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Bob Dylan at the O2 on Tuesday night

Posted Wednesday, May 6, 2009

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Bob Dylan

When I was talking to Dave Fanning two years ago on his radio show, when publicisng the first DylanFest, he asked me if I'd seen Bob Dylan live.

I had to reply that I hadn't.

This seemed to take him aback a bit.

I was also asked the same question on Downtown Radio last year.

"How could the organiser of Ireland's only DylanFest not even have seen Bob Dylan" you could sense them thinking.

Go and See

Therefore, when the opportunity came along to go and see him at the O2 in Dublin, I had to take the opportunity.

I went along with my brother-in-law, who had flown over from Scotland that day, as well as two Moville men.

I had been told by those two, who are big Dylan fans and had seen him often, that I if I expected him to sing the classic songs in the style of the originals then I would be disappointed.

He tended to pick a style and sing them that way.

He's in a blues mode at the moment so he would probably sing them in that style.

Number One

He has just released a new album which has gone immediately to Number 1 in the UK album charts.

It's his first Number One album for 39 years there, although his last album, Modern Times, went to Number One in the USA.

At 67, he is the oldest person to have a number one hit with an album of wholly new songs.

And so to the O2 to hear him play live for the first time.

Milling around before the start I bumped into James O'Connor who has played with top fiddle player Audrey Trainor at the first two DylanFests in Moville.

It was to be his first time seeing Dylan play live too.

Seats

I went with my brother-in-law to take our seats.

The first disappointment was that our seats were right up at the back against the back wall.

The stage looked very small and far away from there.

What used to be called The Point (now the O2) has been redeveloped to add seats but all of those are far away.

Cheaper Seats

Our two experienced friends had got the cheaper standing tickets which were the ones nearest the stage.

It was more than a little disappointing, after paying more for our tickets, to be so much further away.

When talking to them later it turned out that they were disappointed too.

The stage is almost at eye level so they couldn't see very much.

They had to spent most of the two hours on their tiptoes to get any glances they could of the great man.

Big Fan

I had a friend in England who was a huge Dylan fan and went to see him every time he was in London.

However, he stopped going to see him as he said that he had got progressively worse each time he saw him.

After a break in his career, though, it seems he had come back better.

In fact he is as popular now as at any time since his heyday in the sixties and early seventies.

He is as big a hero now to young people as to older people.

Age Group

Whilst in the bar area beforehand I had a look at the age groups of the people who were there.

The main age groups were those in their fifties and in their twenties.

There were some teenagers, some in their early thirties and some in their late forties.

The big missing group was from maybe mid thirties to mid forties from the period when Dylan was 'out'.

Perhaps you could call them the Boy George / George Michael generation.

Expectations

After what I had been told to expect, my expectations had gone down so I thought that I wouldn't be disappointed.

Out on stage came the great man - I think.

I couldn't really be sure. We were so far away.

There were four or five guys on stage and one of them must have been Dylan.

Between ourselves and the guy next to us it took us nearly half the show to work out which guy he was.

So, those standing at the front couldn't see and those at the back couldn't see much either.

There was only as small area at the front of the seats where you could get a reasonable view.

Those people all had badges on. They may have been O2 customers.

I did see an ad from O2 saying Help Us Get You The Best Seats.

However, none of this was Dylan's fault.

Stage Lighting

The stage lighting, though, was very dim, and surely he must have had something to do with that.

Perhaps he doesn't like bright lights.

I was also told beforehand that he never speaks to the crowd - and he didn't.

There's none of that "Hello, Dublin, Ireland. It's great to see you all. I hope you all have a great time and join in the songs you know".

In fact, the speed at which he sung the lyrics of his better known songs led my brother-in-law to the conclusion that he mustn't like the audience singing along with him and so he sings the lyrics in a rapid, staccato manner so that they can't.

Love Fest

I'm sure that the audience would have loved to have joined in during his classics songs and had a love fest for the great man.

They did manage it at for the final song Like a Rolling Stone but it felt that the audience and Dylan were singing in competition rather than in tandem.

The start of the show was actually the best.

Within the first four songs he had sung "Don't think Twice It's Alright" and "Just Like a Woman".

I thought, that's a good start.

He didn't sing them like the originals. He sung them as though they were bluesy songs.

However, the band played them correctly and it was great to hear them.

And it was early in the show. This was just ths start. Shows improve as they go on.

Not Good

The guy sitting beside me didn't like it.

My brother-in-law beside me wasn't crazy about it as the middle part of the show had songs most of which we didn't know.

Indeed towards the end of the show people started to leave in twos and threes and fours.

Not to a huge extent but to a noticeable one.

One of our party, who had gone out to watch the Man Utd v Arsenal game in the pub half way through the show, on the way back asked a guy coming out what he thought of it.

"Don't go and see him, he's rubbish", he said.

However, that was the view of the guy leaving early.

I don't know what the vast majority who stayed till the end and asked for multiple encores thought.

Some of the songs you didn't even recognise that they were some of his best known songs till they were well into the song.

Unrecognisable

Only the lyrics of Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again were the same - and they were sung very differently.

His last song of the night, his classic Like A Rolling Stone was quite good especially as the audience snatched the song from him and sung it for themselves in the way they know.

There were several encores but that just enabled the worst butchery of the night.

All Along The Watchtower was dismembered and burnt.

The worst of all, though, was Blowing In the Wind.

He seemed to have invented a completely new tune for it (much inferior to the original).

No one recognised it till well into the song.

Wasn't Bad

Despite the above analysis, it wasn't bad.

I enjoyed it reasonably well.

It just could have been great and wasn't.

He has all the songs.

He didn't really bring the crowd into play much during the actual songs.

He didn't engage them at all.

Theatre

It was more like a theatre or opera crowd, i.e. they clapped enthusisatically at the end of the songs.

However, I got the impression that they would rather have been drawn into it and taken part in it all.

They would like to have shouted and cheered and sang along with the great anthems that he has written.

However, it seemed that he was more interested in creating devices to stop them doing this than in entertaining them.

It really never got going.

Not Enough

I think people came along both to see perhaps the greatest artist in any art form of the twentieth century and to enjoy and take part in the concert.

I can't speak for them all but I hope that one was enough for them.

I once read someone say that you shouldn't go and visit Stratford-On-Avon to get close to Shakespeare but you should read his works.

I think it is the same with Dylan.

Listen to his albums to know him.

DylanFest

And come to Moville's only DylanFest in early July if you want to hear bands like The Phantom Engineers play Dylan as you want to hear it played.

I hate to say it but the DylanFest was much more enjoyable and entertaining than Dylan himself.

Dylan is an enigma but the money I spent on the ticket and going to, and staying in, Dublin would buy a hell of a lot of his great albums.

One felt that if all The Beatles were alive, and they were up on the stage at the O2 on Tuesday, it would have been a much, much better night.