“It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there.”
In 1997 on what was his 30th album, Time Out of Mind, Bob Dylan sang this line as he reflected upon his own mortality, a perhaps not entirely surprising rumination on his part given that only four months before that record’s release he had been admitted to a Los Angeles hospital with acute pulmonary histoplasmosis, a horrible fungal infection that damn near killed him.
That he should still be here nearly three decades, a further ten albums, and God only knows how many live shows later is maybe nothing short of a miracle. He is, after all, 83 years of age now, a couple of years older than his home country’s outgoing Commander-in-Chief. In fact, as he comes on stage on the stroke of half past seven his unsteady gait does put you in mind of latter-day Joe Biden, though by way of marked contrast and even if he now often relies on lyric sheets that are laid out on the top of his piano, as the concert ignites with a rollicking ‘All Along the Watchtower’ Dylan’s cognitive functioning is clearly still all there.
There are, though, signs that Dylan is slowing down, perhaps not an unreasonable thing to expect given that he has now been on this Never Ending Tour since 1988. But we still get nigh on an hour and three quarters of him and his crack band which will have given the Bobster ample time to get back to his Travelodge room for News at Ten and maybe even a quick blast of Match of the Day 2 if he felt so inclined.
That said, cracks are beginning to appear. ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ was fairly lacklustre to say the least and for those of us who are well-versed in Dylan’s often wanton destruction of some of his classic melodies, ‘I Contain Multitudes’ and ‘My Own Version of You’ – two out of a total of nine songs he features from his 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways, which four years later is still lending its name to the title of this particular tour – are initially almost unrecognisable.
There are other occasions when Dylan is banging out a rhythm on his piano which seems entirely at odds to the song that the rest of the band are playing. And on the occasions he does come out from behind the piano to sing, he does appear to use the side of the instrument to steady his balance. Yet for all of these apparent missteps and human frailties this is still Bob Dylan and the unquestionable genius of the man means he is still more than capable of producing moments of sheer magic.
‘Desolation Row’ has never sounded so good. This sprawling epic of a song seems to have been speeded up by about two and one third revolutions per minute since it originally concluded Dylan’s 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited. And the feral blast he invests in his harmonica midway through suggests there is nothing wrong with the man’s lungs.
‘Key West (Philosopher Pirate)’ is reinvented here as an almost solo piano lament and the ensuing ‘Watching the River Flow’ positively rocks. And as if to affirm “I ain’t dead yet, my bell still rings” – a line from his song ‘Early Roman Kings’ – Bob Dylan leaves the very best until last with a spine-tingling version of ‘Every Grain of Sand,’ his voice still resolutely strong and true.
