How can I say something somehow meaningful or with sense when I've been so out of 
touch for so long? My last reference is Austin, 5 months ago, full R&RW fashion, 
and now here I am, after my first Outlaw show, trying to make out what it was...

I started my yesterday in Hibbing of all places, the previous day being one of the 
most memorable of my life, Bill Pagel gratiously gifting us 2h of his time to tour 
us throughout Bob's childhood home, then the Oxfordesque High School with an 
auditorium decorated with the muses and Tiffany glass, also the iron mine, the 
landscapes, the railroad crossings, the Wild West-like Howard Street, the Roman 
Catholic beautiful church in front of Bob's home, the skies, the rain that fell 
upon us after our visit to Bob's house, the old town up north that got moved a 
century ago to allow for the miners to keep digging... So, in a very precise way, 
Austin wasn't in fact my last reference, but Hibbing was, also Duluth with the 
striking view of the Armory, the steep streets ending in Lake Superior... It 
seemed to me as if all the songs were already there, Bob just has been mining 
them out of the depths of the earth, while me, I consciously felt as if I was 
unlearning, unthought somehow, many of the previous notions I had about Bob and 
his craft, and at the same time relearning them through new eyes, all those 
instants in Hibbing resetting a body of work I discovered I didn't have, and 
probably never will, any power over.

By the end of the Somerset concert, when 'Ballad of a Thin Man' was playing and 
getting f***ing louder and lourder, just like when 14 years ago I saw Bob for the 
first time in Barcelona and with that same song he astonished me for good as if 
he was some medieval sorcerer, I had a similar feeling, an spiritual extasis of 
some sort, him twisting reality on that stage and conjuring in front of me 
forbidden images, occult ideas, meanings that were not supposed to be said, not 
like that anyway.

How did we got there? I'd like to describe a feeling I had while witnessing 
Mellencamp-Dylan-Nelson in quick succession (Southern Avenue was a great opener 
by the way); Mellencamp is crowd-affirming, Springsteenian communal rock, the exact 
thing you need and would expect at such an event, while Willie Nelson, to me, felt 
like Heritage in capital letters, absolutely moving stuff from him and his succint 
band, Willie's guitar playing to me was mesmerizing, at 90+ to be able to do that, 
fingers crossed I get there half good. So sandwiched between affirmation and 
reflection, spirit and Heritage, Bob Dylan goes on stage and does his thing for 80+ 
minutes. After he ended, my first feeling was "What was that?!".

I had almost achieved avoiding all spoilers except for knowing (and getting pissed 
off when I did) that he played 'Hard Rain' in one California show and suspecting 
'Rainy Day Women' at another one, so my gut feeling, also seeing so many Outlaw 
threads hERe having so many pages, was that Bob had obliged and was playing a sort 
of greatest hits show, full of 60s-70s renditions that the Outlaw crowd could enjoy, 
paid their ticket and don't complain. So, imagine my sheer joy when he goes out on 
stage about 10 minutes BEFORE showtime and they start busting out an traditional 
instrumental (what was that btw? Sounded like a familiar american song) and then 
the first chords and lines of a song I'm sure I know but don't quite get at the 
beginning. Then, Bob goes "Silvio! ... ... ... Silver and gold!" and I go wild. I 
feel now as if we both guessed the song's title at the same moment, like "Oh! 
Silvio!". I can feel the energy around me a bit surprised of my reaction, but 
that's EXACTLY why Bob Dylan left his hometown and changed his name, to be himself, 
no matter what, no matter who, just be who he is, whoever that is. That's a lesson 
I can get behind of, but who has not?

Just a few days before coming to the US, I finally finished reading 'Chronicles', 
being the detailed chapter about the 'Oh Mercy' sessions the one that caught my 
attention the most, for I felt that all the detail about the recording itself 
covers up for all of the vagueness and intentional imprecision or even outright 
lies of the personal stuff. Then I played my 'Oh Mercy' LP at home, being then 
'Shooting Star' the last Bob song I heard before travelling. I once heard a 
discussion on a podcat about the "Did I miss the mark or over-step the line
That only you could see?" line and how absurd it might sound, while for me it has 
always been the other way round, it's a line that speaks of a profound connection 
between two individuals to the point that there are invisible rules and 
expectations that they both can break, offend and trespass. It's not meant nor 
sung, neither last night, as a complaining line, but as a humble one, as an earnest 
question that has embedded that statement that Bob sang twice last night: "tomorrow 
will be another day".

