpiece,” Cohen exclaimed, as we ate at a restaurant in Montreal. “Does this guy have any idea what it takes to produce a single masterpiece? I think anything he does merits serious attention.”

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