BY Anne Margaret Daniel, New School
I like life on the road. It’s a lot easier than civilian life . . .
You kind of feel like you’re in a motorcycle gang.
—Leonard Cohen
Starting my autumn 2023 Rough and Rowdy Ways tour diary for the Dylan Review thinking about Canada’s own laureate, I hummed “Famous Blue Raincoat” to myself as I flew to Toronto on a sunny day. Whether due to global warming or the last lingering fingers of summer, it was glorious in mid-October on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. The Thursday of the first show was downright Aegean, and as I roamed the town and got some new freckles, I hoped Dylan and the band had a little time to do so, too. Everything felt relaxed and, as the man now sings, doggone beautiful, until I got out of a car next to Massey Hall, right next to the phalanx of sleek brown and tan buses parked there. Then the carnival feeling kicked in.
The Songs
Why does Dylan start these shows with “Watching the River Flow,” many critics have wondered. Well, it’s when Dylan started rocking again, in 1971, down on Greene Street in Soho with Leon Russell at the helm. There are a lot of good memories in that song. And he seems to get a kick out of starting every show by asking “Whassa matter with me?” “Watching The River Flow” gets you ready for what he’s done with the Rough and Rowdy Ways songs, still new and already getting Dylan’s protean treatment in performance. His lyrical changes are significant, here. He doesn’t sit contentedly, and he has a true love who likes older men. He sees somebody who doesn’t really care – and, later, someone who’s too sad to cry. No one wants to stop and read a book any more.
In most of the shows I saw, Dylan plays a long instrumental intro, the cascading keyboards setting the tone for an evening showcasing his piano playing. It’s long been baffling to me that Dylan doesn’t get much credit for his keyboards. People howl with rapturous anticipation every time he even looks at a guitar, but don’t have enough to say about the ripply, jazzy, riff-laden, barrelhouse-rolling, harpsichord-sharp, and brand-new arrangements he’s been playing every night on this tour. In the descending progressions, particularly, Dylan sounds as if he’s channeling J.S. Bach by way of Dave Brubeck. From classical through Romantic to jazz and blues, he loves keyboards a lot, and that love is really showing right now.
The second song in the setlist, “Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I Go Mine)” is an even more golden oldie. Don’t expect to hear what you hear on Blonde On Blonde. What he does to the title line is notable: he holds the “you go your way” extra-long, and then, after a significant pause, adds, “and I go mine.” The song’s become a swirling, fast-paced, portentoussounding statement, with Dylan’s constant study of, and perfection in, phrasing at the fore. The long instrumental after “you know you could be wrong,” dueling gentle guitars, makes you listen more closely to the words coming up, and they’re not entirely what you anticipate, the song’s next lines ending “you know that’s not where you belong.” Gone is the pleading, resigned “I just can’t do what I done before / I just can’t beg you anymore.” Instead, Dylan skips to “Sometimes it gets so hard to care / It can’t be this way everywhere” – and sings it twice. J.P. Pentecost’s drums hold the pace with Dylan’s piano, which absolutely shines here, particularly in a sassy glissando punctuating the line “You say my kisses are not like his.”
Now Dylan starts the songs from his latest album with the one most touted as autobiographical – though one could speculate that about many, many Dylan songs, if one wanted to. “I Contain Multitudes” is long, slow, and quiet, the words coming in a stream of consciousness, or, rather, self-consciousness, self-awareness. Dylan referred to it as “trance writing” in his first interview after the record was released, with Douglas Brinkley for the New York Times. The touring arrangement offers Dylan’s voice to be heard quite clearly. I don’t know if he fights blood feuds, but Dylan does fuss with his hair, and always has, in concert: it’s a happy moment, when he sings that line even as he runs his fingers through his curls, and flicks the hair at the back of his collar, between songs. Though these are new songs, words are already changed. Ballinalee is gone, replaced by the less interesting “just as close as can be.” On the “fo’ large knives” and “get up off mah knee” Dylan sounds awfully Southern, and it suits him. The jingle-jangle piano at the end is a beautiful closure.
“False Prophet” bats cleanup, with its unmistakable bluesy march-step beginning (as joepass first noted on Expecting Rain in early May 2020, taken from Billy “The Kid” Emerson’s 1954 “If Loving Is Believing”) and guitars in a brotherly wrangle. Sometimes Dylan jumps in early on the words, and sometimes hangs back before beginning a verse, keeping you on your toes. That insistent “I ain’t no false prophet,” coupled with what, rather than ain’t, the singer is – the enemy of treason, strife, the unlived meaningless life; first among equals and second to none – make for a brash celebration of a performance, with Dylan often rising to his feet and standing at the piano for this one. “Whattaya lookin’ at? There’s nothin’ to see,” he challenges us, as we all stare at him. The piano and instrumental after this verse, and the “You don’t know me, darlin’” verse, are brief but searing, always garnering a cheer. When Dylan sings the lines “I’m nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest” and “Hello stranger – hello and goodbye,” he grins at us as if he means it.
