The ban on mobile phones and cameras has annoyed the die-hard fans. They make do as best they can, using camping binoculars and toy telescopes
After the customary bag check at the entrance, my son—a Dylan enthusiast since early childhood—and I wait with anticipation alongside the audience, defenceless and bare before a stage set even more sparse than on other occasions, speaking in hushed tones as if we were in a church.
At nine o’clock sharp, the musicians appear on stage, already ready to tune their instruments and strum a few scattered notes as if they were undecided about how to begin. An unexpected rock and roll backing track kicks in, along with a few sparse solos, and just as suddenly, from the gap in the backdrop curtain, a small figure hooded in black emerges and takes up position behind the piano: Bob Dylan begins to sing what the older members of the audience can, with some difficulty, recall as ‘Watching the River Flow’, a 1971 track which he played at length in the 1980s with Jerry Garcia’s Grateful Dead and which he has often performed as the opening number at his recent concerts. The reasoning behind this choice seems clear: tonight, despite the conductor’s age, we’re dancing to rock and roll tinged with blues and with an aftertaste of whisky and fried chicken. The significance of the presence on stage of two guitarists who quietly joined the band at the end of June, both well known to roots music fans, also becomes clear: Julian Lage, a 38-year-old Californian and young jazz guitar prodigy, plays alongside Bob, whilst on the other side of the stage stands 50-year-old Joel Paterson, one of the pillars of the Chicago blues and rockabilly scene. Both are unassuming figures, dressed smartly, yet with effervescent musical personalities and flamboyant guitar playing; they weave in and out of the laid-back piano phrasing played by the boss with delightful flashes of brilliance, underpinned by the impetuous drumming of veteran Anton Fig. At the centre of the stage is not Bob, as the lady sitting next to us thinks, but his shadow, Tony Garnier – with his black hat and Western-style moustache – who, with his electric bass (which he alternates with the double bass), has been guiding Dylan’s music since 1989, accompanying him in over three thousand shows around the world. No sooner have we settled into the rhythmic, cheerful opening than, almost without pause, the band launches into a broken, hypnotic rhythm: I immediately recognise ‘Love Sick’, one of the masterpieces of the nineties, a ballad about desperate love. Just as desperate is Dylan’s singing, as he tackles the song with a broken voice, at times slightly behind or slightly ahead of the beat, with the audience trying to act as his backing vocals but never quite managing to catch up with him. Lage and Paterson slip in and out in a flash, making the ballad even more sombre and sombre. “I walk through dead streets, I walk with you in my mind, my feet are so tired, my mind is so troubled, and the clouds are weeping. Did I hear someone lying? Did I hear someone shouting in the distance? I spoke like a child; you destroyed me with a smile whilst I slept. I’m sick with love, in up to my neck. This sort of love – I’m fed up with it.”
Bob Dylan begins to sing “Watching the River Flow”. The reasoning behind the choice is clear: tonight we’re dancing to rock and roll with a touch of blues
The applause is thunderous right from the start and remains so right to the end, despite the constant shifts in tempo and atmosphere that make the music elusive, and despite the venue’s sound system being totally unsuitable for such a refined concert. Some people even leave after an hour because they can hardly hear a thing from Section C, and many look around, bewildered, because they don’t recognise a single song and wish they were somewhere else. The setlist alternates songs drawn from his vast repertoire spanning the 1960s, 1970s and 1990s, right up to the monumental 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways: by constantly finding new ways to subvert the performance, Dylan stretches time and space as he pleases. The music is stripped down to its bare essentials, played ever more softly to keep an increasingly fragile yet ever sweeter voice afloat. Even historic and hugely famous tracks such as the folk song ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ – yet another tale of lost love released in 1975 on the masterpiece Blood on the Tracks – is transformed tonight into a lullaby for solo piano and voice, with a few measured interludes from the two guitars. Dylan, the prophet, changes the lyrics, swapping the female protagonist for a male one: a mistake, an oversight, or a reversal of roles in a world crumbling like sand through one’s fingers? “He turned to look at me as she walked away, saying over her shoulder, ‘We’ll meet again on some road sooner or later, sad and trapped in the blue’.”
Many in the audience glance around, as they do not recognize a single song. “Tangled Up in Blue” is transformed into a ballad for piano and voice alone.
