Bob Dylan is still the master of reinvention

Bob Dylan’s Never-ending Tour started 30 years ago and this week it hit Sydney for two concerts, charting a career that spans six decades. Steve Moffatt writes about the famously uncommunicative singer and how 2018 compares to his 2011 experience.

Bob Dylan working on one of his iron pieces at his studio. Picture: Heaven's Door

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Bob Dylan’s Never-ending Tour started 30 years ago and this week it hit Sydney for two concerts, including a last-minute bonus gig in the intimate surrounds of the Enmore Theatre.

“Intimacy” is not a quality Dylan strives for in these concerts, being famously uncommunicative and relying on his songs alone to make the connection.

The last time he was here, in 2011, there was a pre-taped announcement by a crew member to introduce the “laureate of his generation”. This time we didn’t even get that.

‘Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series Vol. 13/1979-1981’ is available today: https://t.co/n9phC2eJKF pic.twitter.com/rtMMP4HvM6

— bobdylan.com (@bobdylan) November 3, 2017

But over the two hours the action on the ICC Theatre’s massive stage was constant, with the array of retro spotlights dimming between numbers while the 77-year-old shuffled around the back of the stage like a veteran boxer, picking up a harmonica and maybe a swig of water before resuming his place on a stool behind the Steinway.

Meanwhile his five-piece band — Charlie Sexton and Stu Kimball, guitars, Tony Garnier, bass, George Receli, drums and Donnie Herron on pedal steel, mandolin and violin — did some free-form tuning and licks, waiting for the boss to kick in to the next number and for the lights to come back up.

GROWL

But if there was not a word said, there is an intimacy in that throaty delivery as if Dylan is talking to us one-on-one.

In 2011 I wrote that gone was the famous nasal whine and that these days his voice sits “somewhere between the low belly-rumbling growl of a dog by the fireside and the clapped-out croak of an ageing rocker”.

His two-hour set worked a rich seam of songs covering six decades from Blowing In The Wind and It Ain’t Me Babe to the swing-era feel of Duquesne Whistle and Soon After Midnight from his crash-hot 2012 album Tempest.

Who wants slick when you can get the full organic genius of rock’s first and last Nobel prizewinner?

Ditching the familiar Fender Stratocaster for a concert piano, Dylan directed a 20-song set list that will not vary until this year’s gruelling version of the Never-ending Tour ends back in the US in November.

But with the constantly reinventing Dylan things can never be predictable, or taken for granted. A couple of endings were a little ragged, and his penchant for changing timings and emphasis, sometimes in the middle of a song, occasionally caught his excellent band of seasoned session musicians off-balance.

BRUTAL

But none of this mattered too much. Who wants slick when you can get the full organic genius of rock’s first and last Nobel prizewinner? The songs like A Simple Twist of Fate and Tangled Up In Blue were delivered with passion and occasionally a pinch of humour, but always with that acid intensity bubbling near the surface.

Desolation Row, somewhat shortened but still coming in at around eight minutes, was given a complete makeover with strident backbeat chords from Kimball and Dylan’s insistent piano motifs while classics like Highway 61 Revisited and When I Paint My Masterpiece set up an irresistible groove.

Receli’s drums lent a marching rhythm to It Ain’t Me Babe, underpinning the honest and sometimes brutal poetry.

When Sexton was let off the leash with a sideways glance from Dylan he dazzled and amazed with his tasteful pyrotechnics and Garnier, the band’s longest serving member, was rock solid on electric and stand-up basses covering a variety of styles and genres.

As the opening number asserts, Things Have Changed, which pretty well sums up Dylan’s attitudes to life and music.

What next?

DETAILS

● CONCERT: Bob Dylan

● WHERE: ICC Theatre

● WHEN: Saturday, August 18