“When I Paint My Masterpiece” is one of the most popular songs in the set, and has been popular since 1971, when Levon Helm sang it and The Band debuted it on Cahoots. After performing it live regularly, Dylan gave this song a rest in the early 2000s, but it’s come back now with a happy permanence. In 2020, Dylan told Douglas Brinkley that the song had grown on him, and these days he’s palpably having fun with the new words and new arrangement. Call it a masterpiece? Only the artist gets to call it that; and only the artist can make those changes to The Original. The meta character of the song appeals to its maker; as Dylan said of it, “I think this song has something to do with the classical world, something that’s out of reach. Someplace you’d like to be beyond your experience. Something that is so supreme and first rate that you could never come back down from the mountain. That you’ve achieved the unthinkable.”
A duo of the darkest Rough and Rowdy Ways songs are up next: “Black Rider” and “My Own Version of You.” The audience shushes for “Black Rider,” a quiet and ominous song akin to the menacing ones on Tempest (2012), particularly “Pay In Blood” and “Scarlet Town.” It starts out cautionary and becomes harsher: the calm warning of “Let all [of] your earthly thoughts be a prayer” gives way to “I’ll take a sword and hack off your arm.” It sounds like he’s singing to every politician who should have stopped running years ago: “you been on the job too long.” In “My Own Version of You,” who’s the me, who’s the you? The light, sprightly one-two-three-four arrangement jars against the grim words, like the way Warren Zevon’s background singers with their ooo-ahhs do in the lyrically horrifying “Excitable Boy.” Dylan lingers over “you know exactly what I mean,” enjoying making us complicit. Some of the directives, often with slight lyrical changes, seem to make himself the “you”: “I’m gonna make ya’ play the piano like Leon Russell, like Liberace, St. John the Apostle.” “I’ll see you, baby, on Judgment Day.” “I can see the history of the whole human race / It’s right there – graven on your face.” Remember, Frankenstein is the doctor, and not the “Monster,” in Mary Shelley’s original book – but today the word has become applicable to both.
“I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” (1967) and “To Be Alone With You” (1969) bracket “Crossing the Rubicon” in a strange mix of ancient and modern. The older songs are nothing like their former selves; not like an iconic face trammeled by botox, though, but happily and snappily rejuvenated, sly, knowing, and fun. The first is no longer the sassy but goofy carpe diem petition of Dylan’s younger and more vulnerable years. He’s coming for you and you can’t say no – as if you’d even think of saying no. “Shut the light / Shut ‘em tight / Tonight’s gonna last all night / I’ll be, be your baby tonight.” The slow piano and vocal start burns away into a boom boom-chicka-chicka-boom danceable romp of instrumentals, including Bob’s boogie-woogie piano pounding away. The “mockingbird” verse he repeats, and then surges into a stripteasy ba-dum ending. Similarly, “To Be Alone With You” is very little like its mellow Nashville Skyline iteration. Now it has a more visceral zing: “I know you’re alive / And I am too / My one desire / Is to be alone with you.” There’s a neoclassical fixation on the place, more than the person: to be alone with you under a star-spangled sky, in a castle high or an ivory tower. No more being in the night time with the one you love; the l word is gone, and we’ll just “hold each other tight.” If you don’t want to do that, tough.
I wish the night was here
Make me scream and shout
I’d fall into your arms
I’d let it allllll (yelps of approval here) hang out
I’ll hound you to death
That’s just what I’ll do
I won’t sleep a wink
Till I’m alone with you
The “moving from place to place / Stepping out into the dark night” feels like a touring musician talking. And yes indeed, Dylan’s eyes are still blue, bright clear piercing blue, harebell bluebell blue, with the darkest irises suffering no fools. This one’s a crowd pleaser.
Though “Crossing the Rubicon” is a new song, and the last from Rough and Rowdy Ways to be performed live (apart from “Murder Most Foul,” still undebuted), Dylan has already changed its words. “I got up early so I could release the Goddess of the Dawn,” he sang at the Beacon, making its start quite different. In the setlist placement, Eos has said yes to kicking off her shoes and bringing that bottle over here, and is now slipping off to get those rosy fingers busy in the skies after Bob being her baby tonight. This spooky Caesar-esque march toward Rome is a showstopper, obliging you to listen to every word. The verses are punctuated by a dazzling, sliding piano.
