Reviews Berlin, Germany Uber Eats Music Hall October 12, 2024 |
Review by Sergi Fabregat
I'll go first to the outskirts of the third Berlin show to try to express
what made it so unique and a perfect, though by no means enclosed, epitome
of not only the true meaning of rough and rowdy (tour) but also of a Bob
Dylan live performance. I was really well located on night #3, quite
upfront and next to the aisle, so I really staged rushed on a pretty
preplanned move and ended up, yup, as close as can be. Literally in front
of him, thanking Bob, also trying to grab some gaze exchanges and
specially smiling at him; I can guarantee you he didn't look at anyone at
all, as opposed to night #3 in Prague where he folded hands a couple of
times to folks at my right. On Berlin #3, he kept doing the panning head
movement, hands at his sides, I'd say almost not even a smile, mostly
looking to the ground and surely not a word of goodbye. Off he was, from a
crazily named venue that stands literally a 2 minute walk from the largest
remaining section of the Berlin Wall, the one with many murals and of
course the famous Brézhnev-Honecker kiss. It kind of made me think as how
Checkpoint Charlie is surrounded by McDonalds and KFCs; it is what it is.
Now I come to think about it, I kept clapping for that minute before
lights went on and, after exchanging an ironic smile with a guy to my left
out of our sarcastic hope that we could get an encore, I said that: "it is
what it is".
My partner came along with me to the second Berlin show, the first one he
had seen in almost a year, so he had missed the epic, PERFECT, Spring Tour
and also the spicy Outlaw deTour. I was glad he came to that second show
as it was a much more rounded, happy experience, both on and off the
stage, a show that perfectly showed the changes the tour has experimented
but at the same time presented them in an emotional, expansive, relatable
way. What happened on night #3 was a beast of an entirely diferent kind, a
show that could either be considered the best and the worst you could’ve
seen, if art was to be measured by bureaucratic grades instead of by the
weight of the feelings it sparks. I remember having to compose and refocus
myself during some moments of the show because I felt crystal clear that
an specific action ignited my thoughts and I wanted to keep myself on
track, just to bounce back with that thought into my eyes, which
transformed in return the nature of what the performance communicated me.
Jean-Luc Godard has a beautiful way to refer to essay film: “A thought
which forms a form that thinks.” Is Bob Dylan doing essay rock these
days? I wouldn’t be that categorical, but surely the correlation that I
felt on the 3rd Berlin show between the bare essences of the songs, the
cubist way in which they were wildly performed and acted and what one
could receive from that and give back makes me wonder about the
possibility.
If we could got used to an ‘All Along the Watchtower’ that was jammed
like a rehearsal but not truly sung and an ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ that
could well be emotionally invested but not that much sonic-wise, the tides
turned on Berlin #3. ‘Watchtower’, above everything, was incredibly on
point regarding the voice, you could feel the plunder of the Earth, when
Bob sang “there’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief” it
truly sounded as if it was coming from within him, he sounded
uncomfortable, he looked uncomfortable, he was not much singer-songwriter
but singer-actor. In return, ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ featured that
endless guitar intro (how long was that? 10 minute song?) that seemed to
try to find a melody until there was nothing left in sight, and then it
answered it with the longest stream of “no, no, no, no, no” you can
imagine. If some days that first one-two classical punch seemed a warming
up, in Berlin #3 seemed as a rehearsal of feelings, a tentative move on
the ground to try to find a safe passage to any kind of conclusion. Bob
kept looking back at Keltner quite often, even also saying “no, no,
no” with his head, mirroring the song and even its meaning in a somehow
twisted way, something that would happen during other moments in the
night.
During an all-seated ‘I Contain Multitudes’, compared to the other
nights when he stood up there and kept moving, I feared that, precisely
the night I had such a great seat on the left side, which allows you to
see him totally when he steps out of the piano, maybe I wouldn’t be
lucky. Bob seated during the whole song and I remember specially the
“William Blake” lines and, even more, the long, really long and heavy
pause he made between one “I contain” and the following
“multitudes”.
Then it came the first true moment of awe and disbelief for me. Bob picked
up a funny groove in his phrasing for the first lines of ‘When I Paint
My Masterpiece’, keeping it down and witty, and finally stepping out
completely of the piano. I could see him perfectly, his figure seeming
much, much bigger than what I would later be able to behold from just a
couple of meters away from him, and then he kind of bent on his knees a
bit, inclined his upper body really forward as if he was gonna fall and
said the line: “Got to hurry on back to my hotel room”. Travelling
afar, it’s a line that logically always gets me, but this time the
comically surrendered pose combined with the catchy delivery made my head
spin. It was such an incredible moment, I felt I had been thrown into a
rollercoaster. The Godard-esque notion of the form that thinks had been
put into motion, as the Prague’s Rabbi’s Golem who protected the
community, my mind had been reset. Bob then started to move, as if he was
in fact the robot-commando, he put his head on straight and I remember the
freedom and crack-a-laugh featured in lines like “sometimes I feel that
my cup is running over” or “everyone was there to meet me coming down
the hill!”
