October 13, 2007
Review by David Moore
My personal oddessy of 5 consecutive shows in 7 nights:
Day 1 - Columbus OH, 10/13/07 - Ohio State University men's basketball
arena.
First off, big props to the FANS... for finally giving Bobby a packed
house to show off his talents to. Coming off of last years minor league
baseball park ordeal, it was really cool to finally see more than 3,000 at
a show. I think it's a great idea to play the college campus scene (Ohio
State, Louisville, & Indiana all in this week), as he's getting more
publicity and advertising this way.
Tonight was a heavy "Modern Times" bombardment, with 6 of the 16
selections tonight being from that album. This, along with his other song
selections gave this night a much more slower and laid back vibe... which
is cool. Perhaps not necessarily what I was looking for, but no
complaints all the same. A less than inspiring song to me is someone
else's paradise... and vice versa. This is what makes Bobby who and what
he is... the ability to reach out to us all in vastly differently ways and
span all of the different and weird eccentricies that makes up the human
race.
Highlights were for me #1 - "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues". I'm biased of
course, and I will never hear a bad version of this song to my way of
thinking. #2 - "Love Sick". A straight-up rendition tonight... quite a
powerful performance. I love when he mixes this one in for us. #3 -
"Ain't Talkin'". Sure, it was long as hell... but how could it be any
other way? This is a great lyrical composition, and as long as Bobby
provides at least a medium effort delivering it... all will be well. #4 -
"Ballad Of A Thin Man". This was really cool, a great song, a great
performance, Bobby really flashing his charisma. Everything was present
tonight to make this a big highlight. And lastly, strangely enough, the
two encores "Thunder On The Mountain" & "All Along The Watchtower". I've
heard "Watchtower" over the past few years more times than I've heard my
wife tell me that she still loves me, but something special was put into
it tonight. Same with "Thunder" (a great song to begin with), both
encores were simply amazing. Bravo! An honorable mention also goes to
"Rollin' & Tumblin'", just a rocking straight-forward rendition. The full
band has to be clicking to really pull this one off... no problems
tonight. Good stuff.
The not-so-highlights were everything else... but again, I don't expect
him to always hit my songs, and I totally respect that he's willing to
play plenty of pieces that perhaps appeal to a different personality type
than my own. We had "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" (overplayed by this point,
and not performed particulary well anyway), "It Ain't Me, Babe" (not
terrible, just not played particulary well either), "Spirit On The Water"
(I personally can't tolerate this one... period), "Things Have Changed"
(interesting selection, just again, not played all that well),
"Workingman's Blues #2" (too slow, sung less than capable of), "High Water
(For Charlie Patton)" (I never liked this, doesn't matter how they play
it!), "When The Deal Goes Down" (this was the only song that caused the
ENTIRE audience to sit down... everyone stood for every other piece),
"Highway 61 Revisited" (simply just didn't cut it tonight), and lastly
"Summer Days" (does anyone really dig this song?).
For the first half of the show, Bobby really didn't sing anything. He
more "spoke" the lyrics, without much melody (yes... he's still quite
capable of melody!), and mumbled quite abit also. I doubt this was
exactly intentional, but he did pick up it quite abit over the second half
of the set. It was like night & day in this regard. "Thin Man"
especially sticks out in my mind, that was something. Maybe not the best
overall setlist to my liking given the heavy Modern Times slant, but an
absolutely incredible show from an overall perspective, and an all-around
beautiful night. Hell, he could probably come out and sing Sesame Street
songs all night, and I'd still be telling you that everyne in the crowd
was touched. I personally walked away with much joy in my heart, just for
having yet another opportunity to see The Jester live once again. We
won't all have this opportunity forever you know... so enjoy each and
every show for what it is, your chance to be in the company of a magical
writer/performer that has inspired us all to works of passion and personal
greatness within ourselves.
See you in Cincinnati!
David Moore
Fairfield, Ohio
dgmoore7@hotmail.com
Review by Tim Lucas
As a little summer's end treat to ourselves, Donna and I drove up to
Columbus, Ohio yesterday (October 13) to see Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello,
and opening act Aaron Lee, at the Schottenstein Center's Value City
Arena.
I love collecting live concert recordings, but I've never been much of a
concert-goer. I've seen a number of acts who have mattered to me -- I
had a seventh row seat to see Iggy Pop on his IDIOT tour with David
Bowie on keyboards, I was once one of maybe 75 people who saw Pere
Ubu one rainy night in the 1980s, I saw the original lineup of the Ramones
three times -- but I've generally refused to travel very far to see any
performer, and it hasn't helped my frequency of attendance that I don't
drive, and my wife and I have conflicting musical tastes much of the time.
