18.40
We got a good mixture of the old and the new last night, though the old sounded newer than the new. This was the vital Dylan. No signs I could see of just going through the paces, though he looked extremely relaxed.
The more recent stuff, which was in the majority, included Beyond Here Lies Nothing, Thunder On The Mountain, Tweedle Dum &Tweedle Dee and an outstanding Love Sick. It all sounded right there, totally in the pocket.
Older material: Tangled Up In Blue, Simple Twist of Fate, A Hard Rain's Going To Fall, Highway 61, Ballad of a Thin Man, Like A Rolling Stone, Forever Young. Only Thin Man wasn't altered beyond recognition and it was on fire. Tangled was stunning. And I'm running out of superlatives for the rest.
Yowza!
3 comments:
Much jealousy, particularly with regard to my favourite -- Tangled, of course. My entertainment for tonight is Bach's St. Matthew Passion.
And jealous you should be (except that the Bach is more than a little compensatory.)
But let me tell you, Tangled was astonishing. It was of three or four pieces that Dylan abandoned his place behind either keyboard (organ generally, I think) or guitar (exclusively electric) to stand alone (except for harmonica, on which he played a superb solo) right out front. He sang it in a wonderfully detached way - quite distanced, as if narrating something from a far away time and place - but with real bite somehow. When he sang Some are mathematicians.. he managed to get a degree of contempt in the word I wouldn't have thought possible. I felt embarrassed to have achieved an 'O' level in the subject.
As it turned out, the performance of Bach was pretty extraordinary. But I think I would have traded it for the Dylan, especially now that I hear about Tangled. I would have been deeply embarrassed too -- I know far too much mathematics to be a respectably ignorant historian. Your observations about the divisions in the audience made me smile -- and a bit upset: I could have happily taken the place of one of those old gyppers with the green stuff (unlike yourself, as you note). Not that I have much (or any, really) of the green stuff myself.
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