It can be hard to hear the words of the all-American epic “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” since fans choose to shout out their undying love for Dylan during this contemplative song in which his voice is the principal instrument. Alas, the boondocks and flatlands are gone, and the sands are now silver instead of shifting, but the pirate radio station out of Luxembourg and Budapest – I always plug in Radio Caroline – remains, its signal strong. Dylan’s vamping on “Feel the sunlight on your skin” and “the healing virtues of the wind” is lovely. There are lines he sings straight at us, eyes intent on the audience, watching: “I’d like to help ya’ but I can’t”; “Some people say, I oughta try a little tenderness”; and “I don’t love nobody – gimme a kiss.” The instrumental sigh on “paradise divine” and “horizon line” heralds the fivefold amen in the last notes of the conclusion.
“Gotta Serve Somebody” and “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” are the hardest songs to hear in the formal seated venues on this tour, since you want to leave your seat and leap around. The heavyweight champion and socialite with her pearls are no more, in the slow first verse of “Gotta Serve Somebody”: “You might be in Las Vegas, havin’ lots of fun / You might be in the bushes, holdin’ a smokin’ gun.” When the guitars and drums bite into the song, it takes off, and the audiences in most places stood and romped, even while trying to hear the new verses (chiefly lyrics written for the song’s version in Dylan’s Mondo Scripto show at London’s Halcyon Gallery in 2018):
You may be in a honky tonk, in a nursin’ home,
Searchin’ through the rubble with a fine toothed comb
They may call ya Peter, they may call ya Paul,
Might even have a name, they call ya’ nothin’ at all
Maybe you’re a mystic and they call you Mister Soul
You might be on the wagon, you might be on a roll,
Or you may be on the highway, headin’ for the coast
Or maybe you’re hallucinating, and ya’ think you’ve seen a ghost
The piano takes over in this one when Dylan isn’t singing, filling in for the space left by his vocals the way he used to let a harmonica do.
No accident that “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” is next. Dylan’s up there on stage serving us all, every night, in a conscious decision. This setlist goes like the chapters in a book. Fans and critics alike have always yearned for, and read much into, Dylan’s allegedly autobiographical songs over the decades, and this one fills many needs. The rhyme of “San Antone / alone” always makes me smile; the line “I hope the gods go easy on me” always makes everyone sigh.
The next spot is the flex spot. Dylan began some of his shows with a local artist or song. He also saved what was usually the fourteenth space for a cover. Many people grumble about Dylan’s setlists these days, since he performs the same songs, in the same order, over and over again. I remember the days when people grumbled that they never knew what he was going to play, and would get more irritated if he didn’t do “Like A Rolling Stone” that night. The wonderful thing about a consistent setlist, about hearing the same songs by the same musicians night after night, is that you get to enjoy the patterns and arrangements and lyrical changes, the shades of differences intentional and accidental. A nice thing about opera or classical music programs in repertory is the ability to see them more than once if you like; critics rave about emphases and nuance, and people often buy tickets for more than one show. You see Dylan smile at a sweet fall of notes, or when he’s amused himself with a line like “Key West is the gateway key / to innocence and purity.” You see him frown when something sounds wrong, a phrase is too fast or too slow: believe me, the next night, whatever it was, it’s fixed. So I like the repetitions, which run like variations on a theme to me. There’s no doubt, though, that an audience perks up after the last melting phrases of “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” trail away. What’s next? No one knows. Dylan and the band did a generous selection of covers this time around. In some venues, they performed only Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s “That Old Black Magic.” But sometimes they also, or instead, did numbers from Grateful Dead songs by Robert Hunter like “Stella Blue,” “Brokedown Palace,” and “Truckin’” to Merle Haggard’s “Footlights,” John Mellencamp’s “Longest Days,” Chuck Berry’s “Nadine” and “Johnny B. Goode,” and, in Montreal, Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me To The End of Love.”
The 2023 setlist concluded with the prophetic “Mother of Muses,” the roof-raising “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” and the elegiac “Every Grain of Sand.” The mother of the nine muses is also the goddess of memory, herself the daughter of Mother Earth. When an artist commands Mnemosyne to sing for him, he’s got a lot of nerve. However, after a chronicling of human adventures and personal heroes, it sounds as if the singer is ready to settle down at last. Dylan might have chosen Clio, historian that he is. He might have asked for Erato. But why settle for one of the younger sisters when you could ask for Calliope, the elegant firstborn, muse of epic poetry and eloquent speech, of Homer, Virgil, and Dante? The coda of the final verses is stunning, from “I’ve outlived my life by far” to the petition “unleash your wrath / Things I can’t see – they’re blockin’ my path” to the most Dylanic of couplets:
Got a mind to ramble – got a mind to roam,
I’m travelin’ light and I’m slow comin’ home
Jimmy Reed of Dunleith, Mississippi and his wife Mary Lee collaborated on the song “Down In Virginia” back in 1958. Dylan pays rollicking tribute to the old bluesman even as he’s bidding us adieu with “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” a song that boasts and brags the best rhymes on Rough and Rowdy Ways. The down and dirty “Goodbye Jimmy Reed, goodbye and good luck / I can’t play the record ‘cause my needle got stuck” and “I’ll break open your grapes I’ll suck out the juice / I need you like my head needs a noose” (this to the “transparent woman in a transparent dress”) always elicit yowls and happy catcalls. At the two concerts Dylan played in Virginia, the audience belted out the last line loudly along with him as he grinned.
