Mike Futcher

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Impressions from Beneath the Lidded Eye: Bob Dylan Live in Liverpool

November 7, 2024 /

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.

A Giant on the Earth in These Days: Bob Dylan at 80

May 22, 2021 /

Whenever I am unimpressed by the latest hyped novel, film or musical act – which is something that seems to happen increasingly often – I find myself lamenting that there do not seem to be any artistic greats among us nowadays. I begin my own novelette, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, with a well-known quote from Genesis: “There were giants in the earth in those days”. Regardless of what the Nephilim truly were in the Bible – fallen angels, an ancient race, or heroes among men – the verse continues to resonate. As our culture falters under the weight of economic depression, societal deconstruction and artistic philistinism, we find ourselves looking desperately for icons who could explain it all. But whether they died out or we drove them away, the giants who could stand astride a culture seem to have vanished from the earth.

However, with Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday arriving this Monday, it is well to remember that one such great is still among us. Dylan’s legend is gigantic but, remarkably, his talent keeps pace with it. From the astonishing lyricism of the freewheelin’ folk songs of the early Sixties to last year’s remarkably fresh Rough and Rowdy Ways album – which contains the song ‘Murder Most Foul’, a show-stopping meditation on American decline and hope – Dylan has always been there to provide genuine artistic insight into our world. “I contain multitudes”, as Walt Whitman wrote – and Dylan is one of the rare few who has not only faced the yawning cultural pit, but has proved equal to the task of filling it with courageous art.

This adventure hasn’t always been smooth, and there are plenty of failed experiments in Dylan’s career that people use to try to diminish his achievement. Some criticisms are merely ignorant and superficial – his supposedly ‘nasal’ singing voice, for example, is in fact remarkably adept at interpreting songs – but others carry more weight. With that in mind, I have decided to comment on an underappreciated aspect of Dylan’s career: his forays into the written word.

In 2016, the announcement that Dylan had won the Nobel Prize for Literature was scoffed at in some quarters. Certainly the prize was heavily influenced by Dylan’s genius lyricism in his songwriting, but at the time I had already read both of Dylan’s published works and had been impressed by both, and I saw the scoffing as unwarranted. What follows are two book reviews from my Goodreads profile: a reappraisal of Dylan’s much-maligned 1966 novel Tarantula, and a further review of his 2004 autobiography Chronicles: Volume One. I hope these two pieces of writing go some way towards paying tribute to just one of this giant’s multitudes.

“Like the animal of the same name, you’re instinctively scared of ‘Tarantula’…”

Bob Dylan, Tarantula (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), 116pp. Originally published 1971.

It’s not that bad, you know. I mean, sure, when the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan in October 2016 they probably didn’t have Tarantula, the songwriter’s only published ‘novel’, in mind as an example of his excellence. It is a rambling, nonsensical stream-of-consciousness piece of absurdity and only for the most patient or obsessive of Dylan fans.

It does have a certain rhythm to it, even if it doesn’t always make sense, though we can’t blame the usual precariousness of translating song lyrics to prose for the strangeness of Tarantula. Whilst Dylan’s imagery does suffer from the lack of the “dobro’s F hole twang & climax from disappointing lyrics” (pg. 14), there is a lot of stuff in here that’s just plain baffling. A magazine article once highlighted the ‘unintelligible’ line, “now’s not the time to act silly, so wear your big boots & jump on the garbage clowns” from page 2 of Tarantula. I assume they chose this early example because they didn’t want to read any further; there’s certainly plenty of other choice absurdities (my favourite is “little girls hide perfume up their shrimps & there are no giants – the warmongers have stolen all our german measles & are giving them to the doctors to use as bribes” from page 58). There’s also evidence that Dylan didn’t want the book published at all, so we shouldn’t judge him too harshly for it. But, clearly, anybody looking for a fearsome piece of poetry along the lines of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ or the eloquent phrasing of ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune’ (both written around the same time as Tarantula) is going to find slim pickings.

