Sunday 3rd November 2024

M&S Bank Arena, Liverpool, England

To review a Bob Dylan concert is to risk playing a fool’s game. For decades, these events have been known to be strange beasts; musically opaque and lacking in showmanship, with radically altered song arrangements and raspy, often barely comprehensible vocals from a now 83-year-old Dylan who often stays hidden from view behind his piano. Criticise these well-documented flaws – or features – and you run the risk of being seen to “not get it”, or to be disrespecting an all-time legend who, as his Nobel Prize citation correctly judged, “created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”. But to praise the events, or massage their jarring effect, often makes a reviewer comes across as esoteric or wilfully blind (or deaf), the review an embarrassed attempt to throw pants on a beloved but ageing emperor who is exposed naked on the stage.

For my part, I have little inclination to rehash the well-known pros and cons of a night of Bob Dylan live, suffice to say that they all crossed my mind on this night at the M&S Bank Arena in Liverpool. I can only offer my thoughts from having witnessed the live experience myself. These impressions are honestly given; the praise I give is not meant to be blind or effusive, and the criticism is not meant to be scornful or disparaging. I am a big Bob Dylan fan – I even liked Tarantula – but I don’t think he should be exempt from criticism, or nailed in place on a pedestal whenever he’s in danger of falling off. Although there is a cachet in having been to see the living legend in the flesh, I had no inclination to go to the zoo to gawp at a tired and ageing lion behind the bars, hammering out all the old hits. I made the hour-long drive to Liverpool filled with the same hope I attend all my gigs – to experience moments where I am turned, artistically and profoundly, by an artist who can see terrain that I cannot. And thankfully, for all the peculiarities of the Bob Dylan experience, that is what I received.

It is sight which is, quite literally, my first impression of the night. I arrive early at the cavernous arena and am well-settled in my seat by the time the lights go down and Dylan and his band come out on stage. (There is no opening act tonight.) The stage itself is dimly-lit, with only half-a-dozen warm yellow lights speaking meekly out into the crowd of thousands. Like everyone else, my eyes search for Dylan himself, but can see only a handful of indistinguishable silhouettes backlit by the small and insubstantial bulbs. By process of elimination, we can identify him as the outline of a profile hunched behind a piano on centre-stage, a microphone stand extending towards him. He will occasionally step out from behind the piano tonight, making him more identifiable, but he always shuffles back into the enveloping dark again.

It is a disappointment; the lighting an unnecessary contributor to audience dissatisfaction, particularly for those of us towards the rear of the vast venue. Throughout the night, I try to make a virtue of it, telling myself that it allows me to focus on the sounds, but such are the peculiar aural qualities of Dylan’s live music that I find myself sometimes struggling with that too. I also remind myself that this is the same sort of cope I had often identified in Dylan reviewers, my own throw of the dice in that fool’s game I warned myself of earlier. So too is the temptation to excuse this deliberately distant, low-lit figure as further evidence of Dylan’s inscrutability. But the honest truth is that, game as I am to take Dylan on his own terms, too often tonight I find my eyes and ears working overtime to filter out what is happening in front of me. My experience of the man and his music is at a significant remove.

As for the music itself, it is a mixed bag, though better than I had feared from Dylan’s live reputation. I realise that is not the most ringing endorsement one can give, but the long, ominous bluesy intro that announced the opening ‘All Along the Watchtower’ got my foot tapping and reassured me that, although the path may not always be smooth, there would indeed be a path. ‘Watchtower’ was otherwise unrecognisable as the song I knew both from John Wesley Harding and from Jimi Hendrix, while the radically changed arrangement and rasping vocals of the second song meant I only identified it as ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ towards its end.

The audience is on surer ground with the newer songs from the Rough and Rowdy Ways album, which are more recognisable in both their arrangements and their vocals – a fact which in itself supports the argument that Dylan’s peculiar approaches to other songs are a conscious choice (however inscrutable), rather than a collapse of skill or talent. ‘I Contain Multitudes’ is next up, followed by ‘False Prophet’, and illustrate the sound that Dylan and the band conjure tonight. Bluesy guitars are a persistent feature, as are chuntering rhythms underpinned by the drums of the legendary Jim Keltner, who colours the loose music tonight with tight, subtle drum fills. Dylan himself will bash away enthusiastically at the piano, sometimes out of sync with the rest of the band – an acquired taste (to say the least) that is not helped by the fact his piano comes through the amp much louder than any other instrument.

Nevertheless, Dylan’s rough and rowdy approach to the songs does sometimes pay dividends. A barely-identifiable ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’ is nevertheless fascinating, as it opens with a Marc Ribot-style guitar line that reminds me of the Tom Waits song ‘Hoist That Rag’. ‘Black Rider’ starts slowly and its lyrics are delivered almost as spoken-word by Dylan.

I didn’t find much to remark upon in ‘My Own Version of You’, but ‘To Be Alone with You’ sees Dylan happily bashing away on the piano, and its up-tempo qualities are brought back down by the slow and bluesy ‘Crossing the Rubicon’. There is a sense of dissonance, of experimentation, of a looseness not so much akin to a jam session but more of an artist sifting through the raw material of a song. Dylan’s reverse-alchemy, unpacking a complete song back into its elements, can be jarring and sometimes unsuccessful, but it is interesting. At the risk of sounding like one of those coping mechanisms I accused other reviewers of using above, I peered at the hunched figure on the distant stage, a dark velvet curtain hanging low and lidded over the sparse lighting, and saw a restlessly bored genius, indifferent after sixty years of performing, who was looking to travel into those creative recesses where the music came from and offer us a glimpse, or at least a facsimile, of how it occurs.