“Every Grain of Sand” (1980) is the benediction with which Dylan closes every show. After an eight-year hiatus, he brought this spiritual song back into his setlists in 2021, and has retained it consistently since. The lyrical changes are few but key, like “the balance of the reality of man” becoming “the perfect finished plan.” “Sometimes I look, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me,” he sings, and glances toward the top of his piano, where a series of harmonicas lie. Would we get the harp on “Every Grain of Sand”? Not every time, but when we did, it dazzled. Dylan was saying good night and God bless, not in words, but still using his breath, mediated through metal and wood.
The Shows
“Well, these songs are not easy songs to play, but this band does a good job, don’t you think?”
—Dylan’s intro to his band introductions
Toronto
Thanks to whoever is choosing the towns and venues for the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour. The cities are all special and well worth visiting, and the concert halls are magnificent old Gilded Age and Art Deco palaces, or sleek new beauties, sharing one characteristic: superb acoustics. Lucky me, that Massey Hall was where my autumn leg began.
People arrived very early for the two Dylan shows in Toronto, delighted to have scored a hard-to-get ticket to a legendary concert hall; eager to walk by the buses next to the venue and take photos before having to surrender their phones to the Yondr staff; enjoying the bright warm weather. The excitement in the air was visible in smiles, audible in musings – “Do you think he’s going to do ‘Sundown’ or ‘Early Morning Rain’ for Gord?” – and olfactible in the smell of weed. I went to the box office for a paper ticket, and then looked down the streets for a place to eat. The happy signage for the Senator Restaurant, with the date 1929, appealed. Two men in their 30s sat at the bar next to me. They were attending the show in honor of one man’s father, a Dylan fan who had passed away last year. We shared stories and photographs, and raised a glass to the memory of our dads.
Massey Hall opened in 1894, a gift to Toronto from an agricultural equipment manufacturing family. Artists from Enrico Caruso to Dizzy Gillespie to Igor Stravinsky to a young Bob Dylan and local heroes the Band (who were booed during the electric portion of their set in 1965) have performed there; Gordon Lightfoot began his popular annual shows there – he played Massey Hall over 170 times – in 1967. Lightfoot died in May 2023, and before the show many of us made our way upstairs to the exhibition in the House of Gord in his honor: his first guitar, the copyright registration page for “If You Could Read My Mind.”
Both nights, I sat in the Roman-emperor seats: front row, center of the balcony. Elvis Costello and Diana Krall were just below and to the left, in the orchestra, for both shows. They were gracious to the many people coming up to them to shake hands, and everyone kept laughing as people wanted to take selfies with them, and then remembered they couldn’t. Phones and recording devices were banned, but as Beethoven stormed out of the sound system at 8:05 precisely – it’s like a ballplayer’s batting music as he walks to the plate, that beginning of the 9th Symphony, priming the pump for Bob and the band – plenty of Apple watches were being activated to record an hour and forty-so minute “Voice Memo.”
The band accompanying Dylan are his bassist of many decades, Tony Garnier; Bob Britt and Doug Lancio on guitars; Donnie Herron on lap steel, mandolin, and violin; and Jerry Pentecost on drums. Pentecost is new this year, and it is intriguing to think that perhaps he was hired because of how much Dylan likes saying “Pentecost” in his introductions – he drags out the religious word, with a lingering “cosssss” at the end, like a preacher. From the moment Pentecost begins to play, however, you know the reason he’s there is because he’s amazing. Like Levon Helm, he lays down a heartbeat that holds the songs together with a woven musical mesh. Garnier’s bass works hand in hand with the drums, these two low lines the vibrant, vital connectors of every song. Soaring above them are the twin guitars of Britt and Lancio, men who know each other’s styles intimately and whose instrumentals lie like wings on either side of Dylan’s piano playing. Herron is the Puck to Dylan’s Oberon, adding the grace notes and delicacy, skimming and flying around both Dylan’s keyboards and vocals in a way that never interrupts and only complements – and sometimes, as on “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” compliments.