That said, some nuggets do emerge from the stream-of-consciousness style. The book defies rigorous analysis, but “if youre going to think”, Dylan advises, “dont think about why people dont love each other – think about why they dont love themselves – maybe then, you will begin to love them” (pg. 109). Riffing on Woody Guthrie, Dylan writes “this land is your land & this land is my land – sure – but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway” (pp75-6). Such thoughts are in short supply here, but the rampant procession of song lyric snippets and literary references and the usual mid-Sixties Dylan stuff of lawyers and senators and mayors and garbage men all makes you realise just how much stuff we’ve got swimming around in our brains. In the introduction – or rather, the disclaimer – we are told the book is “about Bob Dylan thinking aloud” and there is more to this than apologia. As early as page 2, Dylan is talking of “bombing out your young sensitive dignity just to see once & for all if there are holes & music in the universe”, an image the streaming prose returns to on page 68, when in the “vast desert” of his head he “lets yokels test bombs in his brain”. There’s certainly value in letting a talent like Dylan use your head as a nuclear lyrical testing ground, banging away like Curtis LeMay. Like the animal of the same name, you’re instinctively scared of Tarantula, but a calmer and closer look reveals it’s rather more graceful than you first thought. But you still wouldn’t like to get too close to it.

I’m not inclined to be harsh on the flailing, hit-and-miss Tarantula because it’s clear Dylan doesn’t take himself too seriously (“Take it easy & dont scratch too much” is his life advice on page 109). The book is mischievous, playful – not artsy or pretentious. There’s a Loki vein of mischief in Dylan’s book (as in much of his music), challenging and ridiculing those who would define or label or analyse him. “To my students”, he addresses on page 107, “i take it for granted that youve all read & understand freud – dostoevsky – st. michael – confucius – coco joe – einstein – melville – porgy snaker – john zulu – kafka – sartre – smallfry – & tolstoy – all right then… now i’m giving you my book – i expect you all to jump right in – the exam will be in two weeks”. Here, Dylan is remarking on the disposability of his book. Why the hell, he asks impishly, are we reading this when we’ve still not read Sartre? You’ve got to admit, he has a point.

“[Dylan] stands astride the divide, while also hoping people with dirty feet don’t use him as a bridge…”

Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (London: Pocket Books, 2005), 293pp. Originally published 2004.

“I know that he wanted to understand me more as we went along, but you can’t do that, not unless you like to do puzzles. I think in the end, he gave up on that.” (pg. 218)

One of the few artists of the 20th century who truly stands apart, it is difficult to pin Bob Dylan down and drag him back to the more regulated cultural strata where we can understand and quantify him. This is the case even when he is speaking directly and disarmingly, as he is here, in the first (and, to date, only) volume of Chronicles, his autobiography. Like the producer Daniel Lanois, whom Dylan is referring to in the lines I’ve quoted above, eventually we give up. We cede the ground and, without irritation, just let this singular artist do his own thing.

Chronicles: Volume One is an unconventional memoir. Its five chapters deal with three different periods of Dylan’s long career: the first two with 1961, before he became famous; the third in 1970, during a fallow period; a fourth in 1989, as he tries to engineer a new sound; and then finally a fifth back in 1961-2, with Dylan on the cusp of his unique fame. The content and sequence betray in part the origins of the book (it started with Dylan writing liner notes for re-issues of the relevant albums – Bob Dylan in 1962, New Morning in 1970 and Oh Mercy in 1989), but you also get the feeling that Dylan wouldn’t have it any other way. We get nothing on the insane run of creativity from 1963-66, or on the Blood on the Tracks album, but he does briefly discuss his time rapping with Kurtis Blow in the Eighties, of all the things (pg. 219). Like Lanois, you want to understand him more as you go along, but you do have to puzzle it out.

Nevertheless, Dylan manages to cover an astonishing variety even within these peculiar parameters. I first read Chronicles about ten years ago and, thinking back on it, I seemed to remember a powerful piece of writing about Dylan’s encounter with Harry Belafonte; that barely struck me this time around. In contrast, I had all but forgotten that Dylan discussed his tour with Tom Petty (even though I was then, and remain, a huge Heartbreakers fan); this time around I found that discussion fascinating. Dylan manages to touch upon, at natural points in the narrative, various personalities he met over the years, whether trifling encounters with the likes of Jack Dempsey, Robert Graves or John Wayne, or with those who had a deeper influence on him, like John Hammond, Dave Van Ronk and Woody Guthrie.