This year I've spent a lot of time undertaking a thorough self-education in
Dylan -- I carry all of his albums, as well as some key bootlegs, on my
Creative Zen (think iPod); I've read more than a dozen books about him
this year, and seen most of his movies and the Scorsese documentary;
and reading Paul Williams' trilogy of books about Dylan as a performance
artist has turned me into a compulsive downloader/collector of his live
shows from the past four decades. (My present goal is to collect at least
one representative show from each live period... but I'm basically
grabbing whatever I can find.) So I've been immersed in Dylan for awhile,
as Donna well knows, and it seemed the culmination of all this process to
actually attend one of his concerts, to see him in the now and hear
what he happened to be playing now.
Value City Arena is a big basketball or hockey arena that is converted into
a concert hall with temporary flooring and pre-arranged rows of folding
(but surprisingly comfortable) chairs, whose only problem is not allowing
for much in the way of shoulder room. The sound quality was a bit boomy,
given the huge hollows of the arena, but was relatively clear and not overly
loud. Amos Lee played for about 40 minutes with his band and was warmly
received. He was not the sort of opening act you tune out. Their sound
might be filed somewhere between classic period The Band and Dave
Matthews, but that's just to give you a point of compass, not a remark on
their originality. The songwriting was both heartfelt and capable, and the
band itself seemed rehearsed while the music itself remained open to
interpretation; they seemed quite flexible in performance, allowing
themselves to seize upon moments of inspiration to veer from the charts
into undiscovered country. I liked them -- not least of all because they
were serious, eager to please, and comported themselves as though still
uncorrupted by the record business.
After a ten-minute break, Elvis Costello took the stage, his microphone
\ surrounded by a brace of four acoustic guitars and a table with bottled
water and a cup of some other beverage. I was a big fan of Costello in his
early years with The Attractions but drifted away after BLOOD AND
CHOCOLATE for no particular reason, as I still regard it as one of his finest
albums. But as Elvis took the stage, I felt an unexpected flush of happy
emotions that he proceeded to earn with a consistently and impressively
energetic and passionate performance of songs ranging from the very
early ("Radio Sweetheart", "Allison") to more recent songs with a
pronounced anti-war theme ("Whip It Up", "The Scarlet Tide"). These
songs -- with a few humorous, personable, but pointedly political asides
tucked betweeen them -- were torch-bearers for the troubadour spirit
of the 1960s Bob Dylan and proved Elvis an inspired choice to share the
bill with the original. If only he had launched into "Tokyo Storm Warning,"
I thought to myself, the Dylanesque resonance would have been
complete. On second thought, nothing he was lacking. Elvis Costello was
great and fully worth the price of admission.
Bob Dylan and his band took the stage after a somewhat longer break.
Donna and I had scored fairly good seats for the show -- the first row of
the second group of center seats on the floor -- but, from the moment
Dylan took the stage, any benefits of our positioning were queered by
everyone rising to their feet -- and they remained that way for 90% of
the show. Not because the music was rousing and demanded a steady
surge of enthusiasm, because these people in the priciest seats remained
standing even during all but one of the ballads, though they could just as
well have effectively gawked at the living legend from a sitting position.
This caused some inconvenience to me, because I don't enjoy standing
in a stationary position for an hour at a time, but even moreso for Donna,
who's short and couldn't see much of the show even when standing. So,
after driving all the way to Columbus, and paying over a couple of hundred
dollars for the tickets and our overnight accomodations, she spent most of
the show sitting and listening.
Dylan was wearing a very sharp, dark grey suit with sequins and a broad-
brimmed gray hat with a blue feather in the band. He looked like Doctor
Phibes, as he would've looked if he had turned up in a later sequel as a
riverboat gambler with a Spanish alias. As is his habit these days, Dylan
played the first three songs on guitar, then moved over to an electric
keyboard for the rest of the show. I didn't mind him playing keyboard, but
I minded that he moved away from the forefront of the band to sing and
play in the manner of one of his own sidemen. He was seen, from that
point on, mostly in profile and it seemed a deliberate cutting-back on the
powerful opening impact that he had on the audience. For my money, the
concert was at its most effective during the first four numbers -- "Rainy Day
Women 12 & 35", "It Ain't Me Babe" (beautifully reinvented and given, in
my opinion, the evening's one transcendent performance), "Just Like Tom
Thumb's Blues" (one of the irregular numbers from the current tour) and,
after the move to keyboards, "Love Sick" (the potent opener from TIME
OUT OF MIND that was only recently added to the current tour's playlist).
