There have been two Bob Dylan events in Brighton recently. Back in August there was a fun event at the Ironworks celebrating the long and extraordinary life of the bard with a number of local performers doing imaginative renditions of the old chestnuts. It was one of those unsettling occasions that you can already see mutating into a kind of Burns Night tradition or Bloomsday or Shakespeare’s birthday, where teary-eyed devotees sit crying into their drinks, rehearsing again the life lessons they have absorbed from the works of the great man.
And then, suddenly, last Friday, there was Bob himself at nearly 85, edging his way carefully onto the stage, gripping the piano for a moment, then lowering himself gently onto the stool to do one more time what he’s always done.
Earlier we had queued outside the Brighton Centre, that concrete monolith on the beachfront, where even the coastal drizzle couldn’t dampen the air of expectation and good cheer rippling along the line as people of all ages anticipated the better world we were about to enter. Even Jack Dee, just one of the crowd, was smiling. And there was Stephen Mangan too, enjoying the buzz.
We shuffled in and gave up our phones for a couple of hours, leaving behind the horrors of the day: the woeful dance of COP 30 in Brazil, the burning of Kiev and Gaza and Sudan, the will she/won’t she budget and all that. What we got in return, for the next two hours or so, was Bob Dylan and his flawless band, holding back the years and, if not exactly raging against it, at least staring straight into the light as it dies around him.
Taking no prisoners
It’s a Bob Dylan concert so you assume everybody there knows what to expect.
Bob comes on sharp at 8 o’clock, gets settled, starts straight in, song finishes, next one starts. 90 minutes later, the last number finishes, there’s 20 seconds while the band stand stock still, no bows, no smiles, then they walk off, lights come on, everybody leaves.
Of course he didn’t say a word and most of the time I couldn’t see him well as he was sat towards the back of the stage, hidden behind the baby grand and its music stand, lit by what could have been a lamp left over from last week’s rehearsals for the Christmas panto. Apparently he played guitar one or twice but I couldn’t see that. People on the left at the front, the most expensive seats, may not have been able to see anything.
Right from the start though, from my place in the middle of the stalls, the band sounded terrific. We got a very long introductory jam in which you could hear every player and just when you were wondering whether this might be an instrumental opener, surely some kind of statement, Bob, who I couldn’t see at all at this point, suddenly barked out some lines from “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”. And there was immediately no question that he’s on it.
The first twenty minutes were electrifying. Next we get “It ain’t me babe” with Bob making it as clear as he ever has that he will only let you down. No, no, no, he yells, leaving no room for demurral, it’s definitely not me babe.
Not dark yet but it’s certainly getting there
Although it was a very similar set to the last time I saw him, nearly every song had been rearranged, some of them quite drastically. There were no old chestnuts but there were half a dozen at least moderately well-known songs albeit rearranged close to a total rewrite. He played all but one of the numbers from his Rough and Rowdy Ways album, all of them to my mind sounding better than they do on that strangely lifeless record. There was real commitment here and the whole meaning and purpose just felt much more resolved.
Apparent from the off is a dominant elegiac mood, with lines from several songs which we once would have taken to be about lurve and relationships now being delivered in a way that points to the end of life and all things. There are multiple moments where Dylan seems to emphasise the goodbye lines. All the songs on Rough and Rowdy Ways are steeped in intimations of mortality and he plays them up for all their worth. I got a particular shiver from “The killing frost is on the ground and the autumn leaves are gone / I lit the torch and I looked to the east and I crossed the Rubicon”.
And it’s the same with the old songs. In “When I Paint My Masterpiece” it can’t be made any clearer that, of course, he will never paint it. In Desolation Row he definitely wants you to know that “ Right now I can’t read too good, Don’t send me no more letters, no”. And then in “It’s all over now, Baby Blue”, familiar to all from the recent A Complete Unknown movie: “Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you.”
How long, Lord, how long?
On and on it goes. He sings these dark and ominous lyrics clearly. Idiosyncratic is too kind a word for his phrasing but he’s deadly serious and he’s taking no prisoners. He plays his harmonica a few times which the crowd absolutely love and he bashes away on his piano like his life depended on it. He growls and shouts, sometimes a sneer other times a ghostly moan. It’s a defiantly uncompromising show.
And then it was over and we filed out, back into the rain. How many more times can this go on? This man has spent his whole adult life, over 60 years, lionised above anyone else in his peer group, and pretty much in anyone else’s peer group. The film did well dramatising how, sometime in 1960, an annoying kid from Nowheresville, with his funny little walk and his funny little ticks and mannerisms, and a bit of trial and error, designed a Bob Dylan suit which he squeezed into then and is still hiding inside now. It is Bob Dylan we think we see but there’s somebody else in there too.
Whoever he is though, he is unquestionably one of the tiny handful of the greatest living artists. Along with George Bernard Shaw he is one of only two people to have won both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize. And he’s been awarded, for what it’s worth, eleven Grammys on top of that. Only last week he was presented with an honorary doctorate from the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Still on the road
Why he has to perform in near darkness is certainly a puzzle. I doubt he is trying to reduce his carbon emissions but you can see he’s enjoying playing in the shadows. He’s never been one for a cutting-edge light show but now we’ve entered the era of blackout, Bob tucked away behind his piano at the back, just doing his thing, letting the music talk.
It all adds up to an unusual, even unsettling, night. I’m not entirely sure why but now, at two days distance, I have a hunch that this was a special show. I’ve seen Bob many times but I came away from this one with a genuine sense of wonderment.
But he’s gone now, back on the road, heading for yet another joint. This was his 83rd gig this year, his 340th since restarting touring after Covid. This was the third time he’s played in Brighton, first time in 1995 then again in 2002. Next week he’s in Coventry and Leeds, then on to Killarney and Dublin.
Catch him while you can. Not to be like the vultures hoping to get him on the last time around, but to celebrate a great artist among us, the extraordinary phenomenon of his life and work.
His legacy stands like a pyramid in the desert.
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