We drove 8 hours across the caliche flats and flare stacks of the Permian
Basin to Abilene, Texas, where Dylan is playing for the first time and
ending a leg of his Rough & Rowdy Ways Tour. What was it I saw? He walked
out in a white hooded windbreaker which was half boxing robe / half Sith
Lord aesthetic. With Dylan's white hood and sparse stage lighting, with
his position along the back line and the nondescript silver curtain behind
him, he would flicker in and out of existence, in and out of sight –
he's aware of this phenomenon and reinforces it with lines like:
"I'm nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest".

It's an exercise in paying attention to get the most Dylan out of a Dylan
show, partially because of how he keeps disappearing or how restless you
get in the audience with no stage production, no public big screens and no
private little screens as cell phones were not allowed. There's no other
artist at his level that gives you so little to look at, and most of this
Abilene audience simply couldn't handle it as evidenced by the near
constant movement of attendees back and forth from the lobby to their
seats. The darkness of the venue was pierced every 10 to 20 seconds by the
harsh flood of the lobby's fluorescent light every time someone left or
returned mid-song to the concert hall. At a time when performers add more
and more visuals at places like the Sphere, Dylan takes away everything
and loads us up with poetry. With references to Poe, Blake and Whitman,
he's gotten more literary while, let's face it, Americans have gotten
less literary as the decades roll by. Don't you remember Ginsberg or
Patti Smith standing by his side? Things aren't what they were.

The pronoun "you" is used in many of his songs; sometimes it's the
speaker's lover; sometimes it's us; sometimes it's both like in the
opening tune To Be Alone with You. Sometimes the "you" is the other
character in the narrative like in All Along the Watchtower. I'm in
there listening to lyrics as hard as I can, y'all know how it is, you
don't get every word because of how he's bobbing and weaving at the
mic like a boxer, how he's putting all his swagger on the phrasing and
how his inflections and mic-work are his stagecraft, but the poetry pokes
through when it needs to. Some poetry that clearly poked through in I
Contain Multitudes was "you greedy old wolf, I show you my heart / but
not all of it, only the hateful parts. / I'll sell you down the river,
I'll put a price on your head, / what more can I tell ya, I sleep with
life and death in the same bed." With good annunciation he makes sure
you hear the cornerstone bars to get the message of each song. In False
Prophet: "what are you lookin' at? there's nothing to see, / just a
cool breeze encircling me," and we are the ones directly commanded when
he sings "put out your hand, there's nothing to hold, / open your
mouth I'll stuff it with gold".  There's a violence in the Rough and
Rowdy Ways lyric book that starts to pile up as he turns the page after
each song. He says "I'm just here to bring vengeance on somebody's head". He tells us about the pistols and knives he carries. He hacks off our arms.
He's armed and dangerous, more Malcolm X than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
these days.

His electric keyboard playing, always one-handed, sounded more normal than
when I last saw him in 2016. Sometimes he uses his other hand to cover a
yawn or pull close his sitting-mic. His playing sounded less circus-like
and less in opposition with the songs than it has before. There's no fat
in this music; short intros, short outros. My wife and I exchanged head
bobs and grateful glances during Love Sick; it seemed like he had the
lyrics to that one memorized and it was ominous, confident and rocking.
The solos are all very brief, though he did his longest solo in Goodbye
Jimmy Reed near the end. I Can Tell was a nice cover that shook up the
tempo, but more than that its lyrics fit in with this tour's songs of
love and betrayal. Speaking of love, I've Made Up My Mind to Give Myself
to You was my 15-year-old daughter's favorite song; do you remember your
first Dylan show? He used his sweet voice for this one, sans growl. Anton
leaned in over the bass drum, lowered his shoulders and played with
startling restraint in Crossing the Rubicon. They have expansive dynamics
in this one, and it was a show highlight. Forgetful Heart was communicated
with a clear melody, and it's a great treat to hear a song he co-wrote
with Robert Hunter.

The playing throughout the show was crisp and the 2 acoustic guitars kept
it earthy and ironic after all that fuss about him going electric.
Tony's bass playing stood out to me; his establishment of each note, his
embossing of each tone; you can hear his finger feeling for it, shaping
it: out it plops a micro-moment before the snare drops. Several of the
songs crackled with a palpable-juke-joint-jolt and I think Tony did most
of that, especially when he played electric bass. Throughout the show, and
especially in Every Grain of Sand, I noticed when Bob is delivering lyrics
the loudest, he is coming into a line, often with a prepositional phrase.
For example, he's really loud and deliberate at the beginning of lines
like "in the fury of the moment, I can see the master's hand." By
the end of the line he's pulled away from the mic to de-emphasize the
concrete nouns of the "master’s hands", he's swiveled to give it that
Dylan touch we keep coming back for.

I would not blame Dylan for continuing this exact setlist, this exact
libretto, when he starts up again this summer. It tells a good story, asks
all the most pressing questions, and reminds us who he is, who he was, and
who — before our very eyes — he's changing into.

Tim Staley