nightmayer

Attending a Bob Dylan concert is essentially placing a $200 bet against yourself. He’s not Ella Fitzgerald, who gave a masterful performance every time she stepped out on a stage. With Dylan you never know if you’re going to get an on night, an off night or simply something totally inscrutable. You’re betting on the curiosity factor, though you’re assured nothing less than interesting. Even a dreadful show at one of his extended Beacon Theater runs 15 or so years ago was interesting. His three song set in 1968, performed with The Band at Carnegie Hall as part of the Woody Guthrie Memorial Concert, was transcendent. Many notches above interesting.

This time wasn’t exactly a house concert, yet here was Dylan playing five blocks from our home at Brooklyn’s magnificently restored Kings Theatre. I could walk over. And did. 

The quick take: Dylan’s second night at Kings was fascinating. It’s the same 17-song show he’s been performing for two years now (exception: Johnny Mercer’s “That Old Black Magic” has been substituted for “Melancholy Mood”) yet it’s clear from the outset that his supporting musicians have no clue how he’s going to attack any given song.

That’s always been true — read some of Rob Stoner’s Facebook posts about his stint as bassist and band contractor for the Rolling Thunder Revue back in the mid-‘70s and how the musicians had to watch Dylan’s fingers and mouth to get an idea where he was headed. Talk to any long-time fan about how there have been periods where you couldn’t tell what songs he played any given night because he’d twisted them so much. 

Now, though, the set list never changes. This group has been playing these songs almost nightly — this was the 64th performance since this year’s leg of the tour began in April, and the tour overall started November 2, 2021 — yet the truism holds: Dylan is going to mine those songs differently every damn time. That’s another aspect of the bet. Sometimes that mining yields gold. Sometimes coal.

What Dylan and his current band delivered in Brooklyn in 2023 was in the Grateful Dead mode, with lulling improvisations for a mostly 20s-30s-early-40s audience. Many people sitting (really standing) near me were swaying in a stoned haze, making tai-chi-like hand motions — a throwback to Dead shows in the ‘70s and ‘80s, only these people weren’t born yet then.

It was all quite reverential. The ovation when Dylan emerged in the shadows (I mean that literally, and in the shadows he stayed) held through the first four or five songs. After that, at least up front, there were brief segments where everyone sat down before rising again, sometimes at seemingly mysterious moments. This is no Springsteen concert, though; it’s not that the music impels you to stand and move. It’s about legend. One woman in the audience said she was from the state of Washington, cat-sitting in Greenpoint for a friend. This was her opportunity to make up for the time 15 years ago (when she was 13) when she didn’t attend a festival in her home state that Dylan was playing because she had no idea who he was…”and now he’s in his 80s. Who knows how many more rounds he’s going to go?” That theme recurred among young and older fan conversations while exiting the theater and walking home.

A man sitting next to me had flown in from Ohio that morning for business. He checked the box office when he got to LaGuardia and like me discovered that eight or 10 house seats had clearly just been released for sale; we were Row G in the center. He had seen the show two years ago in Ohio, shortly after the tour began. How did this compare? “That was more rock and roll-y. This was more jazzy. He’s Dylan.”

I figure I won my bet. So did my Ohio and cat-sitting seat-mates.