Reviews Frankfurt, Germany Jahrhunderthalle October 18, 2024 |
Review by Christof Graf
,
"Every Grain Of Sand in Frankfurt" - Actually, I would have been
with Nick Cave and his "Bad Seeds" in Munich's Olympiahalle on
Friday, 18.10.2024. I had already bought the ticket in April. At the end
of July, it was suddenly announced: Bob Dylan will perform on several
dates in Germany as part of his tour in October 2024. So far so good. But
a few days later it was also said: Due to the great demand, additional
concerts were scheduled in Berlin and Frankfurt. For me, this meant giving
my Nick Cave ticket back to the fan sale and getting in the mood for the
third evening of Dylan's concert trilogy in Frankfurt.
Friday evening, October 18, 2024: Dylan makes his way from his hotel, the
"Frankfurter Hof" in the city center, to the Frankfurt district of
F-Hoechst. Hardly anyone got to see the Nobel Prize winner for literature
in the venerable building of the "Steigenberger Hotel Chain", which is
the literary hotspot par excellence during the book fair.
Frankfurt a.M., Friday evening, October 18, 2024, a good half an hour's
drive from the "Frankfurter Hof", the same place, the same time as the
day before in the Jahrhunderthalle. The ritual can begin. I am curious to
see what will change compared to the two previous evenings and also what
will not change. At least my seat has changed. After sitting quite far
back on the balcony on the first evening, sitting in the high stalls on
the second day, I make it to the stalls on the third evening. From here I
have a whole new perspective, which offers new views of Bob Dylan. Yes,
just looks at Bob Dylan, not looks at the legend Bob Dylan - I don't
want to use terms like legend, icon or myth in the Dylan context
anymore. Too often the media still talk about the music legend, the icon
of rock music or even the myth of Bob Dylan when attempts are made to
describe Dylan's complete work or a concert in words and this rarely
succeeds. Bob Dylan is just Bob Dylan or just Robert Allen Zimmerman from
Duluth, Minnesota. That's it. Bob Dylan is only Bob Dylan to the others.
After all, it was not for nothing that he once said about himself: "I is
somebody else" in reference to Arthur Rimbaud. But perhaps he is simply
a believer in the consistent and permanent change of role.
The course of the evening remains the same as the one already experienced.
Smartphone ban, two gongs before the concert starts and the two openers
"All Along The Watchtower" and "It Ain't Me Babe". At times he
sits at the piano during these first two songs. At times, he reaches for
the guitar lying on a stool next to the piano. The whole time of the two
songs he shows himself only with his back to the audience. Dylan's
performance has patterns when, after the initial refusal to make visual
contact, he slowly opens up and approaches the audience in lyrical blues
garb. Then he begins to pick it up in order to invite it into his cosmos
with his seventeen songs that are currently most important to him,
performed live.
This cosmos looks a little different in the stalls than in the back rows.
You pay attention to other concert details. In the first fifteen rows, the
light is brighter. If someone were to come up with the idea of pulling out
a smartphone that is not locked in the Yondr pockets to take a snapshot of
what is happening on stage, you would immediately be exposed as the
culprit par excellence. This is what happened in Berlin in 2022, when the
rule-breaker was expelled from the hall after he tried to take photos with
his smartphone quite early on. Dylan doesn't like that. Dylan has never
done it to be photographed, at least not in moments when he doesn't like
it. There are many of these moments. Concerts have been part of the
forbidden time window of photos since the 90s. In Frankfurt, everyone
adheres to the rules on the third day. And yes, I admit, I would also like
to succumb to the temptation to take a photo, but I fear the consequences.
So I focus on the overall ambiance. Dylan & Band (around Tony Garnier
(electric and standup bass), Jim Keltner (drums), Bob Britt and Doug
Lancio on electric and acoustic guitars) provide the soundtrack for those
impressions that are denied when looking through camera objects and
smartphone displays on the high musical level that has been accustomed to
for two days now. Viewed up close, the stage looks a bit like a workshop,
like a rehearsal room, like a workplace where some musician friends gather
to jam something. There is hardly any light on stage. Two large film
studio spotlights, two smaller spotlights and a handful of light sources
that act like construction site lamps project only unpleasant, shadowy
yellow in the environment of a lot of darkness. At the back, right and
left hangs a folded theatre curtain, which is only discreetly illuminated
on the floor.
Effects, light shows and screens have never been Bob Dylan's thing. On
the last part of the "Rough And Rowdy Ways" tour, which has been
announced for three years, visual reduction is the program. Dylan
doesn’t need photos of it. Hence the ban on press photographers and
smartphones. Images of this arise and remain in the mind when Dylan works
his way through his current oeuvre surrounded by brilliant musicians with
perfect sound. The current album is still at the center of the rather
literary spectacle. The longer I sit in the stalls, the more I consider it
a gift to be able to experience a third concert in a row at the same
venue. Writing about it in retrospect proves to be a bit of a challenge if
you are just as enthusiastic about Dylan's performance and in this case
rightly as the day before. Nothing was worse, rather everything was even
better, even more precise and even more accurately presented than on the
two days before. Those who were only present on this one evening and only
get involved in a single Dylan concert in 2024 may see the evening with
different eyes. A few actually left the hall after just one hour.
