An the beginning you only see a shock of hair that peeps out just above the piano on the stage, sometimes disappearing completely behind it. And now and then a few centimeters of forehead and curly hair, slightly bobbing. Together with the two reading lights, which are stuck to the instrument like feelers, this gives a hint of a bee or bumblebee: as a character in a puppet theater that moves merrily to the music. This is Bob Dylan’s head.
The show band around him plays what feels like fifty rounds of a blues scheme on vintage instruments in front of a beige-yellow curtain, so everything is staged quite in the style of the fifties, with an almost natural sound without frills, until the curly-headed creature stands up for the first time and sounds from gives. They lie between speaking and singing, no one understands it right away, but syllables finally emerge, then words: “Oh, this ol’ river keeps on rollin’.”
Far and wide no classics
So Bob Dylan has really come back, at the age of 81 and after the pandemic seemed to have derailed his supposedly never-ending tour after all. The anxious question of some fans in Berlin’s Verti Music Hall, some of whom have been with him for decades and have seen him very often, i.e. the question of how he is probably preparing some of his classics this time, alienating them, even making them unrecognizable – it is unnecessary this concert. Because in this evening program there are no classics in sight: no “Blowin’ in the Wind”, no “Don’t Think Twice”, no “Mr. Tambourine Man”. Demonstratively, there is mostly late work to be heard.
A couple in the row in front of us leaves the hall after a few songs, did you also see a slight shake of the head? Yes, that may be difficult to accept when the expected soundtrack of life simply does not play, the melodies and lyrics that have shaped so many youth among those present are missing. But it is also an educational measure that may be necessary, especially in Germany: Because one often has the impression here, in particular, that many people only associate the name Bob Dylan with his best-known early work. He only recorded some of his strongest albums in the new millennium.
The band plays second fiddle
On the billboard and at the center of the evening is recent record Rough and Rowdy Ways, a sonic archive of American poetry and music that adds a few more to Dylan’s legendary Lang songs (think Highlands). A first highlight of the concert is the song “I Contain Multitudes”, in which Dylan appropriates Walt Whitman’s Modernist Manifesto and reinterprets it.
After half an hour everyone has probably understood that the band, as good and dynamic as they do their thing, naturally only plays second fiddle to the main instrument: Bob Dylan’s voice. It is basically a poetry lecture that one attends here for long stretches, in places still reminiscent of the symbiosis of music and text in the Beat poets, which the Nobel Prize winner for literature often conjures up – but mostly the music plays an even more subordinate role here. Sure, there’s a little guitar solo here and there – but while the band plays almost in a trance at times, the voice stands out from it, barking, biting, rattling to the fore with the many theatrical phrases, the quotes from Shakespeare (“winter of discontent”) to Sinatra (“in the wee small hours”) and old-fashioned rhyming jokes (“Calliope – Why not give her to me?”).
Try tenderness
The theatricality is sometimes used for self-parody. “People tell me, I ought to try a little tenderness,” he crows, and the version of his 1967 song “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” which he then intones, sounds so fistulous that it arouses pity. While claiming to be a baby, Dylan plays the piano like a kid. Makes a two-note solo. Sometimes jingles a bit next to it. You almost feel reminded of Helge Schneider before you realize: Of course it’s the other way around. Everything comes from Dylan. And the greatest songwriter of the last sixty years sits there and makes fun of himself. When he finally steps into the middle of the stage for a moment, it looks like he’s being pulled by strings, dancing, stumbling in a green velvet western shirt that could somehow also be part of pajamas. So is it all just for fun? No, because the most serious piece is still pending: the ballad “Key West (Philosopher Pirate”), which takes stock of western culture and possibly describes its end point, Bob Dylan nails it in your ear and heart, every syllable is there. All of the melancholic implications that this piece has, performed in this setting, are simply overwhelming.
And then something else happens that you would hardly have thought possible: the audience, who got up from the back seats and came to the front, starts to sway. It sways to Dylan’s new song “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You,” which gives many the impression that the singer is finally revealing his true colors: I give myself to you all. You should actually know better than to take something like that seriously with him – especially since he continues to evade some approaches in a sympathetic way by banning photos and mobile phones. But the melody of the barcarole from The Tales of Hoffman quoted in his song does the rest, lulling people first into the certainty that he means it sincerely, then into farewells. Fortunately, Bob Dylan’s tour will last a few more years. And Dylan will know from his even older folk colleague Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, whom the “New York Times” has just portrayed as very agile and fun-loving: You can still sing and dance at 91.
