Bob Dylan Delivers Another Stellar Show In Late-Career Resurgence At Capitol Theatre

I saw Bob Dylan at The Capitol Theatre on Wednesday, November 8, and it was an amazing experience, another terrific performance in a late-career resurgence. He’s 82 years old and performing like a madman on “The Never Ending Tour,” which Wikipedia says commenced on June 7, 1988 and has included about 100 shows a year ever since. Thousands of performances for decades, so maybe it’s not surprising that he has five in metro New York over the current two weeks.

I quit going to see Bob at some point because I found his setlists random and got frustrated with the extent to which he rearranged some of my favorite songs, sometimes to the point of mangling. But since I got back on the bus in 2017. I’ve now seen him four times and I will keep going on whenever I can because I find being in the room with him to be exhilarating. His strength and ongoing creative fervor and ferment is an excellent reminder that no one has to live in the past or revel in past glories, regardless of their age or place in life.

Without going back and combing through various years’ performances, I can’t be sure how much Bob has changed versus my perspective and appreciation of what he’s doing. What I have fully realized is that each tour exists in its own little universe, with shifts in approach and He has morphed into the perfect embodiment of what he should be at this stage of his career, a master craftsman who is no longer inventing new things, but is instead working in the grand American traditions and perfecting them into something very unique and very special. He’s riding into his 80s like a wild, brilliant mix of Muddy Waters and Shakespeare, placing himself both within and above some very august traditions.

When Gregg Allman died in 2017, I decided to see as many older legends as I could and in short order I saw Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty. I had already started this “better see ‘em while you can” approach a few months earlier, maybe starting with a terrific John Prine show in Newark that made me stop and wonder why the hell I hadn’t seen him for so long. His performance was so full of love and compassion and joy at being alive.

In 2017, I had never seen Paul and it had been too long since I saw the other three. The Petty and Dylan shows were on consecutive nights and my experiences were so different. On June 15, at The Cap, I wormed my way up close to the stage and for the second song, Bob strapped on a Strat — he’s mostly played keyboards for years, due to some sort of hand health problems I believe — and played a faithful version of “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright.” I shut my eyes and got chills. Literal chills. I felt elevated, otherworldly — floating above myself and looking down. It was a transcendent experience, the kind that you can’t calculate or anticipate. Nothing else in the rest of the show came close to hitting me like that. Bob then was in a crooner phase and while it was amazing to be in the same room as the great man, a lot of the material just wasn’t much to my liking. I didn’t recognize the encore of “Blowin’ in the Wind” until the chorus because he had chopped it up that much.

The next night at the Prudential Center in Newark, Petty played an incredible, hit-laden set that never once had my wind wandering or feeling bored, but lacked that single moment of elevation. Which is a greater experience? I’ll take them both, please, and was lucky to have had them at all, much less on back-to-back nights! Tom Petty died three and a half months later, leaving me sad and bewildered and very happy that I made it to that show, a last-minute decision when a friend’s friend couldn’t go and was looking to unload a pair of tickets.

But of all those artists Bob was by far the biggest influence and most important artist to me — but not just to me. I think Bob Dylan is the most important, influential artist of the modern rock and pop era, even above Sir Paul and the Beatles, who were singing “Love Me Do” before they started listening to Dylan. He altered the conception of what a rock song could be, he merged pop, rock, folk, blues and country to the point where the distinctions didn’t matter. And I think he established the idea that to be taken seriously, a rock artist had to write their own music. (I think this gets taken too far sometimes; think Bonnie Raitt singing Prine, or Gregg singing Jackson Browne.)

As much as I enjoyed the Cap show and valued the transcendent song, I didn’t feel a huge need to see him again. There was too much material that I just didn’t care for. But two years later, I saw a review of his tour opener in St. Louis, which not only was a rave, but showed a setlist where mid-period classics like “Simple Twist Of Fate” and “Serve Somebody” had re-emerged. I needed to see that, so I went to The Beacon Theatre on November 26, 2019 and saw a transcendent show. The next year, I didn’t hesitate to return for his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour. Knowing that he would be playing most of the album, I listened to it over and over and it paid off.

Bob’s music now is not very loud — it calls on you to lean in and really listen — and it doesn’t feel like a jam, though his band members are clearly on their toes ready to follow him wherever he goes. In the great tradition of the master bluesmen, he plays what he feels and if that means the 12 bar blues has 13 bars in one verse and 1 the next, that’s on the band to follow. But overall, the experience to me is very much like going to the theater or symphony — sitting and being attentive to the performance, and the music is almost like chamber music, controlled and beautiful and wonderfully arranged. I know there are people who don’t like his voice and think it has degraded, but I find it beautiful and feel like he is in total control of it.

I would have gone to this tour after those previous experiences regardless but seeing that he was doing new covers every night – “Truckin’” “Stella Blue,” Chuck Berry’s “Nadine” and Muddy Waters’ “40 Days and 40 Nights” and Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killin’ Floor” – meant I had to go. And what a show it was. His band is terrific, locked in and following his every quirk, holding a chord, dropping a bridge, adding an improvised introduction. Bob was sitting centerstage at a grand piano, and his playing drove a lot of the tunes. Previously, he was playing mostly a stand-up keyboard, and it could be a struggle to even hear what he was doing. Not now. With guitarist Doug Lancio up front playing mostly acoustic, and longtime bassist Tony Garnier switching between upright and electric, Bob’s piano was loud and clear. Guitarist Bob Britt and pedal steel/filled/mandolin player Donnie Herron added the color and texture, and new drummer Jerry Pentecost kept things sturdy and moving.

The band sans Bob kicked off the night with a simple, toe-tapping swinging blues shuffle, the kind you could hear in any good honky tonk roadhouse bar anywhere in America since about 1955. Bob strolled out, gambler’s hat on head, waved at the cheering crowd and sat down at the piano and didn’t move much, except taking the hat on and off and occasionally standing up for the next two hours. It was a mesmerizing performance, aided by the lack of distractions, as all attendees had to lock our phones in pouches on the way in. I lost my focus on a few songs, but most of the night was just superb, very much including this faithful version of “Stella Blue,” one of the most haunting Garcia/Hunter compositions. I also find Bob to be also hilarious, as when he introduced the band and after Lancio, he said “And on the other guitar is the other guitarist…Bob Britt.”

I’ll try to make the Beacon next week, and I’ll be back somewhere when Bob comes back to town next year.

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[A modified version of this article originally appeared on Alan Paul’s Substack]

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Alan Paul is a journalist/author whose recently released book — Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s — was his third straight instant New York Times bestseller, following Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan and One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band. His first book was Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues and Becoming a Star in Beijing, about his experiences raising a family in Beijing and touring China with a popular original blues band. Alan Paul is also a guitarist and singer who fronts two bands, Big In China and Friends of The Brothers, the premier celebration of the Allman Brothers Band.