Review by Christof Graf
,
"My Own Version Of You in Frankfurt" - It's book fair week in
Frankfurt a.M. Literature is the order of the day. Bob Dylan provides the
appropriate soundtrack. The atmosphere around the Jahrhunderthalle is as
relaxed as the evening before. Outside the hall, a "Busking Man" plays
old Bob Dylan songs on the acoustic guitar with harmonica. The outside
temperature on this October Thursday in autumn 2024 is just under 20
degrees Celsius, a tad warmer than the previous evening. The tour trucks
are still in the same place to the right of the hall. The parking lot
fills up hectic and the sign "Welcome" at the counter of the box
office welcomes the first visitors again from 6:30 p.m. Admission controls
are again moderate. Only bags that are too large are rejected and the
smartphones are to be locked in the "Yondrs". The evening begins as
the day before. This time I sit in the middle of the stage in the balcony
area and experience a different concert atmosphere than the evening
before. If you visit several Dylan shows on subsequent days in the same
location, you pay attention to other things if you succumb to the
assumption that nothing will change in the setlist anyway. The assumption
proves to be correct.
A walk to the merchandising stand reveals that e.g. a tour shirt (with
tour dates) costs 45 euros, a black hoodie (without tour dates) costs 100
euros and a burgundy wool hat costs 40 euros. There is no tour program.
But there is an overpriced concert poster in a slightly larger DIN A 3
landscape format for 35 euros, which unfortunately says: "WED - THUR
OCT 16th - 18TH 8 PM". Friday is "missing". Perhaps it is due to
the fact that initially only two concert days were planned for Frankfurt
and only after the sale of these, similar to Berlin, a third concert was
added. Anyway, I take a seat at 7:20 p.m. and monitor how the venerable
Jahrhunderthalle fills up unhectic. To my right sits a man around 75, in
front of me a father in his 50s with his teenage daughter and to my left a
demented woman in a skirt and blouse and a glass of champagne in her hand.
She has just come from the book fair and wants to feel the presence of a
Nobel Prize winner for literature, she says. Behind me sits a group of six
"best-agers" who are loudly reminiscing about their concert memories.
One was already at the first Dylan concert in Germany on June 26 in
Dortmund's Westfalenhalle 1. Another remembers how a few days later he
saw Bob Dylan in 1978 in front of 80,000 people on the Zeppelin Field in
Nuremberg and who belted out the anti-war song "asters Of War"
against the main stand of the old Nazi party rally grounds. A third only
says that he has only seen Dylan live from the 1990s onwards, but has seen
about 50 concerts of the "Majestro" since then. The oldest of the
group talks about his first album, "Highway 61 Revisited", which he
bought in 1965 and is particularly looking forward to "Desolation Row"
tonight, which he also heard here yesterday. So I'm not the only repeat
offender. Another behind me tries to top the aforementioned concert visits
and speaks of almost 100 Bob Dylan concerts in almost five decades that he
attended. The youngest of the men's group says nothing and goes to get
beer for everyone. The lady next to me looks at me and just says: "I
didn't deal with Dylan until the "Time Out Mind" (1997) album and
found the two Sinatra albums and the "Shadow Kingdom" album last year
impressive. The boy comes back with the beer and one of the group boasts
that he has seen Dylan at all the concerts in Frankfurt so far.
I don't know how many concerts I've seen, maybe there have been around
100 since I first saw him in Nuremberg in 1978, but I've never counted
them. But I think to myself that all the people around me and in the hall
carry their own story of Bob Dylan around with them and everyone has
something like "My Own Version Of You", as Dylan will sing later. I
think the people around me are a good mirror of those who reflect the
Dylan audience of today. Then the second gong sounds and shortly
afterwards the hall lights go out.
Dark is the order of the day again. The darkness in the rear area of the
balcony area looks blacker than the darkness in yesterday's left high
parquet. The ceremony begins like yesterday, only the little "rehearsal
session" to get in the mood for "All Along The Watchtower" and "It
Ain't Me, Babe" sounds much tidier from the beginning than last
night. "It Ain't Me Babe" sounds almost coherently wonderful.
Dylan sings clearly and emphatically and he swallows fewer syllables. It
becomes audible early on: Dylan is in the best mood on his second
Frankfurt evening, as if he wanted to offer the "perfect" concert
evening from the beginning, although yesterday's was not bad. Then it
goes on very quietly and slowly with "I Contain Multidudes" and here
too you understand almost every word, nothing is mumbled away, not a
syllable is left out, as if he deliberately wanted to introduce the live
performance of the album with the first song on the "Rough And Rowdy
Ways" album after the two older opener songs and point out his seemingly
constant self-questioning. The song has a slow tempo and sparse
arrangement and is driven live by reduced drumming by Jim Keltner, as well
as two acoustic guitars by Bob Britt and Doug Lancio, and the electric
bass by Tony Garnier. In the following "False Prophet" he affirms that
he is not a false prophet (however he wants that to be interpreted, if at
all). "I ain't no false prophet" fits perfectly with the concern
of his current tour: he probably wants people to listen to him and that
without raising the prophetic index finger or even being accused of it. He
probably wants you to listen to him and to make your own thoughts about
his. What he really wants, we will never really know. Why should they? It
makes room for our own versions.
