167. Bob Dylan
Wembley Arena
8 May 2017
Seeing Bob Dylan live in 2017 is a bit like going to visit a famous old lighthouse: you know it’s still shining; you just can’t always tell in which direction it is going to light up. It’s been over fifty years since he first plugged in and divided a folk festival in half, but here he is, standing under a haze of yellow light at Wembley Arena, continuing his lifelong quest to see just how far he can stretch the concept of “interpretation” before it snaps.
You don’t go to a Dylan gig expecting Dylan, not the Dylan in your head, anyway. You go expecting a man in a hat, standing at a piano, playing music that vaguely resembles his own songs, while you spend the entire night quietly asking yourself what song this is. Yet, it’s still magic. Sort of.
Dylan shuffled onstage with his current band of immaculately dressed desperadoes, all waistcoats, bolo ties and solemn determination and launched into a set that was part jazz club, part travelling medicine show. The man himself barely said a word. He just adjusted his hat and went straight into a reworked “Things Have Changed”, which, given his general approach to performance, felt like a warning.
Let’s be honest: you don’t come to his concerts for clarity. You come for texture. The voice, once a nasal whip, now a gravelly croak, rasped through the air like a radiator on its last legs. Half the words were inaudible, but the ones that landed carried weight.
Somewhere around “Highway 61 Revisited,” the band found a groove so tight it could’ve been lifted from a Tarantino soundtrack. The crowd was a mix of die-hards and pilgrims. They watched in reverent silence, as if afraid they might frighten the old wizard.
Yet, amidst the reworkings and rasp, there were moments of transcendence. “Desolation Row” arrived like a ghost. “Blowin’ in the Wind” was bruised and magnificent. He closed with “Ballad of a Thin Man,” his voice cutting through the murk with that sly venom: “something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is”, perhaps a song that once again is a prescient reflection of the misunderstanding, even weaponisation, of counterculture in these strange times. I don’t believe for one minute that Dylan chose this closer randomly.
As the lights came up, Dylan nodded once, shuffled off without a word. The man remains an enigma wrapped in a riddle, wrapped in a very expensive suit. He doesn’t perform for us anymore. He performs in spite of us, and that makes it all the more fascinating.