My son, to whom I have been playing this music since he was a child, at one point asked me: ‘What kind of music is this? How would you describe it?’ It is a valid question. The music being performed tonight is unmistakably rooted in rock and roll and the blues, drawing equally from the protest songs of his spiritual mentor Woody Guthrie and from his other guiding light, Little Richard. When the wild performer of ‘Tutti Frutti’ died in 2020, Bob broke his long-standing silence to declare that Little Richard had been ‘my shining star and my guiding light when I was just a child. His was the original spirit that drove me to do everything I would go on to do’. For this reason, watching him tonight playing the electric piano with such intensity, everything seems clearer. The other element that has constantly shaped his music is the path he has tirelessly followed on his legendary ‘Never Ending Tour’. The great guitarist and his friend Robbie Robertson described what they were doing in the 1960s as ‘street music. We all come from the street’. Whether it’s the streets sung about by Bob in his most famous songs or the ones he has physically travelled since that 11 April 1961 in New York’s Greenwich Village, when he made his live debut. Sixty-five years on, Bob is still on the road, almost every evening, with a hoarse voice, a battered body, and a sharp gaze – at times piercing, but more often than not moving.
In the darkness, we catch sight of someone who has surreptitiously managed to evade security and is taking a photo from a distance. The master of these ‘stolen shots’ is undoubtedly Paolo Brillo, the well-known accountant from Bolzano, a Dylan fan through and through, who for more than forty years has managed to get past metal detectors and security to capture all the rock stars whilst seated in the stands of theatres and stadiums, from the Rolling Stones to Patti Smith, from Bruce Springsteen to Neil Young. But Bob is his first love, and in 2020 he dedicated the book “Bob Dylan. No such thing as forever’ in 2020. His photos of Dylan, of exceptional quality and taste, have over the years been published by *The New Yorker*, *Uncut* and *Le Soir*, and before the concert begins, he tells me about his meeting in 2014 with Jeff Rosen, Bob’s long-standing manager, in his New York office: “I started photographing him in ’84 on 35mm film at the Arena di Verona. Then in Milan, London, Paris. I must have over ten thousand photos of him. But I felt somewhat foolish sitting in his office with copies of the new album due out the following year, his hats, his personal belongings. Rosen, his right-hand man, walked in and said to me: ‘We know you well. But how do you manage to take these photographs without ever getting caught by our security? “I didn’t tell him, because otherwise it would have been all over for me,” says Brillo with a laugh. “Rosen really liked the photos,” Brillo continues, “but he makes it clear: ‘If it were up to me, I’d publish the book straight away, but he’s the boss and anything that comes out of here – be it a pin or a poster – has to be approved by him’.” The photographer admits that it took years for the book to be approved by ‘the boss’, as he’s perpetually on the road, and following the first print run for the British publisher Red Planet Books, Brillo is now working on a new, updated version featuring his most recent shots and a new layout. When asked what he would say if he ever met Dylan, Brillo replies slyly: “I’d say, ‘I’m that idiot who’s been secretly photographing you for forty years!’”
Paolo Brillo recounts the four decades he has spent navigating metal detectors and security checks to capture rock stars on camera. Bob is his first love
Another Dylan fan is Bennyboy, the stage name of an English musician who cleans up and remasters the amateur recordings he magically finds online, making them available to fans free of charge. He tells us that he has only been following Bob live since 1995, but has produced over 650 bootlegs – those ‘ghost’ recordings that take their name from the smuggling of alcohol during the American Prohibition era. “I’ve never had any problems with the management or the record label, for which I’m grateful. Probably because I don’t make any profit from my work and I don’t do it professionally, but only for the fans,” continues Bennyboy, whose mission is “for as many people as possible to be able to listen to the works of this incredible artist with the best possible sound quality”. As Dylan has taught us for more than sixty years, true transgression is being oneself, and freedom is to be found outside the box and beyond the rules.
An hour and a half of the concert flew by without anyone receiving a notification or an email, and the only thing that grew during this seemingly endless time was the desire to dance, to embrace one another, to let oneself go.
After the first verse, it is once again my son who recognises the anthem of freedom “I Shall Be Released”, with which Bob decides to bid farewell: a sweet and sorrowful gospel ballad about a man who, through a wall, hears the cries of a cellmate who has been framed. Dylan recorded it during a home session in Woodstock, where he had retreated following his mysterious motorbike accident in 1966. That version, pressed only on promotional copies, began to fuel the more or less illegal bootlegs throughout his career, and is also the final song performed by Dylan, Robbie Robertson, Ringo Starr, Joni Mitchell and many other guests in Martin Scorsese’s 1978 documentary masterpiece The Last Waltz.
“Next to me in this solitary crowd, a man swears it wasn’t his fault. I hear him shouting all day long that they’ve framed him. I see my light shining from west to east. One day or another, one day or another, I’ll be set free.”
On the bus taking us home, everyone is listening to Dylan on their devices, and the lines from ‘False Prophet’ that Bob sang just before the end echo in my mind: ‘I am the enemy of betrayal, the enemy of discord. I am the enemy of a life unlived and devoid of meaning. I’m no false prophet: I only know what I know. And I go where only the lonely can go”. Only the lonely – that’s him.