Those who are still looking for the classics in 2024 will continue to be
disappointed. Those who want to experience an epic-historical evening are
in the right place at the right time, on this third evening in
Frankfurt's Jahrhunderthalle.
Those who are still looking for the classics in 2024 will at least be
appeased with some older songs such as "When I Paint My Masterpiece",
"To Be Alone With You", "Desolation Row", "It' All Over Now,
Baby Blue" and "Watching The River Flow" as well as with the concert
finale "Every Grain Of Sand" in new arrangements compared to the
originals. Those who want to experience an epic-historical evening with an
exceptional artist who has been awarded a Nobel Prize for his literature
get involved with the Bob Dylan of the present day.
And yes, the third evening sounds just perfect. Not a single crooked
guitar note and a perfect coherent sound determine the evening. The times
when the audience puzzled over which of his songs he was alienating or
even wantonly destroying and sometimes not even his musicians knew which
song was next on the program are long gone.
Dylan demonstrates once again today that music has a more accompanying
function in his late work. The concert in the stalls seems a bit like a
reading of the old Beat poets, who once let themselves be accompanied by
quiet jazz and blues tones during their lectures. In 2024, Dylan will be
accompanied by blues tones that are sometimes very quiet, but sometimes
loud, sometimes played quickly and sometimes slowly. He underlines the
blues scheme with almost brutal piano passages, such as in "Crossing The
Rubicon", one of my highlights of the evening. Whenever Dylan goes
quiet, it gets epic. Then the 83-year-old gets up from the piano and
slowly takes a few steps to the middle of the stage. Thanks to the
proximity to the stage, you can see his face better than from the back
rows. Some people will wish they still had as much hair at 83 as Bob
Dylan. Yes, the hair has become thinner, dyed black, but still there. He
hardly wears a hat or any of his sometimes somewhat bizarre and hat-like
headgear on the "Rough And Rowdy Ways" tour and not on this evening
either. Bob Dylan is in a good mood this evening, which he is not always.
The concert does not seem like a mandatory appointment to be worked
through. The band is in the mood to play. Each of the musicians will again
be introduced individually after a total of four songs. Same procedure as
yesterday and the day before yesterday. The main protagonist is in a
talking mood. He is downright talkative this evening, because you can hear
some "Thank Yous" at the end of several songs.
The musicians are all wearing a black suit again. The guitarists flat cap,
Tony Garnier, the bassist a flat-brimmed Stetson hat. Dylan wears one of
those black frock coat suits with a decorative pattern, reminiscent of the
ones you know from old western films when the cowboys dressed up for the
salon. Underneath you can see a black shirt, as on the previous evening.
On Wednesday, he wore a black and white patterned shirt underneath.
Everything somehow fits together when Dylan invites you to his
"Americana". Up close, you can observe so many things that are not so
easy to see from the back rows. Dylan in Person. After each song, he opens
new pages in a DINA 4 folder, for example. He never steps up to the
microphone stand at the front of the stage. Only at the end of the concert
does he briefly hold on to it. Bob's facial expressions are just as
recognizable. He seems concentrated with every song. He distorts his face
a little when he drags out the words. And not infrequently he even smiles
when he addresses his audience with his song lyrics.
It always gets particularly epic when he gets up and leans on the piano.
- When he holds the microphone to his mouth in his right hand and
supports himself with his left arm on the instrument as if at a bar. The
scenes seem downright casual, for example when he uses the belcanto method
in the meditatively acoustic folk song "Mother Of Muses". – With his
prosodic singing in the final verse, he sings "Take me to the river,
release your charms" - or "I'm travelin' light and I'm a-slow
coming home" and thus knows how to put the emotional content of the
words in the foreground. No, he doesn't seem preachy when he inserts
short rhetorical pauses in a strongly articulate way, only to end them
with the harmonica. After "Goodbye Jimmy Reed", the citation of the
"Rough And Rowdy Ways" is over.
The wonderful "Every Grain Of Sand" “ marks the end of the concert. The
song, which he will only perform live in 2021 for the first time in years
after 2013, stands for the end of the concert experience in 2024 (not only
in Frankfurt). Quietly, sitting at the piano, we understand almost every
one of the words that flow past us like rippling water in a riverbed.
Dylan's last words "I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man/
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand" affirm that this
song is an anthem for this evening. Far from his religious references,
Dylan describes the pain of self-perception and reverence for the beauty
of the world. "To see a world in a grain of sand/ And a heaven in a wild
flower/ Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/ And eternity in an
hour."
If I was already of the opinion on the second day that it was the perfect
Bob Dylan concert of the present day, I see the third Frankfurt concert as
another perfect concert, just from a different perspective in the
Jahrhunderthalle. Thank you, Bob, for being able to see (your) world in a
grain of sand for almost two hours.
There is no encore - as usual at the moment - and there is no need for
it. How could he, in such a final? The light is not illuminated, Dylan
stands up for a few seconds, remains in the middle of the stage for
another few seconds and leaves the stage as usual in the dark.
(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
Click Here to return to the Main Page |
page by Bill Pagel
billp61@boblinks.com
Current Tour Guide |
Older Tour Guides |
Bob Links Page |
Songs Performed |
Set Lists by Date |
Set Lists by Location |
Cue Sheets |