Then he picks up the harmonica for "When I Paint My Masterpiece".
Those who are interested in the older songs are thrilled. Scene applause.
Some stand up briefly, but quickly sit down again. As on the previous
evening, a couple dances in the dark next to the rows of seats in the
stalls to the lively rhythm. Four "Rough And Rowdy Ways" songs follow.
One of my favorites of the evening is "Black Rider", where slight
echoes of Bobby's voice can be heard in the middle, as if he wanted to
escape the supposedly approaching Black Rider and distance himself from
him. A song that is driven through the hall like a hunted horse on the
run. Dylan underlines the rhythm with emphatically beginning piano
playing. Sometimes standing, sometimes sitting. "My Own Version of
You" sounds too jazzy right now and Dylan speaks the lyrics into the
microphone with a well-accentuated accent, as if he were preaching from a
pulpit, no, as if he were giving a lecture about his world of thought.
Instead, he gets up after playing the piano again and again and belts out
a few cadenzas into the keys. It is his way of musical punctuation, as if
he wanted to make the end of a sentence, phrase or section more effective.
Sometimes he turns away from the piano, goes a few steps further than last
night in the middle of the stage, so as not to give the impression that he
is hiding behind his piano or as if he were even immobile. No, he
doesn't. No, it is not. Later, with my next favorite of the evening,
"Key West", he sometimes even goes down on his knees, as you could
once observe on Leonard Cohen's last world tour, when he wanted to give
his songs even more expression at certain points. Tonight is "Frankfurt
the place to be", but not if you are looking for mortality. To put it in
a nutshell, Dylan is less fragile this evening than the night before, but
all the more agile, which can also be heard in his loud harmonica playing
on "To Be Alone With You". He sounds a little bit like a crooner in
"Crossing The Rubicon", which captivates with loud piano playing and
driving blues. "Desolation Row" sounds much more guitar-heavy again, in
which Dylan enters intensively with the harmonica again after initial
piano playing. Even though Dylan doesn't say a word to his audience this
evening, it's noticeable that he thanks them for the applause every now
and then with a "Thank ya". And yes, Dylan seems much less distant and
downright approachable this evening when he gets up again and again and
sneaks slowly, almost deliberately, to the middle of the stage to
establish a kind of "eye contact". Atmospherically, the concert is
sometimes even reminiscent of the "Shadow Kingdom" scenery, just not
in black and white and without background singers. Sometimes it also seems
like a melange of devotion and poetry reading, for which a few friends
have come together, who accompany the "Majestro" musically at an
extremely high level unobtrusively through his world of words. Although he
once proclaimed "Don't follow leaders, watching the parking meters"
in his "Subterranean Homesick Blues #1", his audience still follows
him today in 2024. Even though the new songs are very similar to the
studio recordings in their versions and the time of big surprises is over,
when every concert evening was never comparable to the previous one, all
this is appreciated with cheers, clapping and even occasional standing
ovations from some individuals. The version of Bob Dylan that Dylan drew
of himself on the second evening was for me the best so far on the Rough
And Rowdy Ways tour that I had heard so far.
After the "Mother Of Muses" and "Goodbye Jimmy Reed" I'm just
waiting for an equally successful version of "Every Grain of Sand",
one of his best songs ever in my opinion. He performs this in a really
touching version with a well-accentuated voice. He seems to know that he
knows how to convey the deepest feelings. He seems to want to somehow pass
on the powerfully staged allusions to Jesus, faith and spirituality with
haunting word images and numerous biblical references to his audience.
Vocally, it is one of the best performances of the evening, which he
performs at the end of the evening, sitting relaxed at the piano. With the
last note, he stands up. The four musicians put down their instruments.
They stand briefly, and this time really very briefly, not much longer
than 15 seconds next to their boss in the middle of the stage. The lights
go out, Dylan disappears into the black of the stage as he appeared. The
hall lights go on. The woman with the champagne glass goes back to the
champagne stand with a farewell nod of her head. The guy next to me
disappears without greeting. The group of men behind me is silent and
probably adds another concert and more versions of their memories of their
long lists and I have the Yondr pocket unlocked and leave the
Jahrhunderthalle, knowing that I have attended a "concert of the
century". Outside, the "Busking-Man" plays Dylan songs again, which
were not at all bad inside, and in the sky the "supermoon" announced
for this night pushes through the Frankfurt night clouds in the direction
of "southeast". It reminds me a bit of the Sinatra song "Full Moon
and Empty Arms", which Dylan sang on "Shadows In The Night" in 2015.
But that was almost ten years ago and thus a thing of the past. My
thoughts are more focused on the future, on tomorrow, on the third concert
under the sky of the Main metropolis.
(More Infos and photos from the Frankfurt-Gig (also in German
language) you find in my blog.leonardcohen.de:
http://blog.leonardcohen.de/?p=31599
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