On not seeing Bob Dylan play at the Albert Hall this week

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.