Benefits of travelling abroad Bob Dylan is an old man. Let’s skip the part where we’re surprised at that. When the friend you’re ribbing before the concert about his new bifocals could quite reasonably have been conceived to the sound of the headlining artist on the radio then any comment on their having aged is superfluous at best, disingenuous at worst. So. Bob Dylan is an old man.
Benefits Of Travelling Abroad
And he is fucking rocking it.
9 pm, Dylan minces on stage. Blue suit. Big white hat. Tiny man. I’ll advise a mustache. BANG! Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat. KABOOM! Shooting Star For more informative blogs visit Ideal Writer. SKIDOO! Things Have Changed. JENGA! Man In The Long Black Coat. At this point, I am not ashamed to say, we hit the first song that I recognize. Despite having heard all of them a thousand times before benefits of travelling abroad.
Because, of course, these aren’t the same songs that I have on my hard drive or my CD shelf. Any more than this is the same man who recorded them. These are hellfire, bluesy, swamp rock reinventions. Staccato and arrhythmic. Sung to ward off boredom by a man who has utterly and completely run out of fucks to give. And, oh! It is good.
I’m told that I’m lucky. I’m told that it’s far more usual for the fidgety, big-hatted, gravelly, Vincent Price-looking fucker to sit behind his keyboards. Brooding, and forcing himself to trudge through his fifty – maybe sixty-minute set. Well, then I AM LUCKY because, for ninety astonishing minutes, I was twenty feet away from a bouncing, sweat-soaked, harmonica-playing, pensioner who was giving it his all benefits of travelling abroad.
(And Bob Dylan was quite good too).
“BOBBY! BOOOOOOBBBBBBYYYYYY!” Shouted the crowd. Over-familiarly.
“ROBERT ZIMMERMAN DON”T NEED NO ZIMMER-FRAME!” Shouted one lad. Presumably confusing the hell out of Dylan, because they don’t call them that in the U.S.
“Sounds like William Shatner as a dog doing Bob Dylan karaoke covers to a presetting on an electric keyboard. If this was a cover band there would’ve been riots.” Says an angry Glaswegian on youtube benefits of travelling abroad.
Bob Dylan ignores it all, of course. He may have stopped overtly distancing himself from the crowd, but he’s doing engaging on his own terms. Which, tonight at least, seems to be ‘playing at being Tom Jones’. He nods straight out at the crowd, he jiggles his hips creakily, and he mugs his way through the tracks, probably winking occasionally (even though we weren’t close enough to tell that much). He all but wears a t-shirt reading ‘I am humoring you, you bastards.’ It is glorious benefits of travelling abroad.
Because it’s not a cover band. It’s a man who has spent fifty years buggering up his vocal chords and stretching his brain inside out still managing to give you something new for your money. And why on earth would anyone value familiarity above that?