The restlessness in Bob was so palpable all through the night, ‘Black
Rider’ feeling half worried and half mocking, that kind of pristine,
almost synthetically shiny quality Bob’s voice projects sometimes, it
kept coming back song in song out, me thinking that a more wonderfully
irregular show than Prague #3 was impossible and there I was. I’m not
sure if it was during ‘Masterpiece’ or ‘My Own Version of You’ but
at one point I realised that, more than to Indiana Jones, Bob that night
was making me think about Super Mario, as stupid as it sounds. Always
about to fall off the cliff, always moving forward, jumping and braking
and speeding and hoping, devoid of all purpose but the now, the motion of
the current, one false step off the way and down you go, and I remember
feeling in my guts that same burning focus that made my eyes incapable of
losing track off him on my first show 14 years ago, that “.
If night #2 ‘My Own Version of You’ brought back the uptempo
arrangement that I loved so much in Summer ’23, on Berlin #3 came again,
but this time without any safety net. Do you want to hear Bob Dylan
supermarioing like a madman through some lines? Go listen to this version,
it is jaw dropping on most moments and the band holds it so amazingly well
that it does justice to the song’s title and, like a perfect circle,
achieves to make an own version of it. The last line, “do it with
laughter and do it with tears” is a miracle on acknowledgement of
one’s own limits, it embodies the perfect balance that the song itself
has tightrope walked during its entire course. Wow, it was such an
incredible moment.
The keyboard intro in ‘Crossing the Rubicon’ was so weird, so out of
the blue, so on the verge of being nice and coherent and precisely because
of that closeness to the usual so outstanding that I can’t stress enough
how much I loved it. It made no sense with the rest of the song, it was as
a sort of bing bang, the necessary body parts to give birth to the
subsequent song, and Bob delivered such a deep take, deep fried I’d say,
and I cheered again an ad-lib I forgot he also used on night #2: “Take
the high road, take the low road, I DON’T CARE, take any road you’re
on!”. That “I don’t care” felt both a nice and angry statement, a
truly commitment to his own freedom more than an advice, something
remarkable in a line that seems to speak about the listener’s freedom,
instead refocusing it to the independence of the one speaking.
I’d been struggling to find in a ‘Desolation Row’ the kind of sheer
excitement and propulsion that brought to my feet and fingertips the most
deep of rumbles on October 5th in Prague, but finally I connected to it in
a similar glorious way in Berlin #3. Wow, from the beginning it sounded to
me as a tiny bit faster, even if it was just and nothing more, and after I
shifted my own gears, put all my attention into it I found it a piece of
velocity and sadness like no other. In the hands of Buddy Holly, this
‘Desolation Row’ is almost an abstract piece, a train running
westbound on its wheels and eastbound on its whistles. I’ve thought for
a while that this song could well be about the Holocaust (or the
concentration camps if you like), and this Fall Tour is hitting quite some
cities that have its relationship to the event. So the rumble makes me
think about westerns, the quest for the Pacific Coast, but the words bring
me to the east. It’s just one of those moments, you don’t remember
exactly many details but you know the feeling, that you are genuinely
moved by this. I see Bob doing a real pose next to the piano and moving
his extended hand towards the sky exactly when he sings “well, the moon
is almost hidden” and it’s such a beautiful sight. Then a beautiful
instrumental break, really uplifting, salvaging, not sure if it was harp
or more piano, and after that not the usual “Dr. Filth” verse, but
something else. The first words I catch are “put his memories in a
trunk” and I can’t believe it, he’s singing the Einstein verse. One
of my favourite ever performances is a ‘Desolation Row’ from 2006 in
Jackson, MS, where he sings the Einstein verse in a half staccato, half
upsinging mode and by the end of it, when he gets to the “you wouldn’t
believe, if you look at him, but he was famous looooong agooo” it sounds
as if he is hollering his tears out of his broken heart. And in Berlin of
all places he sang that verse too and I was there to witness it; this
verse about a fleeing, about lost memories, about a robber, about
drainpipes and about someone important turned into a nobody and lots of
thoughts pass my mind. And Bob gets to the end of a magnificent,
unforgettable performance, and he sings the “rearrange their faces and
give them all another name” in a very strange, difficult to fathom, way.
