Graeme Thomson

What a remarkably bad electric guitar player Bob Dylan is

I have rarely known anyone – certainly not anyone charging on the door – play with such careless conviction

Bob Dylan in 2009. Photo: Harry Scott / Redferns  
issue 23 November 2024

Finally, a taste of the authentic Bob Dylan live experience. On the two previous occasions that I’ve seen Dylan, in the early 2000s and again two years ago, he was disappointingly well-behaved for a man with a reputation for operating a scorched-earth policy towards his catalogue.

Once upon a time, seeing Dylan live was a high-wire activity. Those days are long gone, but on the second night of two shows in Edinburgh, some little wildness crept back in. During the opening pair of songs, which were gradually revealed to be on nodding terms with ‘All Along the Watchtower’ and ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’, it was like watching an old bar band warming up after a long break from the trenches. There were missed notes, dropped beats, rogue chords, halting rhythms. The band hovered around their master in a semi-circle, like nervous footballers awaiting a half-time bollocking. I looked at Dylan, looked into my notebook, and wrote ‘Brian Clough’.

He’s a remarkably bad electric guitar player – I’ve rarely known anyone play with such careless conviction

It was precarious, but the music crackled. Dylan is still touring his most recent record, Rough and Rowdy Ways, and the sound is getting closer to conveying the intent in the album title.

When I saw him last, in Glasgow on Halloween 2022, there was an elegiac note to proceedings. He was 81 then and it felt like it might be his last rodeo. Well, he’s 83 now and in Edinburgh seemed rather more energised. The elegant poise of the 2022 show had been worked over. Jim Keltner on drums added heft and punch. The guitars were looser, crunchier. We might say that Dylan has ‘gone electric’ once again.

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