Chance has willed that the same day that “Rough and rowdy ways” turned three years old, its author will present it at the Kursaal in Donostia. On a more personal level, I was still two days away from reaching the age of 42 from the first time I was able to see a Dylan concert. It was at the Toulouse Municipal Stadium, and Zimmerman was about to publish “Shot of love” (August 12, 1981), of which he already brought forward three songs there, and therefore his last edition was “Saved” (June 20, 1980). And with his “Gotta serve somebody” he began that night, which he later sprinkled with many of his, shall we say, greatest hits (“Like a Rolling Stone”, “Man Gave Names to All the Animals”, “Maggie’s Farm”, “Simple Twist of Fate”, “Ballad of a Thin Man”, “Girl From the North Country”, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”, “Mr. Tambourine Man”, “Just Like a Woman”, “Forever Young”, “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”…). That is to say, what could be expected from a record of his height. Because in that June of 1981, Dylan He was 40 years old and had about twenty albums, and in addition to being close to the end of his controversial and later praised Christian trilogy, he was already considered a kind of dinosaur, incapable of adapting to the new times that marked the outbreak of punk, the new wave and all its variants. (If anyone is curious to check my enthusiastic breaking latest news of that first time, shared with my friend “Bolo”, you can rescue it from the pages of the magazine “Muskaria”).
Times have changed, someone said. in 2023 Dylan He is another and perhaps no one like him to understand the uncertainty principle. And he is another in his own right, an other who on the one hand adapts to his biological condition that practically prevents him from playing the guitar in order to focus on the piano, sometimes sitting down, sometimes standing up. But above all it is different because every night he has the mystery of him, whom he pursues with the delicate and persistent euphoria of a young adult of 82 years. To begin with, he focuses on his latest album, which he reviews from cover to cover, all its songs except the 17 minutes of “Murder most foul”, perhaps because of its long duration, but not to reproduce what has been recorded, but to transform it and often make it grow. . He renounces the copy to become the erratic, hoarse and ridged crooner that he always intended. Thus the canonical “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” takes on a new flight, “Key west”, that singular test of dream folk passport to the pleasure of crying, “Crossing the Rubicon” slows down a bit more, “False prophet” is sustained in its litany and its tenuous plucking, “Mother of muses” walks through a state of almost funeral song, etc, etc.
Another part of the set is made up of the rescues of “Shadow kingdom” (2021 concert turned into record and film) with some mid-range classics. He opens with “Watching the river flow” and his voice is almost muffled, a matter already resolved in the following “Most likely you go your way and I’ll go mine” where he “shows off” at the piano between ethereal plucks, a borderline “When I paint my masterpiece” with harmonica and violin, or “I’ll be your baby tonight” introduced with soft percussion. Already in the final part he moderately rocks “Gotta serve somebody” (“Slow train”1979), and says goodbye with a heartfelt “Every grain of sand”, from “Shot of love”curiously enough, the album he had planned in 1981. It is known that the only title that changes from one concert to another is song 14, and tonight he resorts to “That old black magic” by Johnny Mercer, which is not a first (it’s in his album “Fallen angels”one of those dedicated to Sinatra).
But where then is the grace of the matter, beyond some songs or others, when all those that made him famous among the general public are also missing? Well, in that this evening Dylan, accompanied in the twilight, like an artistic installation, by a quintet that surrounds him and almost swirls around him in a circle, even if this means that some of them act with their backs turned (Bob Britt and Doug Lancio, guitars, Donnie Herron, steel guitar and violin, Tony Garnier bass and Jerry Pentecost drums), engender something unique, that amalgamates and swallows the noble materials of the s. XX (blues, country, rock, swing, gospel…) without parking in any. Ballads that aren’t exactly ballads, half-times that aren’t exactly half-times, masterful and libertine essays of an emancipated music and mantric textures that from the rear approaches a personal avant-garde thread that catches you and doesn’t let go, and that makes almost two hours go by in a flash. A music freed from refrains or canons, of people chanting, talking or clapping; small suites in permanent experiment without approaching the concept as such, but light years away from deja vues and comfortable repetitions of so many others. The effect is difficult to explain, it is felt or not felt. Anyone who prefers a folksy and submissive version of Dylan has gone to the wrong concert. This old man, variable as the moon, has not lost the youthful touch of giving surprises, nor has he forgotten that nostalgia is so often due to a fake in our brain. What is truly noteworthy is not the absence of mobiles, but the absence of easements.