The first time I saw Bob Dylan live I had an out-of-body experience. I was high up in the rafters of the Royal Albert Hall watching a croaky old man caterwaul his way through Frank Sinatra songs with stunning inaccuracy. In the front row, I could see a woman genuinely averting her gaze as though in the presence of her lord and saviour. It occurred to me in that moment that were aliens to come down and be told this was generally regarded as the most important musician of the last century they’d laugh in our faces.
At the interval I received a text message from a friend sat elsewhere in the venue explaining that he’d seen Bob 23 times and this was by far the best he’d ever been. The aliens would have a field day but if they just allowed me enough time to make them a compilation…
Dylan returned to the Albert Hall this month, older and croakier. He did, as ever, sing songs you know and songs you don’t as well as songs you know in ways you don’t. He has reached his final form as a kind of Old Testament prophet with a voice that, at this point, feels like a direct challenge to the impressionists. He is a mythic figure who has retained an otherworldly aura despite steadfastly refusing to die. Or, at the very least, stop. His last album, released when he was in his late 70s, is one of his best. The tour of the same name, Rough and Rowdy Ways, came to London in 2022 and was a triumph. Dylan and his backing band gave the whole thing the air of a smoke-filled bar in an old film noir and it was actually good, not just good by the standards of a Bob show.
At that Palladium show two years ago, we were speculating as to whether this would be the final Dylan concert in London but my friend felt if anyone was too obstinate to die then it was our Bob. For context, he is one of just five people on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band still around and has lived long enough to see his story get the lavish Hollywood biopic treatment. A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet, will be released in December and it is worth noting that the film’s star was born just two years before the release of Time Out of Mind, Dylan’s 30th studio album and one concerned primarily with death’s proximity.
Perhaps the man who has spent his entire life confounding expectations will simply refuse to die. At the conclusion of that last London run, his exaggerated bows were interpreted as a final farewell to a city central to the Dylan mythos. He’s back a couple of years later and perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. This is a man who wrote an autobiography that left readers knowing less about its protagonist than they did before they started. A man who exhibits paintings he claims depict significant locations from his youth, only for it to transpire that most of them are reproductions of stills lifted from old Hollywood films. A man born Robert Zimmerman, who nonetheless released Christmas in the Heart, a seasonal collection of Christian hymns and carols.
Dylan is enduringly fascinating because he refuses to play the game and thus retains the kind of mystique we associate with those musical icons who die young. He is equally happy releasing a 17-minute song about the JFK assassination as he is telling mother-in-law jokes during his glorious stint as a DJ hosting his very own Theme Time Radio Hour. He doesn’t seem concerned with calculated moves or what his legacy might be and simply follows his instincts. Sometimes they lead to Highway 61 and at other times we end up with Masked and Anonymous, a mess of a movie written by and starring Dylan that, improbably, shares a director with Borat.
Timothée Chamalet plays Bob Dylan in the forthcoming biopic
In recent months, with Elon Musk’s X seemingly in its death throes and users abandoning the platform in their droves, perhaps the greatest songwriter in the history of popular music has suddenly decided to tweet about subjects as banal as bumping into ice hockey players and good places to eat in New Orleans. And, after a lifetime of conditioning, we dissect every utterance as though it might contain a clue as to where the genius comes from or what is contained at the heart of Bob Dylan. One suspects he finds all this very funny.
There’s a rule in improvisation that you don’t think twice. Not only has the expression proved useful as a song title for Dylan but it also seems to sum up his entire weltanschauung. There are albums where the photographs on the cover seem to have been the first ones taken, the kinds you would delete from your phone when taking holiday snaps, and yet this cultural behemoth seems as unfussed as he did when he went electric. His standard response to questions about word choices in his lyrics is to say: “It rhymed.” In other words, he seems content to leave the analysis to the rest of us.
In a 1965 press conference, Dylan said: “I think of myself more as a song and dance man.” It is always hard to determine exactly how ironic Bob is being but he does genuinely seem to see himself in a lineage with the likes of Sinatra and Fred Astaire. It stands to reason that, at some point, the Never Ending Tour, like the film series The NeverEnding Story, will have to come to an end. But because of that cornucopia of remarkable songs, he has already taken his place with Fred and Frank in the ranks of the immortals.
Bob Dylan is playing at the Royal Albert Hall until 14 November. royalalberthall.com