Dressed in dark suits, the men surround Dylan. The man’s in black himself, but with a difference – the sparkle of rhinestones on his cowboy clothes; a polka-dotted or striped or, in Roanoke, the most beautiful bright satiny green shirt – and a little white hat. When he wore the hat and when he took it off occasioned much comment, and a few memes. Almost no one noted when Britt or Lancio wore a hat, whether an Irish newsboy cloth cap or something more elaborate, or the fact that Garnier always wears a black hat with a brim. There’s something Beckettian about the hats on stage, something reminiscent of Lucky putting on his thinking cap so he can deliver his tremendous rush of words, and also the playful weirdness of Vladimir, Estragon, and Lucky all juggling hats. The formality of them is nice, too. When Dylan was a boy all men wore hats, for both work and play.
These are not easy songs to perform, individually, and spectacularly not when they’re all grouped together in just under two hours on a stage. And, needless to say, not when the man who composed them is your bandleader. The joker is wild, and he’s right there in front of you, turning around to look at you from the vantage point of his baby grand piano, usually – these days – with a genial approving smile. Beware the stinkeye, though.
At Massey Hall, Dylan was relaxed and happy both nights, smiling often. When they nailed a song, as in the case of “False Prophet,” “Crossing the Rubicon,” or “Gotta Serve Somebody,” there were grins all around. The lighting was dark on stage, as usual, and in the house, it’s twilight, making it easy for Dylan to look over the top of the piano, and his songbook spread out there, and see all of us.
A delicious, gentle “Stella Blue” was the cover song on Thursday night, and even those who had hoped for “Evangeline” or “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” were content. Friday, Dylan went for “Brokedown Palace,” somehow wrenching as he sang the slow lyrics of a river bringing him home, of resting by the waterside where he can “listen to the river sing sweet songs / to rock my soul.” He seemed delighted by the clear anticipation, and reception, of “Every Grain of Sand,” so much so that on one night he reached for his harmonica evidently too late, let go of it, and just kept playing the piano instead. Both nights, he lingered over his curtain call, though moved quickly thereafter for his bus on Friday, heading straight to Montreal. How I wish I’d gone. My friend Sue and her daughter Chelsea did; my friend Harry did not. He and I might never get over missing “Dance Me To the End of Love” (though I’m comforted that by sheer luck and youthful ability to travel I heard Dylan sing “Hallelujah” in both Montreal and Los Angeles during the summer of 1988)
Schenectady
On the night before Halloween, we drove up the Hudson to Schenectady to meet friends for supper before the show. Judy was born and raised there, and suggested we go to Ferrari’s on Congress Street, an old style Italian family restaurant in a residential neighborhood. We left laden with unfinished eggplant parmigiana and ziti for the road, and drove the short distance to Proctors Theater. One of the first people I saw there was Sue, safely arrived from Canada, under the marquee.
Proctors was built by “the Dean of Vaudeville,” Frederick Freeman Proctor, in 1926. What a palace it was then, and still is now, despite years of neglect in the 1970s and significant renovation and expansion since. Shining gold décor, ornate plasterwork, red velvet seats roomy enough to relax into, a splendid enormous Wurlitzer organ – and, backstage, performers’ dressing rooms with big private baths. The exhibition cases out front cover everything from Proctor’s career to the building of the theater and past events. I think Dylan would laugh at the idea of performing where once a flea circus commanded the stage.
The crowd was happily unruly, with us Hudson Valley Deadheads hoping for some Hunter / Garcia amidst the Rough and Rowdy. There was much dancing and vocal singing along, no mere mouthing the lyrics; props to everyone who knew the new words already, it seemed. “False Prophet” was a bump-and-grind showstopper, with Dylan leaning fiercely into the keys and working them over like the boxer he sometimes is. He’s very physical and vital on this tour, literally putting his back into it, sometimes tickling the ivories and sometimes pounding the keyboard, right foot in its cowboy boot keeping constant time. The reverb on “Black Rider,” with Dylan’s echoed voice repeating the words, was suitably Halloweenish; and the slow parts of “When I Paint My Masterpiece” showed off the singer’s absolute clarity and Sinatran, or perhaps Carusovian, phrasing.
An hour and twenty minutes into the set, Dylan and the band noodles briefly, teasing us, and gave way to an unmistakable drumbeat from Pentecost. Everyone began to dance to “Truckin’.” When this song swirled into global consciousness in 1970, the Dead were the quintessential American traveling band, and Dylan was still based in Woodstock, a 29-year-old dad with five children, recording folk-flavored music close to home. He’s making up for it now. Though he certainly messed with the words a bit (no cats are speaking of true love, and they’re not crying; sweet Jane has lost her marbles and is living on vitamin D), what he emphasized was superb. Hearing Bob invoke the doodah man, draw out that “what a long strange trip it’s been,” and state “I’d like to get some sleep before I travel / But if you got a warrant, I know you’re comin’ in” was for the ages. We twirled and shimmied and, at the end, whooped and hollered. Dylan smiled like someone who, once upon a time, wanted to join the Dead himself, though I watched his face as the applause went on and on. Was “Truckin’” too popular? Were we too jubilant? Alas, this was the last time he pulled it out of the magic hat in 2023.