Anyone who has tried creating art themselves in an honest way knows this creative place, its loneliness and its unpleasantness and how things seem to emerge out of nothing in that darkness where the muses dwell. Dylan has recreated this, and like a scientist seeking to hold a fundamental particle of creation for a fleeting moment of laboratory measurement, it is often a failure.

But when it is captured, as in the next song, it can be surprisingly exhilarating. ‘Desolation Row’ is one of Dylan’s most remarkable songs, and as Jim Keltner’s fast-paced drums begin to rumble, we in the audience can already recognise it as remarkable on the night. It feels better than it perhaps is, because the audience has had to work for it, but there is some fine harmonica from Dylan (bookended by some, well, enthusiastic piano-playing) and the song is well worth the ovation it receives at its end.

‘Key West (Philosopher Pirate)’, which follows, is interesting and lucid, but its sparse and slow arrangement leads to a bit of a lull. While movement has been happening in the crowd all night, the stream of people heading back and forth down the aisles becomes distracting. Like ants on a fallen Cornetto, they scuttle out through the lighted tunnels into the concourse, to buy beer and to piss and to buy beer in order to piss again. Dylan’s prohibition on mobile phones (we have had to lock them away in pouches provided by stewards at the entrances, so there are no photos or videos of tonight) seems to be a quixotic folly. The sort of people who consider it an outrage to be parted from their phones for two hours of live music will just find other ways of disrupting their fellow concert-goers.

Unfortunately, I’ve grown accustomed to poor concert etiquette, even as I still fail to understand why people would pay so much money for a show and then not pay any attention to it, but Dylan’s loose, disengaged approach does highlight the problems that can arise when the audience is not all-in. Perhaps that engagement is never possible given the oddities of a Bob Dylan live set, particularly in a large and impersonal arena, but I find I cannot entirely blame the waning interest of many in the crowd. While I remain engaged with the music, despite the distractions, it has required significant effort to do so in the low lighting and through oscillating arrangements and rasping vocals. Dylan live is a cerebral experience with fluctuating rewards.

It’s a shame that a lot of people seem to have decided the arena is merely an expensive and inconvenient boozer, because Dylan, who has been producing remarkable moments since the early 1960s, still has a few more moments of real worth to give us tonight. ‘Watching the River Flow’, which follows ‘Key West’ builds heavily with Dylan’s piano and also incorporates his evergreen harmonica sound. Bob’s cacophony works well for this song – or proves resilient to it, depending on your viewpoint – and it is a fine moment.

Its follow-up, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’, is another radically different arrangement, a slow number with plaintive vocals that silences the crowd. The song from 1965, often interpreted as the newly-electric Dylan turning his back on his acoustic years, is a reminder that Bob’s determination to go his own way is no recent development. He follows it with the slow groove of ‘I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You’, a lull that continues when he steps out from behind his piano to sing ‘Mother of Muses’, microphone in hand.

Another new song follows, although ‘Goodbye Jimmy Reed’ sounds much different from the album version. Tonight it is a higher tempo song, almost like a boogie, with some good guitar from the band. The arrangement hides the lyrics, but the music blossoms.

A distinctive guitar riff opens ‘Every Grain of Sand’. The peculiar flow of the set and the lack of showmanship tonight has failed to communicate to me that this will be tonight’s final song, and it is only at its end, when the lights come up, that I realise it is. Nevertheless, I have drunk the moment in, not because it is the last song I have heard – and perhaps will ever hear – Dylan sing live, but because it is special in itself, another of those moments I mentioned where a singular artist has managed to turn me onto unseen terrain. ‘Every Grain of Sand’ is delivered elegantly – it is one of the few songs tonight that doesn’t seem to end with an emergency stop, with Dylan the instructor tapping on the dashboard – but most remarkable is the harmonica sound that Bob provides in the song. It is one of his finest and most enduring qualities; the sound he creates with the instrument now in this Liverpool arena in 2024 is as clear and distinctive as it was on the songs of the Freewheelin’ album in 1963.

The song ends, and the crowd applauds. For all Dylan’s oddities, the ovation is deserved, and he comes to stand out front and centre on the stage for the first time. Exposed under the lights, that carefully lidded eye lifted a little higher to see, and coming so soon after those distinguished harmonica notes, we are reminded how bright this star once shone, and how it will one day fade for good, never to be replaced. The night’s impurities – the ragged vocals, the over-balanced piano, the occasional bum note – fade into insignificance, leaving only the finest moments. The harmonica on that final ‘Every Grain of Sand’. ‘Desolation Row’. ‘Watching the River Flow’. Such things have been worth seeking, even if we do have to parse through every coarse grain of sand.

Setlist:

(all songs from the album Rough and Rowdy Ways and written by Bob Dylan, unless noted)

  1. All Along the Watchtower (from John Wesley Harding)
  2. It Ain’t Me, Babe (from Another Side of Bob Dylan)
  3. I Contain Multitudes
  4. False Prophet
  5. When I Paint My Masterpiece (from Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. II)
  6. Black Rider
  7. My Own Version of You
  8. To Be Alone with You (from Nashville Skyline)
  9. Crossing the Rubicon
  10. Desolation Row (from Highway 61 Revisited)
  11. Key West (Philosopher Pirate)
  12. Watching the River Flow (single)
  13. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue (from Bringing it All Back Home)
  14. I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You
  15. Mother of Muses
  16. Goodbye Jimmy Reed
  17. Every Grain of Sand (from Shot of Love)

My reviews of Tarantula and Chronicles, Vol. 1 by Bob Dylan can be found here.

My other concert reviews can be found here.