The Spectator - What a remarkably bad electric guitar player Bob Dylan is

 

(personal underlines)

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What a remarkably bad electric guitar player Bob Dylan is

I have rarely known anyone – certainly not anyone charging on the door – play with such careless conviction

Bob Dylan in 2009. Photo: Harry Scott / Redferns

Finally, a taste of the authentic Bob Dylan live experience. On the two previous occasions that I’ve seen Dylan, in the early 2000s and again two years ago, he was disappointingly well-behaved for a man with a reputation for operating a scorched-earth policy towards his catalogue.

Once upon a time, seeing Dylan live was a high-wire activity. Those days are long gone, but on the second night of two shows in Edinburgh, some little wildness crept back in. During the opening pair of songs, which were gradually revealed to be on nodding terms with ‘All Along the Watchtower’ and ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’, it was like watching an old bar band warming up after a long break from the trenches. There were missed notes, dropped beats, rogue chords, halting rhythms. The band hovered around their master in a semi-circle, like nervous footballers awaiting a half-time bollocking. I looked at Dylan, looked into my notebook, and wrote ‘Brian Clough’.

It was precarious, but the music crackled. Dylan is still touring his most recent record, Rough and Rowdy Ways, and the sound is getting closer to conveying the intent in the album title.

When I saw him last, in Glasgow on Halloween 2022, there was an elegiac note to proceedings. He was 81 then and it felt like it might be his last rodeo. Well, he’s 83 now and in Edinburgh seemed rather more energised. The elegant poise of the 2022 show had been worked over. Jim Keltner on drums added heft and punch. The guitars were looser, crunchier. We might say that Dylan has ‘gone electric’ once again.

With the stately ‘I Contain Multitudes’, the set settled in. There was a surreal kind of theatre to it all. Dylan spent most of his time seated behind a grand piano, positioned not side-on to the audience, as is customary, but facing us. Sitting in the front and centre of the stalls, for the first two songs, all I could see was the top of his curly mop. When he played guitar he sat on his piano stool and turned his back to the audience, most likely in shame.

Dylan is a quite remarkably bad electric guitar player; I have rarely known anyone – certainly not anyone charging on the door – play with such careless conviction. Later, he leaned on the piano, so we could at least see him. From time to time, he shuffled out from behind it and sang into a hand-held mike, Vegas-style.

This was the night after the US election, but there was no comment made, either directly or obliquely, to events back home. Dylan liberated himself from that kind of thing a long time ago. There were no protest anthems and precious few classics. More than half the songs were from Rough and Rowdy Ways. He could happily drop two or three of them, but that’s all. The dusky drama of ‘Crossing the Rubicon’ and shimmering beauty of ‘Key West (Philosopher Pirate)’ were a match for anything he has done, revealing new ways of conjuring old magic.

We got ‘Desolation Row’, its ribbons of imagery unspooling incongruously over a fast tom-tom surf beat. ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ was heavily deconstructed, not necessarily to its benefit, while a closing ‘Every Grain of Sand’ was played straight. It was deeply poignant, despite the fact that for its duration a large man with a grey mullet seemed poised to punch a guy sitting behind him. Five metres away, Dylan rolled on, apparently oblivious. I’m not sure he noticed any of us, actually. It felt as though he would have played exactly the same show to an empty room.

It was a fine performance but the usual caveats and disclaimers should be made. Anyone coming to Dylan cold, as it were, would surely have been baffled. His piano playing was wayward and often knocked the terrific band out of its stride. His singing was surprisingly good – for an 83-year-old Bob Dylan. Much of the time it was an unintelligible rasp placing the emphasis in weird places, but that’s not news to anyone.

By now, we will all be aware of our personal tolerance levels for his eccentricities. To a casual listener, the busker performing all the big songs outside the venue before and after the concert probably sounded much more like the real thing than the man inside, but I have a feeling that’s exactly the way Dylan likes it.