Dylan comes on stage and doesn’t speak. The audience are reverentially quiet, too. The Royal Albert Hall has turned into a cathedral, and we are here to worship the high priest of rock: Bob Dylan.
Bob Dylan brought his tour to the Royal Albert Hall
Luckily for us, half of the set that Dylan plays comes from his ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ album, which I feel is his best album for decades. The LP (his 39th studio release) suits his rough, deep and talking voice that is now a substitute for his previous whining tone – endearing as that was. Because the album is so recent, it means that Dylan has not had the chance to get too bored of the songs on it, so he has not mangled and ‘destroyed’ them in the way some claim he has done so with the classic songs from his repertoire that he plays on tour.
Some classics like ‘All Along the Watchtower’, which opens this set, and ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’, which follows soon after, seem to have been reinvigorated by Dylan’s tinkering. But ‘Desolation Row’ – one of his greatest songs – is virtually wrecked by giving it a fast rock tempo treatment. The beauty of that song – as in all of Dylan’s classic ’60s songs – is in the way that the music matches the intensity and picturesque imagery of the lyrics. Sadly, when Dylan sings it now, there is none of that. Nevertheless, when this version of the song comes to an end, there is thunderous, non-stop applause for minutes. But you can’t help feeling that the applause is for a song that Dylan sang way back in the past, and which connected with so many people, not the song he is singing now.
The best songs from ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ that he plays are ‘I Contain Multitudes’, and ‘Goodbye Jimmy Reed’. However, despite his Frankenstein creations of his older classics, we have to admire the fact that Dylan is still so creative and rebellious, and that is why he re-works these songs the way he does.
The ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour’ began three years ago in Milwaukee and has seen him perform over 230 shows. Each of those concerts has seen Dylan give us nine out of the 10 songs on that 2020 album.
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