By the time this post goes up, Bob Dylan will have played his the last of his tour dates at the Royal Albert Hall. As he is 83 years old this could yet be his last live appearance in Britain. I am a little disappointed and wistful not to have there, given that I am a fan of more than 40 years and virtually a Dylan completist in terms of recorded music.
In truth,
though, only a little disappointed. I didn’t try that hard to get
tickets. Although I had recently sort of made my mind up to go and see Dylan again if he
toured Britain, I took no steps to find out when shows would be announced or
tickets go on sale and it was all sold out by the time I cottoned on. In truth, I
wasn’t sure I really wanted to go. As his Bobness has a reputation as at best
an inconsistent live performer, and as on the two occasions I did see him, in
1981 and 1989, he was excellent, I almost subconsciously decided back then to
quit while I was ahead.
Also as the
years have gone on he seemed less and less likely to play songs from the era I like
best, namely those from about 1978 (Street-Legal)
to 1990 (Under the
Red Sky). This is not quite so eccentric a view as it might once have
been considered. There was a conventional wisdom that Dylan’s great period was
the 1960s and this just about continued up to Blood on the Tracks
and Desire before a serious loss of form that
continued until 1997’s Time
Out Of Mind which was seen as a return to greatness and his subsequent
work has been met with a succession of five-star reviews.
I started
listening to Dylan, though, in the late 1970s after my Dad borrowed Street-Legal
off a colleague at work who was a real obsessive. This was the time of the
1978 tour, Dylan’s first visit to Britain for several years. So his stock
seemed quite high, but it then took a nosedive after his conversion to Christianity,
leading to the ‘Jesus Trilogy’ of Slow Train Coming,
Saved and Shot of Love over the
subsequent three years.
While I had managed
to hear the sixties classics and become a Dylan fan, it was a bit awkward when these
new albums came out with their decidedly uncool and untrendy Christian message.
I still bought them (or received them as presents) but it didn’t do to be too
enthusiastic. Even Dylan enthusiasts didn’t like the new stuff and longed for a
return to secular material. If you wanted raspy-voiced harmonica-playing American
singer-songwriters you listened to Bruce Springsteen and bought The
River not Saved.
So I went
along with this, all the while thinking that the Christian albums actually sounded
rather good. After all Mark Knopfler, who it was OK to like, played some mean
guitar on Slow Train Coming, the tunes were memorable, Dylan’s singing and
backing group were as good as they every had been and the words were at least interesting.
Maybe there was a bit too much Jesus, even for someone with my mild Christian sympathies.
But you didn’t have to agree with it to like it. For me, 1981’s Shot of Love
album was a happy compromise, one or two overtly religious songs, some with
Christian themes but less overt proselytising and some straightforwardly
secular material.
At this point
I had my first experience of seeing Dylan live, at Earls Court in 1981. The
good news was that unlike in his North American concerts of a year previously
he was now playing some of the old stuff, not just Christian material. But
tickets didn’t sell all that well and I can remember hearing an impromptu
interview with Dylan on Capital Radio after he rang the station, presumably to drum
up sales. In the end it was a great night, with a slug of some of the better
recent material and a good smattering of his 1960s classics, which took up more
than half the setlist. It was only slightly marred by missing my train home and
getting in big trouble (it was my 15th birthday and one of the first times I
was allowed out into London for the evening without adult supervision). Anyone
who wants confirmation of how good he sounded during this tour should listen to
the live tracks from the previous and following evening on the Trouble No More
official bootleg album. Great voice, great band, great choice of songs!
At this stage
I expected Dylan to continue the move towards more secular themes tinged with
Christian sensibilities. In fact his career took another strange twist. There
were stories that he had abandoned his Christian faith and returned to Judaism.
With the moralising certainty of a teenager (‘I was so much older then’) I felt
a sense of betrayal, not because I shared his version of Christian faith (which
I didn’t) but because I had persevered with him through these difficult years
and this new departure made his Christianity seem insincere and superficial –
like a career move gone wrong.
Anyway, when
the first ‘post-Christian’ album Infidels came out in 1983, it was touted as a
return to secular Dylan and those who refused to listen to the Jesus trilogy
seemed to love it. This seemed odd to me since, as the title suggests, it was
if anything more preachy than Shot of Love and more like the fire and
brimstone of Slow Train Coming, even if the biblical references were now
to the Old Testament not the New, it seemed to include warnings about false prophets,
and odd negative references to moon travel. If the outtakes Death is not The
End, Lord Protect My Child and Foot of Pride had been included it
could have passed for being the fourth instalment of Dylan’s God Quartet rather
than a step away from religious material. I was interested to hear an edition
of the
Jokermen podcast that referred to Dylan having a long Christian period lasting
from Street-Legal to Infidels, which has some validity especially
given the former’s references to Lucifer, Armageddon and St John.
In the
intervening decades Dylan’s Jesus years have had enjoyed some sort of
rehabilitation, perhaps aided by their being long in the past, a relatively
short episode in a long career and capable of being regarded as Dylan’s take on
gospel the way Nashville Skyline is his take on country. This was helped by the
Trouble No More box set that came out in 2017, featuring outtakes and
live performances from the 1979–81 years. To the uninitiated or the gospel
refuseniks it gave a new sense of the power and excitement of his performances
in these years. Whichever way, even though none of the albums of the time quite
warrant the title masterpiece, partly due to Dylan making poor choices of which
tracks to include and to omit, this remains my favourite period of his music.
So in
thinking about whether to see him live this year I was initially encouraged by
seeing that Dylan is regularly concluding his set with my favourite of his
songs, Every grain of sand, which is surely the greatest one from the Christian
years. Even then I had mixed feelings. He has developed this way of growling
out songs as if reciting a shopping list. With its profound lyrics that dwell
on on faith and doubt, life and mortality, Every grain of sand is a song
for the ages. I feared he would ruin it, and indeed I found at least one version on Youtube where that was the case. Yet I also found this version
(linked to in the picture above) which is powerful, haunting and profound. Maybe
the possibility of hearing such a performance should have made me make more of
an effort to go this time. I can but hope that he will come round again, he
will keep the song in his set, that I can get a ticket and that he will deliver
a good rendition.
