8
HAMILTON — Bob Dylan
At the Copps Coliseum
In Hamilton on Wednesday
‘How old is Dylan?” asked the young woman in her twenties, travelling on the westbound GO train to Hamilton for the Bob Dylan concert on Wednesday.
“In his seventies,” her boyfriend said with a hand wave as if to say, you know, timeless (actually, he's a mere sapling of 67). At the bus terminal, the grandfatherly ticket attendant said, “Enjoy the show. Bob Dylan's my inspiration.”
Inside the arena, the pattern was the same. A lot of grey and bald heads and pockets of young people with stringy beards and knapsacks and illicit cellphone cameras to capture a picture of the Father Time of alt-country. (No photographers were allowed and officially, the press wasn't invited to review.) Cross-generational fan bases are normal enough for sixties rock acts but the Dylan thing is in a different realm.
His resurgence in the last decade, masterfully orchestrated by manager Jeff Rosen (who opened the vaults to The Bootleg Series in the early nineties, produced Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home and encouraged the publication of Dylan's memoirs and the satellite radio series, as well as facilitating Todd Haynes's prismatic Dylan biopic, I'm Not There) has created a second wave, accelerated by Internet interactivity. Fans have pools guessing his set lists each night, and Dylan, who seems to be on a perpetual world tour, obliges them with a set of 15 or 16 songs, shuffling between a couple of dozen reliable favourites and the occasional wild card, drawn from that 30-year-period, from the late sixties to the late-nineties, that is now part of Dylan's back-drawer repertory.
Hamilton was the only Canadian date west of the Maritimes on the current tour, which has bounced around the Americas and Europe for months now, not, apparently, to push any particular record but because the tour bus seems to be Dylan's principal domicile. Last night, the seventies and eighties were shut out completely. The closest to a mid-period song was the opening tune, Cat's In The Well, a minor growling groove tune with a twisted nursery-rhyme lyric that closed out 1990's Under the Red Sky album.
If you haven't been attending the Church of Dylan, you be surprised to find how tight the current show is. At 20 minutes past the 8 p.m. starting time, the quintet of sidemen filed on to the stage, dressed in matching grey sports jackets and fedoras, looking like a carload of mobsters on their way to a hit. Dylan himself, wearing a lighter coloured hat and a police stripe down the side of his trousers, stood sideways on stage, playing his keyboard (not that you could hear it), standing up for every song.
He wasn't exactly what you'd think of as a front man; for those of us on the wrong side of the stage, he was more of a backside man for the entire night. He didn't say a word to the audience during the main show, finishing, appropriately, with Ain't Talkin' from the 2006 Modern Times album. Then, at the start of the encore, he introduced the band: George Recile, a veteran of the Neville Brothers bands, on drums; long-time Dylan bassist Tony Garnier; Stu Kimball on rhythm guitar; Denny Freeman on lead; and Donnie Herron on fiddle and lap steel.
Over all, the tempo might best be described as “driving,” in the sense that, you felt the motor running and the guys were in a hurry to get to the next gig. In any case, the hard-snapping snare and machine-gun rolls put a whole new bounce on the swamp-rock sound of later Dylan, and even the recent tunes that sound like thirties pop were subsumed in the up-tempo blues, rockabilly, bayou mix. Not that it wasn't fun, in a puzzle-solving kind of way.
Elvis Costello, who toured with Dylan and the Rolling Stones recently, pointed out the contrast between their performance styles. The Stones, he said, “isn't going to go anywhere you can't guess. With Dylan that's not so much the case.” Even if you maintained a 100-song Dylan play list at the forefront of your brain, it would take at least a moment, or sometimes most of a song, to figure out what the tune was.
For the first couple of songs on Wednesday night, when Dylan didn't swallow lyrics, the arena did the job. Later, when the sound mix straightened out, it was still a guessing game what song the band was playing because Dylan's melodies and arrangements have been so rejigged. Occasionally, it felt less like watching a concert than looking at laboratory techs taking apart songs and putting them back together in new ways.
It Ain't Me, Babe, for instance, had two melodies, neither of which were the original, with one of Dylan's which-note-will-he-hit-next harmonica squalls in the middle, which earned the first roar from the crowd. Part of the peculiar variation on call-and-response of the Dylan audiences is to yell out the title when they recognize it, as if it were a giant game of Name That Tune. Songs that used to be ballads – Girl from the North Country – were reformed as rockers. Fast-tempo tunes such as Rollin' and Tumblin' and Highway 61 Revisited raced like downhill freight trains.
A lot of words weren't audible but Dylan's voice was forceful and his phrasing deliberate. At times, such as the end of It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding), Dylan's late-career catarrhal prophet-in-a-cave rasp rose to a pained yelp. Rarely was the music pretty (an exception was the dainty guitar arpeggios introducing Just Like a Woman), but the momentum never flagged. Then, suddenly, it was over and the band walked off stage.
A couple of minutes later, they strolled back on and started playing something with a familiar jangle that turned out to be Like a Rolling Stone. The song, a perennial poll favourite for greatest song in rock 'n' roll, is definitely one of the meanest. That's not so true of the concert version, which sounded less like a young man's bitter wail than a grumble of empathy. (I had a mental image of a couple of winos sharing a cigarette for breakfast in the park. “So… how does it feel?”)
Finally, came the closer, the apocalyptic howl of All Along the Watchtower, pounded out like early Clash. Dylan rushing and then staggering out the lyrics in single syllables ending with an onomatopoeic pop: “I. Can't. Get. No … Relief!”
Though the spirit had nothing to do with nostalgia, especially in the two encore songs, awareness of the old-young split in Dylan's career and fan base was unavoidable. What was once hysterical and extravagant has been reinvented as sardonic humour. The power band that crashes through Dylan's old songs these days feels like a demonstration of bumptious bluster, a way of saying that the change of style is not about dwindling vitality, just a way of demonstrating the long, bruised perspective.