The next twenty minutes were as tight and together as I’ve ever heard a Dylan band, and “Every Grain of Sand,” even sans harmonica, was elegant and hymnal. Our group became Dylan fans in different decades and for very disparate reasons, but we were all deeply pleased with the show, and happy to see friends from New York like Craig, who’d ventured upriver just for the show, outside the theater at the end. Town was sound asleep – scarcely a thing was open near Proctor’s on a Monday night. We walked around the back toward our cars, parked up the hill in an empty lot, and had to wait for the buses to pull out and past us. We waved, and kisses may have been blown.
Waterbury
“Waterbury is a fine city. Big clock city, the famous Waterbury clock. Sold a nice bill there,” says Willy Loman, in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. The drive to Waterbury from home went over wide rivers and through thinly settled hills, until I fetched up in the shadow of the clock tower, all 245 feet of it. The Roman numerals on the dial of its Seth Thomas clock are five feet high. As I parked my car next to the theater, they said it was six p.m. on the nose.
The aptly named Palace Theatre is a Jazz-Age Renaissance beauty. Italian-born sculptor Sylvester Z. Poli, who started out as a maker of waxwork figures in the 1870s and ended up a major theater impresario, hired George M. Cohan to open what was then called Poli’s Palace in 1922. In 1924, a hole had to be cut in the stage to accommodate Harry Houdini’s magic act. Bing Crosby, Pearl Bailey, Al Jolson, the Andrews Sisters, Glenn Miller and his orchestra, Tony Bennett, and Frank Sinatra all preceded Dylan and his band here, too.
Pentecost stood out this evening, from the first long instrumental intro to “Watching The River Flow.” Bob took his time before coming onstage, settling into the piano, and then opening his mouth, and Pentecost’s dexterity was the glue holding the song in place. That continued all night. Dylan’s voice, though, was the standout instrument. Somehow it was stronger than it had been two weeks before, even with the intervening gigs. He seemed amused, too, and shared that vibe with us in unanticipated ways. For example, on “I Contain Multitudes,” he let his fingers shimmer up and down the keys in a sassy glissando after the line “all the pretty maids.” When he sang “under that old black magic called … looooooo-ah-ve,” he sighed the last word in something like resignation, and laughed.
On Veterans’ Day, November 11, 1975, a group of buses had rolled up to the Palace and disgorged a motley crew of performers. Appearing without fanfare or advance publicity as The Rolling Thunder Revue, they played for almost three hours that evening. As I broke for the car on November 11, 2023 and headed straight for the highway, Dylan’s buses were just ahead in the traffic queue. Was he thinking of that night almost fifty years ago, and how different “When I Paint My Masterpiece” was then? So many masterpieces since – and to come.
Brooklyn, night two
Sincerest thanks to Craig Danuloff, a longtime concertgoing pal and, among many other things, the founder of Dylan.FM. I was teaching my New School class on the late afternoon of Wednesday, November 15, and planning to fight my way from West 4th Street to deepest Brooklyn just in time for the show. Instead, Craig kindly swept up to the corner of 7th Avenue and West 11th Street to collect me right after class, and we drove to Brooklyn in alternatingly fair and foul traffic in swift time. We parked a block from Flatbush Avenue and the theater. Jamaican food for supper, dozens of friends under the marquee. Kings Theatre is bright and beautiful and big, an old picture palace that’s been home to generations of Brooklyn high school graduations since the 1920s. We wended our way along a snaky security line outside, stopped for a specially branded Rough and Rowdy drink at the concession stand, and sat up front with Laura, who came from London for the shows.
Bob himself stalked onto the stage festively dressed in black and white, and bounced through the first two numbers before searing us with “False Prophet.” Similarly, in “My Own Version of You” he upped the scariness, and lingered over lines like “mix ‘em up in a tank, get a RO-bot commando.” We stood for most of the rest of the show after this one. “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” was an edgy shake-rattle-and-roller, and Dylan graced us with a minute of harmonica at the end of “Every Grain of Sand.” The Manhattanites in the gang were an hour and a half, at least, from bed, and we scarpered after a few hugs and smiles, knowing we’d see everyone the next night at the Beacon.
New York City
Broadway Bob. If there was one show that had to be seen, this was the one. The security line around the Beacon was awful, poorly managed and moving very slowly with all the bagging of phones. We were there for the end of “Watching the River Flow,” but were sad to miss the shard of “New York State of Mind.” I’d been hoping for a full-throttle “New York, New York,” to be honest, but that would have been such a moment it would have stopped the show, perhaps permanently, before it began.
