Bob Dylan

On Sunday night, my dad and I drove to Liverpool to see Bob Dylan.

This potentially marks the end of a long tradition. I’m not sure how many years Dylan has left—he’s in his mid-eighties, after all.

My dad has always been fanatical about Bob Dylan—to the extent that my own name can be shortened to Bob only because ‘Dylan’ was vetoed by my long-suffering mum.

Now, if you haven’t seen Bob Dylan live before, I’m sure you’ve heard the stories. And I’m here to confirm them on your behalf.

Dylan has been on what his fans have come to call ‘The Never Ending Tour’ since 1988—two years before I was born.

I’m not sure how many times I’ve seen him. A few are blurry childhood memories of arenas in Cardiff and Newcastle that I didn’t really want to be at.

A couple stand out with more clarity.

I was a Dylan-denier until about the age of 16, in that way a certain type of teenager, determined to assert his own tastes, instinctively resists anything his parents like.

Unfortunately, a cocktail of genetics and circumstance probably doomed this resistance early on.

How could a 16-year-old learning to strum his first guitar, already mesmerized by the impenetrable poetry of Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, deny himself the Bob Dylan songbook—there in all its playable glory on dylanchords.com?

Soon, Bob Dylan became everything. I would spend days murdering the whole back catalogue on acoustic, harmonica, and even piano. I raided my dad’s never-ending CD collection, burned the entire discography onto my desktop computer, Bootleg Series and all, and it became the perpetual soundtrack to my most formative years.

I spent hours on MSN Messenger, failing to convince girls to go out with me to the sound of Blood on the Tracks and Street Legal. I remember sitting in my bedroom and playing ‘I Threw It All Away’ in the tumultuous hours after my first major breakup. I listed every studio album in chronological order on the back of my A-Level General Studies paper in the twenty minutes of exam time I had left to waste before stepping out into the heady sunlight of post-sixth-form adulthood.

I found myself doing unto others exactly what my dad had done to me—playing Bob Dylan songs to people who obviously didn’t like them and trying to persuade them that they did, like some sort of weird musical evangelist.

I even remember turning over one of my papers during Finals at Oxford to find Dylan staring back at me:

“Some people work in gas stations and they’re poets. I don’t call myself a poet because I don’t like the word. I’m a trapeze artist.” Bob Dylan. Discuss.

So I suppose I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed every time we turned up to see him.

Because he was never the flat-capped folk sensation of Greenwich Village, or the spidery avant-garde rebel of the Free Trade Hall, or the manic, white-faced reptile of the Rolling Thunder Revue when I saw him.

He wasn’t even the born-again Christian of the 1980s.

He was a recalcitrant, muttering old man, hunched behind a keyboard.

For those who haven’t had the pleasure, let me explain.

Contrary to what any reasonable person would expect when buying tickets to see a household name play to a huge arena, Bob Dylan doesn’t play any of his most popular songs. When he does, they’re re-interpreted, rag-tag versions—usually swung about and stripped back. He’ll change the words and throw away the choruses.

On Sunday night in Liverpool, the stage was sparse—six tall studio lights shining warm gold onto a lean drum kit, a double bass, a couple of guitar stands and, the centrepiece, a huge grand piano.

Dylan, in lounge-lizard sequins, sat behind it for most of the gig with an oddly glittery microphone, emerging every now and then to lean unsteadily near the bass player.

His band hovered around him in a tight circle, eyes trained exclusively on his fingers, largely because they’re never quite sure what he’s going to do next. There’s no telling when he’ll decide the song has ended, which chord changes he’s going to suddenly start improvising over (which he did, on the piano, despite not really being able to play the piano very well, at least twice per song), and when the vocal is going to suddenly come back in.

At times they got audibly lost, despite being some of the most seasoned session musicians on the planet, and, presumably, rolling with Dylan’s punches every night in various combinations since 1988.

On our way back out onto the Albert Docks, I heard two Scousers trying to persuade an emphatically disbelieving third that Dylan had played ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ at the beginning of the set. He absolutely had—it was just almost indecipherable to the untrained ear.

Doesn’t sound great, does it?

The thing is that Bob Dylan is a complete one-off. He is a mythological figure—a walking (now mostly shuffling) embodiment of what it means to be an artist.

How else could anyone dare to speak mystical poetry across a grand piano to 8,000 Liverpudlians for ninety minutes, not address them once, and then leave the stage without coming back for an encore?

It’s because we know instinctively that we’re dealing with a transcendental being. Someone who doesn’t play by our rules. Dylan is art itself—he’s a painter, a sculptor, a novelist, an actor, a poet, a songwriter. He’s shared stages with Martin Luther King, he’s revolutionised and then abandoned entire genres of music. He’s capable of distilling divine revelation into the lyrics of a slow waltz.

“I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there's someone there, other times it’s only me
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.”

I wonder if the man in the gas station could do that?

When we watch Bob Dylan, we understand that he is inhabiting an artistic space; he is donning the latest disguise in a perpetual masquerade; he is doing, as all great artists do, whatever moves him tonight.

And driving home from Liverpool, I was reminded of other journeys home from Bob Dylan concerts. My dad, deciding to take a ‘shortcut’ out of Nottingham City Centre, and driving us—almost fatally—the wrong way down a tramline. My dad insisting we stop by a roadside fairground in Sheffield and strap ourselves into a giant slingshot. My dad, on Sunday, insisting on a ten-minute detour in the cold to look at the statues of the four Beatles for less than four seconds, while simultaneously ruining the carefully choreographed photo of some bemused tourists.

I suppose, at some point in life, you’re going to do everything for the last time.

You won’t know it when it happens, but there’ll be a last cup of coffee, the last time you watch The Godfather Part II, the last time you’re inexplicably catapulted into the Yorkshire night next to your own father.

The last time you hear Desolation Row, and wonder at how lucky you are to live in a world where a strange old man behind an oversized piano can paint visions like that on your brain with words and music.

Some of these last times will happen earlier than others—all of our lives are running in parallel, at the same speeds but from different starting points.

The older I get, the more I appreciate that line of Dylan’s from Empire Burlesque: “What looks large from a distance, close up ain’t never that big.” Life seems to shrink a little. Previously unimaginable distances contract.

It’s not dark yet for Bob Dylan, but it’s probably getting there. I’m not sure I’ll catch another concert; even the Never Ending Tour has got to end sometime.

One day it’ll be the last time my dad and I go to a gig.

But, hopefully, not for a long time.

For now, I’m going to try a bit harder to count my blessings and enjoy the memories.

Keep dreaming,

‍
Rob