Two songs and he already had crushed each and every expectation I could have when 
the fest started, two quite deep cuts that were followed by an equally sparse and 
stompy 'Love Sick' that set the path of the mood of a concert that is everything 
but a show: Mellencamp and Willie offer (and that's TOTALLY fine) exactly what you 
expect, but Bob focuses specifically on puzzling you, on turning his set in an 
enigma, on turning himself into an enigma. Why two 'Time Out of Mind' songs? Why 
two 'Tempest' songs? Why four covers out of 16 songs?

To be honest, if I was attending fewer shows, not knowing anything about them, I 
would have been a bit underwhelmed by the proposition, as it's so strange, how it 
progresses to the sparser arrengements as the songs go by, so I'm really glad I 
will have more chances to keep trying to get answers to all the questions I now 
have. Don't get me wrong, I had such an amazing and entrancing time last night, 
danced, cheered and enjoyed, really enjoyed, each and every surprise and turn, one 
of the times I've ended up more sweaty after a show, and being as cold as it was 
that's quite something, people were wearing gloves! In Hibbing's High School we 
were told that, regarding the (in)famous tallent show in which the curtain was 
pulled down during Bob's performance, there is a unique version of what happened 
depending on who you ask, and that's also what this first Outlaw show made me feel, 
that you can take many roads to and from it, and that's perfectly fine, and it's 
baffling that almost 70 years later he still has this power to challenge you, to 
lure you to your own storms, and make you contemplate them in all their 
magnificence.

Some of you have spoken of a murdermostfoulesque style in some songs' phrasing, 
and I agree but would go even further: everything is so broken that some words 
are meant to be spoken. Take the beginning of 'Can't Wait', for example, the first
"can't wait" was literally ennunciated in Somerset, out of nowhere, it gave me the 
chills, it seemed as if Robert Zimmerman was saying "can't wait", not the performer, 
not the rockstar, not even the Nobel winning writer, but the plain old man: "can't 
wait". From the funky summer '19 arrangement to the more somber one that same fall 
to this, a spoken version, dragging words that weight a few tons, because that's 
how it is... When things disintegrate. Again, the words, "disintegrate", the simple 
idea of using that word, and how upfront he put the words last night, it was black 
magic, it was frightening, like a warning, like when he sang "I'll drag his corpse 
through the MUUUUUD" in 'Soon After Midnight', it takes decades in making words 
sound like that, mean that, weight that, empower them like that to the point 
they're detached from the performer and even the music, they acquire their own 
entity. I get it may not be everybody's cup of tea, but this idea in this kind of 
event feels revolutionary, putting the words at the center, the sound they have, 
what they mean depending also on how they sound.

I still have many questions and right now I can only sketch some thoughts on what 
it felt like last night in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin, but I also want to 
point apart to a couple of specific moments that left me completely speechless: 
during an impossible to sing-along 'Hard Rain', already flirting with this idea of 
masterful declamation, the line "a poet who died in the gutter" flew along crushing 
and crashing on us, as if he was thinking of an specific person (himself?) and thus 
making you think of him, and then those two lines, "a man that was wounded in love, 
a man that was wounded in hatred", like in a Picasso painting, it sounded and 
seemed as if in fact it was the same wounded man.

If videos or recordings pop up, listen to how Bob phrases "you've been with the 
professors and they've all liked your looks" lines in 'Ballad of a Thin Man', 
listen to the whole attention to detail and nuance in a tear-inducing 'Simple Twist 
of Fate' version; I was in the Art Institute of Chicago a few days ago and those 
important words could well be hanging next to the Renoirs and Monets there, 
droplets of paint against droplets of letters. Well, he's playing close to the 
masters tonight and tomorrow will be another day.