For the first two songs, I only see Dylan’s nose, eyes, hair. Not because I’m in an unfavorable position, he’s the one who’s holed up behind the piano arranged perpendicular to the stalls, so that he can barely see it. When towards the end of the second piece he stands up and shows his torso, people cheer and applaud. This happens at a Bob Dylan concert: as he is unwilling to indulge, any sign of interaction or movement becomes a show, very normal things for everyone else turn into special gestures. I’m not telling you the roars for a “thank you” in Italian, I’m not referring to the amazement of having heard 18 songs instead of the usual 17.
Yesterday evening Dylan held the fifth last concert of the tour at the Arcimboldi in Milan, which will end in a few days in Rome. It’s not stuff for nostalgics, despite the average age I’d say over 50 of those present and the 82 years of the artist. You don’t hear a greatest hits song, unless you consider it a fan-favorite 1971 outtake or an old song about how you can be the president of the United States, but you still have to serve God. Certainly Dylan doesn’t is at the service of the public and exactly as in the other concerts of the tour, following a rigid lineup, does the whole album of 2020 Rough and Rowdy Waysexcept the 17 minutes of Murder Most Foul. He intersperses it with what English speakers call it deep cuts and towards the end he places two covers (two, not one as usual, another miracle for the Dylanians).
When he sings live, Dylan is by now totally melodic, he looks like a 120-year-old crooner who has lost the elasticity of his voice and performs accompanied by a blues group with earthy and sharp, arch-American sounds, i.e. two guitarists (Doug Lancio and Bob Britt), a bassist (Tony Garnier, in turn hidden by Dylan), a drummer (Jerry Pentecost), a multi-instrumentalist who divides his time between pedal steel, violin, guitar (Donnie Herron). Behind them, only a high red drape and around some lights, the lights are dim, there is an old club atmosphere. The poorly amplified piano is little more than stage equipment, perhaps it is there to defend Dylan from our gaze or perhaps it expresses the crepuscular and almost confidential spirit of the concert.
The monotony of the rock-blues pieces is animated by the band’s ability to enhance the dynamics, the bandleader’s expressiveness is sometimes limited by the growl with which he stretches the vowels, someone yawns in the audience. The emotion is there, and how, when Dylan interprets the slow and sometimes mysterious pieces, like The Contain Multitudes or Black Rider, that silences everyone. It hangs from Dylan’s lips, it’s as if every word comes from another place, from a remote time. The music itself seems to be the echo of a past life, at times it seems to be witnessing the slow, poetic decay of an era.
While Dylan gathers the immense cast of Rough and Rowdy Ways, i.e. half America and pieces of history crammed into an hour of music, I’m starting to think he lives in another timeline. He’s not living in the past, because there’s nothing nostalgic about this show. Unlike many of his peers or even decidedly younger people, Dylan is not interested in evoking his best years. Rather, it seems to stage a time both real and unreal in which past and present interpenetrate, in which one can be simultaneously in these 20s and in the 40s of the twentieth century, in which imaginary characters coexist with the protagonists of American popular culture, a busted and fascinating timeline in which things and characters pile up that you would not rationally put together and which serves to tell the permanent traits of human experience.
No audiovisual testimony is allowed, the phones are placed in the Yondr cases at the entrance, a service that pays the public with a five euro markup on the cost of the ticket. From Dylan there is no display of empathy, no warmth, zero communication. Yet people, except a few who are visibly bored, seem entranced by what is not a revered master, not a great old man, not a myth, not even a symbol of anything. It is an exception, one of the most extraordinary that popular music has ever had. And whoever sees it for the first, fifth or twentieth time is forced to accept the fact that on this tour Dylan repeats the same lineup, except for the surprise cover. Which is not so surprising to the Arcimboldi, since it is a matter of Not Fade Away. Soon after, however, comes an unscheduled, the prodigious eighteenth song, a cover by Merle Haggard called Bad actor, it would seem never played before by Dylan. Always free from the slavery of self-narration, from the mechanism that provides that everything that is sung has biographical value, Dylan borrows the emotions of others as the protagonist of this perfect song for a concert in which everyone in the audience would like to see a different Dylan : “Tell me which hero you want me to play, how should I feel and what should I say?”.
No encore. From the covers we pass to Mother of Musesto the dedication Goodbye Jimmy Reed it’s at Every Grain of Sand, on the “time of confession” and the moment of “most desperate need”, with the only harmonica solo of the evening that somehow closes a circle. There is Dylan who turns around and hears “ancient steps” behind him and he seems to see someone. I may be suggestible, but in all these songs about “sleeping in the same bed with life and death,” about being “three miles north of purgatory and a step away from the dead,” about having lived longer than that should have, I could not help but read a parable about the approaching end, not necessarily that of the artist. “I’m traveling light and I’m coming home”, sings Dylan at one point and this is perhaps the ultimate truth of the concert.
Only at the end, Dylan takes a few wobbly steps and goes in front of the piano to receive applause and show his full figure for the first time in an hour and three quarters. People rejoice as if he had witnessed a mystical apparition, I think of death, the girl behind me wakes up from the great sleep she’s had.
ladder
Watching the River Flow
Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine
The Contain Multitudes
False Prophet
When I Paint My Masterpiece
Black Rider
My own version of you
I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight
Crossing the Rubicon
To be alone with you
Key West (Philosopher Pirate)
Gotta Serve Somebody
I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You
Not Fade Away
Bad actor
Mother of Muses
Goodbye Jimmy Reed
Every Grain of Sand
