Review: Bob Dylan plays rare club show at The Tivoli, Brisbane, Australia

THEY came from all over, even a different hemisphere, for that rarest of treats: an intimate Bob Dylan club show.

PADDOCK WOOD, UNITED KINGDOM - JUNE 30: Bob Dylan performs on stage during Hop Farm Festival at Hop Farm Family Park on June 30, 2012 in Paddock Wood, United Kingdom. (Photo by Gus Stewart/Redferns via Getty Images)

OUTSIDE, the queue stretched down the block. There was a carnival atmosphere, people just blown away to have a ticket to this rarest of Dylan club shows, not quite believing it was going to happen and their good fortune at being there.

People had been drawn from all over, locals, serious devotees following the entire tour, someone who had seen the 1966 Manchester show and flown in on the day from Tokyo for this. The true believers who had been to dozens of shows, people seeing him for the first time.

As with all Dylan shows, there was intense speculation. Was it being filmed? Was it called at the last minute because he hates having days off? Would he play exactly the same set he’s been sticking tour on tour, including at the Convention Centre on Monday? Would he mix it up completely?

All was soon revealed. If the Monday night show was high-grade, one of the best Dylan Brisbane shows ever, this was off the scale.

REVIEWED: Dylan’s first show in Brisbane

To be able to see one of the legends of music in a 1500-capacity venue was in itself an unforgettable thing. To hear his band in such blazing form — truly, one of the great rock’n’roll combos on the planet — and for the man himself to be so engaged, still so capable of surprise, and enjoying himself so much, was revelatory.

The first set was great, the same one he’s been playing through this tour, Charlie Sexton’s sublime guitar lines snaking through the songs, that hewn-from-rock groove of the rhythm section, Bob jauntily walking from grand piano — he plays it well and it really adds something to the sound — to front of stage and back again.

But in the second set, everyone knew they were witnessing something never to be repeated, soaking up every drop of the experience.

The set opened with the banjo-driven Bob blues of High Water (For Charley Patton). Then he goes off script: a tender Girl From the North Country, one of five songs to date from the ’60s. Sizzling versions of Love and Theft songs Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, Cry a While and Lonesome Day Blues. A brilliant rockabilly workout on Thunder on the Mountain, the band locked in as tight as can be. Who will actually be able to play with this kind of swing when these guys are gone, I couldn’t help wondering.

Then came a simply jaw-dropping Ballad of a Thin Man, no longer delivered dripping in bile but a reverent rendition of one of the greatest Dylan songs of them all and its timeless: “Something is happening here and you don’t know what it is do you, Mr Jones?’’

Oh, we knew it was happening all right. And what unrepeatable confluence of events had placed us here, to share this space and time and special occasion with Bob Dylan. Grown men wept.

And all over the world today, Bobniks are wishing it could have been them.

Originally published as Review: Bob Dylan plays rare club show at The Tivoli, Brisbane, Australia