Dylan has home-field advantage at the Beacon, as do many performers I love and have loved: Tedeschi Trucks Band, Government Mule, and most of all The Allman Brothers. Dylan has done some long and immensely well-received stands there over the years; we might even call them residencies, but he can’t be contained by that word since he’s not resident anywhere. He was completely at ease on a stage he knew well, standing for most of his songs and looking as if he was pushing back against the piano, so energetic was his playing. He also did a lot of roaming about – back toward Garnier, occasionally toward Britt, and into center stage, with that light catlike step of his, to rest a hand on his hip and survey the scene. Bernett, who can walk to the theater, was there. So were Marielle from England, Petra from Belgium, Sean from New Jersey, Kelly from California, friends from around the world. We had gotten dressed up. The audience shone with sequins, cowboy-stripe trousers, every tour t shirt from every Dylan decade, Rolling Thunder hats, even a few folks in black tie. As he gazed down on us and we smiled, clapped, and waved, roles had reversed. We were the show, filling the Colosseum, and he was the emperor, standing between the two great golden guards with their spears, giving us, thanks be, a cheery thumbs up of approval.
The show sounded good, almost too intense – a bit like listening to a sharp CD sound instead of vinyl. Perhaps this is the fault of the much touted Sphere Immersive Sound, in which, according to the Beacon website, “audio beams from the left, right and center speaker arrays reach every seat in the house[.]” Particular standouts were “False Prophet,” “Mother of Muses” and “Goodbye Jimmy Reed.” The latter was sped up, as if Dylan was eager to get out into the city night. He flipped the “butcher’s hook” and “guitar behind my head” verses, but he played that piano like ringing a bell. “Well thank you. We like playin’ here,” he said at the end. An extra-long harmonica sally was Dylan’s last word. He jigged a bit from foot to foot at the curtain call, still in motion, a restless farewell.
Newark, night one
As fitting as it is to have a backdrop of bare black walls and instrument cases for this tour, it’s also a pleasure when, instead of having things go dark and the band, then Dylan come out on stage, a big fancy curtain goes up to find everyone arrayed in place like men in a play. The Prudential Hall of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark is a glimmering newer space with splendid acoustics, and the nicest security staff on the whole tour. The restaurant in the venue, Nico, is excellent; plenty of us showed up early and in time for a lovely meal before the show.
No, Dylan and the band didn’t play “Thunder Road,” or a Sinatra cover, or “Oh What a Night” to open the evening. They started slowly, not by rote but certainly without flash, with beautiful piano playing on “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I Go Mine).” The show rose to another level on “False Prophet,” though, and stayed there. Dylan and Herron had a sweet musical conversation during “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” and a more rollicking one on “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.” “Key West” was the best I’d heard it, Dylan talking and singing directly in great voice, the instruments in complete sync with what he wanted, and not even close to obliterating a single word.
After a drawn-out “home” at the end of “Mother of Muses,” Dylan thanked us, and then, in now familiar words, commended the band for doing an “excellent” job playing songs not easy to play. “Don’t you agree? I know you do.” After introducing the band, accompanying himself on the piano, Dylan announced, “It’s nice to be back in the great state of New Jersey, home of the Boss, Joe Pesci, we know he comes from here, Queen Latifah, Frankie Valli, and of course ol’ Blue Eyes, he’s from someplace around here, [somebody] out there would say I’m from around here too.” The audience loudly claimed him as an honorary Jersey boy.
Richmond
Oh, to be home again, down in old Virginny. I was born and raised in Richmond, and returned there for Thanksgiving. Bob and the band obligingly followed me down on the postholiday Monday.
The Shriners’ Mosque was built on Monroe Park in downtown Richmond in 1927. Its minarets, domes and crescents, gorgeous murals, and other elaborate interior details still grace the building now known as the Altria Theater (though no local refers to it thus). The year my parents moved here as young newlyweds, they went to see Elvis at the Mosque on her birthday, June 30. Later, they’d hear everyone from Buddy Holly to Frank Sinatra to Bo Diddley to The Supremes. They first heard Bob Dylan live here, in 1966, and I heard him at the Mosque in the autumn of 1990, when he opened with a twangy instrumental minute of “Dixie.”
No such opening tonight, and no mentions of celebrated local singers like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (yes, he sang as well as he danced), Aimee Mann, Tommy Edwards, or Yvonne Fair. What we got, though, was a gorgeous show from start to finish. Dylan and the band had just continued rising, from those first nights that I heard at Massey Hall. The couple next to me had traveled down from New Jersey, and had heard the Newark shows. Like me, they agreed that Richmond was better. The band practically had the giggles at times, they seemed so loose and happy. “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and “Key West” were unimprovable. Herron’s playing increasingly stood out, not in a showy way – that’s never his style – but when the golden fiddlethread and swirl of steel mated so well with what Dylan was doing on the piano.