Dylan is particularly good at explaining the influence of various musicians on his own creative outlook; Guthrie especially, though Chronicles also ends with an energizing one-two punch combo about Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Robert Johnson. He’s less good at explaining his own creativity, particularly as it appears so feverish (a passage in the chapter on Oh Mercy, where Dylan tries to explain the new songs and vocal techniques he is developing, is clearly reaching for something ineffable but struggles to reach the reader). I’ve long been trying to formulate an adage that the difference between great writers and average writers is that average writers are trying to explain simple things in a complex way (through big words, fancy techniques, etc.) whereas great writers are trying to explain complex things as simply as possible. I felt something similar in reading Dylan as he tried to express his creative direction: normal artists are trying to be special, whereas Dylan, feverishly atop the strange artistic hierarchy, is a special one trying to be normal.

Certainly, one of the most striking aspects of Chronicles, and Dylan’s personality in general, is his determination to be normal and conventional. In conversation, I often use “catch rainbow trout”, a lyric from ‘Sign on the Window’, one of his New Morning era songs, as a byword for the sort of domestic contentment Dylan is striving for. He wants out of the “rat race” (pg. 114) but is also “fantasizing about… a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard… That was my deepest dream” (pg. 117). In the Eighties, he buys ‘World’s Greatest Grandpa’ mugs (pg. 209). He never wanted to be a countercultural icon in the Sixties – “I had no ambitions to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick” (pg. 35) – and bristles at the attempts to get him to lead a movement (pg. 119). By 1970, he’s completely fed up with the hippies and gatecrashers: “I wanted to set fire to these people” (pg. 117). While never a reactionary or a get-off-my-lawn type, he’s also not the rebel agitator, “the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest”; “whatever the counterculture was, I’d seen enough of it” (pg. 120). He stands astride the divide, while also hoping people with dirty feet don’t use him as a bridge – or set fire to said bridge.

For someone with such a strange position in our culture, and who remains so enigmatic even as he carries us across the pages of a dedicated autobiography, Dylan is remarkably self-aware. He says it’s “nice to be known as a legend, and people will pay to see one, but for most people, once is enough” (pg. 147). It says a lot that, even on a second read, his legend takes on new and ever more inscrutable dimensions – most ‘legends’ don’t even stand up to a single glance. Chronicles can sound like a performance at times (“The last time I’d seen her, she was heading West” (pg. 60)), but when this happens it never appears to be out of conceit, a desire to wow the audience with stream-of-consciousness verbosity. Instead, whenever he eludes discussion of more conventional memoir topics like his family (his wife is mentioned but never named) or his relationship with Suze Rotolo (the lady on the cover of the Freewheelin’ album), it has the appearance of practiced shields and well-oiled countermeasures. He’s been throwing up these puzzles and magic signs to bamboozle interlopers for a long time now.

And why not? The interest in Dylan ought not to be in his Minnesotan hometown or his children, but in his unique creative take on things. The literary quality of Chronicles is rarely overt (an exception being “sometimes all it takes is a wink or a nod from some unexpected place to vary the tedium of a baffling existence” on page 43), but it takes technical skill to establish this voice and maintain it during a non-linear narrative. To do so with some occasional genuine insight, and maintaining the reader’s interest, is impressive. When someone comes into writing from a different artistic realm – music having its own unique language – and proves capable of writing well, it’s always an experience to be grateful for. When the world’s most renowned songwriter describes songs as “like strange countries that you have to enter” (pg. 165), you sit up and pay attention. When he describes his legendary image as “a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows” (pg. 147), you realise he’s been to so many of those strange countries which nobody knows, and has been crowned there. Our enduring fascination with his remarkable far-off conquests is never puzzling – how could we not be fascinated? – even if, partly by design, the man behind the legend remains so.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy some of my other book reviews on my Goodreads profile. I have also written a novelette called Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, inspired in part by the Genesis verse with which I opened this post. It can be found here.

The image of Bob Dylan used at the top of this post is in the public domain and was accessed via Wikimedia Commons. The book covers of Tarantula and Chronicles: Volume One are the property of their respective publishers and are considered fair use for purposes of review.

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