You’d always see eccentrics at Dylan gigs, like the man with the hat who shook his peacock feathers at the line “to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free”. There are many ordinary folk, too, in the audience at London’s Royal Albert Hall on 12 November, because everyone is wondering whether it could be the last time they see him. Dylan, dressed in a sparkly jacket, even sparklier shirt and with his hair as black as a working men’s club comedian, is on stage early (this Monday night gig finished at 9pm). He stands at the piano for the whole show, reaching down at the keys, which can’t be comfortable, but his birdlike frame seems to have developed that way, like cartoon cowboys with their “horseman syndrome”. There is no teleprompt, and no slip-ups; he is a poet, after all. Why is he the best he’s been in years? Because of his life and his age; because he’s still going; because there’s a tacit expectation that Dylan really sounds quite bad on stage these days, and he doesn’t.
The last time I saw him, at London’s Roundhouse in April 2009, was also the first time: I recall a vague sense of affrontery over his famous lack of regard for the audience, no eye contact and speech, and indecipherable singing. A version of his eternal band is still going (I’m so glad he didn’t get a young one, or play with his son Jakob), and they’re still far more concerned with each other and him than us, but they’re clustered round Dylan in a circle, black-hatted, and lit by vintage Hollywood movie lights. They are an art piece, in the way they weren’t 15 years ago – a tiny, glowing nucleus in the vast space of the Albert Hall. Phones are placed in lock-tight pouches pioneered by Jack White and given back to you (fine, but what if you forget to turn it off before it’s locked up?), and partly because of this the audience is motionless, another thing that makes it more a piece of theatre than a rock concert.
If Dylan is saying goodbye, at 83, it is not in the way that rock stars traditionally say goodbye, with farewell tours and mass communions over famous songs. Rather, the end is signalled by a certain formalism to his music these days; a new polish, and a sense that he is showing his working, laying it all bare. Did the Nobel prize win in 2016 change things? He may not have appeared to care – he sent Patti Smith to collect it – but his 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways, for which his tour is named, features perfect songs that function like instruction manuals for his method, such as the epic “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”, a high point tonight: “That’s my story, this is where it ends.” Rough and Rowdy Ways, which followed his Sinatra covers records, was a masterpiece; then there was that book of pop criticism a few years back: The Philosophy of Modern Song. His archive has been made public property too.
Looking back, I wonder whether the alienation I felt at his earlier gigs had just as much to do with the musical arrangement as any lack of onstage friendliness. The band made a wall of Dylan sound, consciously ramshackle and shuffling, highly atmospheric, but kind of relentless. Nowadays they lock into set parts, something that becomes more obvious as the show goes on, when their crazy rock ’n’ roll train slows to a halt – so subtly, you barely notice – and the musicians drop back one by one. For several songs, including the particularly hymn-like “Mother Of Muses” and “Every Grain of Sand”, it’s just Dylan’s voice alone, with the odd, carefully-placed guitar note or cymbal shiver. It is still, and will forever be, “guess that song” with Dylan: if in doubt, listen out for fragments of lyrics and Google them (oh wait, you won’t have your phone). “It Ain’t Me Babe”, in particular, shares no notes at all with the original – but who cares: Joni Mitchell likes to deviate from all her melodies these days, and it’s as though they see themselves as above it all, bored by the tunes they wrote 50 years ago.
Besides, an eccentric voice on a still-singing 83-year-old is now a wondrous voice – Dylan’s is more velvety than I recall it, or maybe that’s just the décor at the Albert Hall. Several times, I closed my eyes, or looked up into the dome, and tried to appreciate the fact that all this is coming to its end, and for now he is still here: the last person I saw on this stage was Eric Clapton, and I had a similar feeling. How amazing to be a gigantic figure like this, yet still be so protected by your own silence. At Christmas, Timothée Chalamet will play Dylan in A Complete Unknown, the biopic all about the time that he went electric. And while he may be saying goodbye, albeit slowly, he recently said hello, getting familiar with X for the first time, reviewing local restaurants, wishing unknown people “happy birthday”, and further confusing us all.
[See also: Chappell Roan’s war on fandom]
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This article appears in the 20 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Combat Zone