Being ‘Key West’ usually a very quiet tune among the crowd, I felt a
bit bad for laughing quite aloud when Bob turned back to look at Keltner
specifically on the “it might not be the thing to do but I’m sticking
with you through and through” line, but it was so funny and obvious! It
added to the vibe of a very reactive show from Bob’s side, fully plugged
to the present and navigating through the elements, not at his happiest,
easiest or most comfortable, but definitely roughest and rowdiest, at show
at the very limit of its own essence, even the reddish lighting from
previous concerts changed to a golden green tone, as if a summer meadow
had turned to gold. When he leaned over the piano, he fussed his hair
sometimes with both his hands, turned around, signalled here and there, he
really seemed distressed but not so much because of displeasure with the
band but with something else, definitely unknowable and unimportant for
those down there.
Then, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’, a rendition that I can’t
believe it lasted almost 10 minutes, so strange is the time passing, so
piercing the scarce vocals, so basics the concepts of the song (the sky
that folds as opposed to the carpet that moves) and, between keyboards,
pianos and harps, I reconnected fully to the moment when the last lines
came, and Bob didn’t sing them, he exhorted them: Strike another match!
Go start anew! He usually connects both lines as if one was the
consequence of the other but in Berlin #3 he clearly shouted both
concepts, mirrored them, the metaphor and the action, again the form that
thinks and the thought that forms.
The now usual disappointment because he’s not bringing back
‘Dignity’ passed really quickly because from the start it became clear
that ‘Watching the River Flow’ was about to be enthralling, worth
every laugh, guitar lick, irony and purity when Bob sang “I’ll sit
right here” while performing one of the most mobile shows I dare to
remember.
‘Mother of Muses’ […] for me, peaked on Berlin #1 but, still, the
third night’s rendition made me fall in love all over again with a song
I had made the mistake of overlooking in the past. Again, hearing him
stressing so beautifully the name “Zhukov” in Berlin, next to the
Wall, hit me quite hard, my mind rumblin’ nonstop.
Now, before I get to the most incredible and iconic moment of the whole
night, let’s stop at ‘Goodbye Jimmy Reed’. It got me, in all its
swampy monochord ticking, to my most recondite crannies; it worked
witchcraft on me. It reminded me about that ‘coldironsbounds-esque’
take in Tokyo 2023, Berlin’s more jumpy, gestural, performative if you
want. The “Godspeed” Bob exclaimed felt as never before, the “I need
you” dismembered from the “like me head needs a noose”, the “I’m
just looking for the man” made me remind that next day I was set to do a
tour one of its stops being the place where Hitler’s bunker was and it
felt eerie and wrong. The whole song was full of energy and at the same
time devoid of it, on tweeter I compared it to a ‘Mission Impossible’
movie where the mission message self-destroys after five seconds, and it
totally felt that way.
And then, to cap a concert that I’m confident can make the rounds to
near the top of the hill, Bob did this while singing a beautiful version,
once again, of ‘Every Grain of Sand’. He moved out in plain sight and,
just in the moment he sang “I don’t have the inclination to look back
on every mistake”, he inclined himself about 45 degrees, and I again
laughed quite earnestly. It was SO funny and SO fitting, it was essay rock
in all its extension, as it was not only a really funny joke but an actual
commentary: he has the inclination to look back on every mistake, he
literally has it. And it made him feel so human and that was soothing and
nice to see! A bit later, before the best harp solo of the night, that
kept my mind dancing wild and free, it came the last verse that features
some of the best lines he’s ever written: “In the bitter dance of
loneliness, fading into space, in the broken mirror of innocence, on each
forgotten face”. A bit earlier that same day, I visited the Topography
of Terror museum, standing on the site formerly occupied by the SS Reich
Security Main Office, which documents in a really throughout exhibition
the rise and crimes of the Nazi government. I read most of it, but when I
got to the persecution of homosexuals, I made sure I would try to remember
the faces of some of the cases detailed in the exhibition. During that
line in ‘Every Grain of Sand’, the face of Alfred W., a 18yo telephone
operator denounced to the Gestapo by a sex partner came suddenly to my
mind.
A bit later, with a big smile on my face after an extremely funny show I
hope to remember forever, I tweeted that “It felt so special to feel
such an idiosyncratically funny & juvenile gig in a city where so much
pain has been concealed, projected, endured. The roughest & rowdiest of
shows at the same time healing, running backwards to try find some kind of
beauty behind every painful thing.”
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