The rest of the show alternated between flat-out roadhouse rock 'n' roll
("Rollin' and Tumblin'", "Summer Days", "Highway 61 Revisited"), sweet
whimsy ("Things Have Changed"), and dark ballads, including "The Ballad of
a Thin Man," which I was especially happy to see performed. That classic
song from the HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED album closed the main performance,
and an extended stomping/clapping/cheering from the crowd lured Dylan
and Company back out for a perfunctory encore of "Thunder on the
Mountain" and "All Along the Watchtower." I've heard many different
renditions of this song as it has been explored in Dylan's live repertoire, and
this performance was not particularly inspired. The lead guitar was Hendrix-like
to the point of being overtly imitative and the vocals were so phonetically
rendered that Dylan might have been trying to teach the song to a
kindergarten class rather than tell a tale of revelation. Despite an extended
milking of audience applause, the lights came up -- there was no second
encore.
It was strange: the audience seemed to be giving Dylan everything that an
audience can give an artist, at least in terms of standing at rapt attention
and applauding and whooping like crazy. This was the first concert Donna
and I had attended since roughly 1999, and we were surprised by some of
the changes made in audience comportment over the years. First of all, no
wafting aroma of cannabis. Secondly, we were amused (and a bit horrified)
to discover that the cigarette lighters once used to coax encores out of
artists have now given way to cell phone screens being held on high. (Talk
about scenes that should have been in THE INVASION!) There were
hundreds of them -- any one of which could transmit photos or a live
recording to a receiving line -- yet people all around me were getting caught
with cameras or recorders and being told to turn them off and put them
away. Nobody cried "Judas!" either, but Dylan hadn't really done anything
to earn such rude treatment -- unless you compare his show to the one he
was doing the last time that word was hurled at him. He actually played a
very good and entertaining, if a bit by-the-numbers, show, and his band
(most of them dressed to the nines as well) was hot, but I believe they left
the auditorium a song or two short of satisfied. It was, however, needless
to say, a thrill simply to be sharing the same very large space with him, to
cheer him, to sing along with him, and to know that he was playing for the
two of us and everyone else assembled there.
So there you have it, my first Dylan show. It was neither one of his legendary
uninspired shows nor was it one of his legendary great ones, but parts of it
could serve as an illustration of both extremes -- so, all in all, a good place to
start. I had the sense that he was definitely enjoying it for awhile and giving
the audience close to everything he had; his fire is not yet extinguished by
any means. But I did sense from the second half of the show that he was
deliberately sparing himself from investing his performances with too much pain
and acuity or anger -- the very forces that Elvis Costello is still drawing upon to
fuel his performances. But they were there in his reading of "Love Sick," which
would be a damned hard song for even him to fake.
Reading Paul Williams on the subject has taught me that the show you see is
not necessarily the one you hear -- so I'm eager to find a recording of the
show and re-experience it more specifically through my ears, away from the
smell of the hoagy being eaten by the stranger sitting next to me, removed
from all the people standing or milling back and forth in front of us, apart from
the raised cell phones -- just the pure, undistracted sound of the music and
the receptivity of one for whom it was intended.
Am I coming to Bob Dylan's concerts too late in the game to see a sustained
show of greatness? I don't think so, and I hope not. I've got tickets for
Monday night's show in Cincinnati -- which I understand to be Show #1999 of
the Never-Ending Tour.
Tim Lucas
Video WatchBlog
http://videowatchdog.blogspot.com
Review by Charles Cicirella
COLUMBUS WAS BLISTERING - RED HOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A SUMMMER DAYS TO DIE FOR
I HAVE NEVER HEARD THIS BAND PLAY THIS HARD
THIS BALLS TO THE WALL
MY BACK WAS UP AGAINST THE WALL
IT WAS THAT POWERFUL
BOB'S VOCAL RIGHT FROM RAINY DAY WAS
RIGHT IN THE POCKET AND WHEN HE SANG
THAT FIRST LINE OF IT AIN'T ME BABE IT
WAS ALL OVER AND LOVE SICK LOVE SICK LOVE SICK
WHEN I LEFT THE VENUE I WAS
JUST ABOUT BUMPING INTO PEOPLE
IN A BOB PURPLE HAZE
REPEATING LIKE SOME BEATIFIC MANTRA
THIS SHOW WAS SO GREAT
THIS SHOW WAS SO GREAT
HARP AT END OF THINGS HAVE CHANGED WAS UNYIELDING
RELENTLESS
AIN'T TALKING WAS A PUNCH TO THE GUT
TOM THUMB WE ALL TURNED PRUSSIAN BLUE
SPIRIT HE PULLED OUT SOME OF THE WORDS LIKE THEY WERE ELASTIC
DYNAMITE DYNAMITE DYNAMITE
ALL OF IT THRILLED AND CHILLED ME TO
THE BONE!!!!!!!!
Charlespoet
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