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.
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