Listen to “Every Grain of Sand” from Richmond, if you can find it. The long harmonica stanza, or verse, at the close is the finest I heard on this leg of the tour.
Roanoke
Roanoke was bright and pretty on a cold and frosty morning when I arrived from Richmond, by way of Appomattox and an hour there reflecting on our nation’s history. It was nice to have a day and night off to explore. The hotel I’d chosen was a funky-looking place called The Liberty Trust, installed in an old downtown bank. A private dining room now occupies the vault, and spectacular smells waft out of the open kitchen through the common bar and reception area. “We’re a little busy,” apologized the lady at the desk as she helped me. “How come? It’s a Tuesday,” I said. She lowered her voice. “We have some musicians and their crew staying here. They’re really nice. They’re playing at the Berglund.” I nodded and smiled. “Take the other elevator,” she cautioned, as I headed up to my high floor. “We had a guest get stuck in it earlier. One of the musicians. A really tall fella who plays the guitar. He had to call the desk on his cellphone, and we got him out really fast. He was lovely about it.” Not wishing to follow Bob Britt in entrapment, I duly waited for and took the safer lift. It all felt very nineteenth-century and also magical to be in a room with vault-thick walls, scarred marble on the floors, and heavy copper doors.
Roanoke is called Star City for the neon star on top of Mill Mountain, which was installed in 1949 and has remained lit at night ever since. It was a tobacco-growing railroad town, still bisected now by the rows of Norfolk & Western tracks but with a nicely cosmopolitan downtown of many good restaurants, the Roanoke City Market, the Roanoke Co+op, The Taubman Museum of Art, the O. Winston Link Museum, and the Fret Mill Music Company. I stopped into Fret Mill to buy some guitar strings, and the proprietor said sadly that no, Dylan hadn’t been in. Several of his road crew members and techs had been, though. “One of them told me he travels with a hundred harmonicas.” As I roamed through Link’s breathtaking black-and-white photographs of steam trains rolling through the Virginia landscape, past drive-in theaters at night and ponds full of swimming children, I hoped that Dylan – who likes both photography and trains – had made this a stop on his day off, too.
What a joy upon arriving at the Berglund to find historian, tremendous Dylan authority, and Virginia neighbor James Adams, purveyor of Pretty Good Stuff (and formerly Bob Dylan Notes, on the site that used to be Twitter); and Niels-Hugo Blunch, the coolest economics professor at any Virginia institution of higher learning. The Berglund is a beautiful place at which I’ve heard Dylan before, easy alike to walk to from downtown and drive to from the interstate. We were all happily seated far in front, right under Bob’s piano.
Up went the curtain, and there they were, arrayed across the stage, with Bob resplendent in his black suit with rhinestone bands, and a dark green silk shirt, unbuttoned at the throat. No hat – he’d worn his white hat most of the night in Richmond, except when he shifted it to fuss with his hair – though it was on his piano in case he needed it. Harmonicas were to hand, too. The concert began more gently and quietly than any before. The band sounded almost as a small classical orchestra might, in the intimate setting of the Berglund with just over 2,000 seats, and not nearly all of them filled. Only on “False Prophet” did the grit begin to grind. It was a nice and noticeable balance, the edgier and louder, the contemplative and more melodic. “Mother of Muses,” in particular, shone, as did a tangled, repetitive, yet strangely wonderful “Gotta Serve Somebody” that evolved in twists and turns even as we listened. Roanoke itself did get some special praise, as the hometown (possibly: it’s more likely he was born in Norfolk) of Wayne Newton, who headed west to become Mr. Las Vegas. “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” had the room up and dancing, and, as was the case in Richmond, “can’t ya hear me calling from down in Virgini-ahhhh” got a huge roar and long applause. “Every Grain of Sand” blessed us, once again, with the harmonica – talk about a shot of love.
*
Back in 2006, Leonard Cohen told NPR’s Terry Gross “it’s inappropriate for an elderly chap to register, you know, authentically his feelings, you know, because they really can be interpreted. So you have to get quite covert as you get older. Or you have to find some avuncular way, you know, of responding. But still, you just really are just – you’re wounded. You stagger. And you fall.”
May I make a contradictory statement from the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour? Bob’s not wounded. He’s not staggering. He’s not falling. He’s playing the ever living hell out of the piano, leading his band with an iron fist and reveling in their musicianship, grinning a lot, keenly aware of the places in which he’s playing and apparently happy to be in both the towns and concert halls, and turning in fine shows for happy audiences night after night after night. Long may he wave. Long may he reign.
