Rock and roll lives.
Yes, Las Vegas is probably one of the worst places in the country to follow live music. The clubs are big and corporate. The fans are more concerned with pyrotechnics and celebrity sightings than what type of guitar the musician is playing. There is more security than Fort Knox. Beer is outrageously expensive and of course you can't smoke.
But, one thing Vegas does well, is throw money around and The Joint at the Hard Rock is nothing if not state-of-the-art. It's probably a treat for musicians to play at (though the huge plasma screen TVs are a downer for some), and the sound is an audiophile's dream come true.
So Bob came to town and we went to see him. We braved the high ticket prices, the pitfalls of parking, the crappy tap beer, and the iPhone maniacs trying to sneak videos all night long while big scary security guards shined flashlights in their faces. (Really adds to the mood, thanks guys!)
No stranger to Dylan concerts, loyal fans know that no Dylan show is the same as the last Dylan show you saw. Sometimes he's bluesy, sometimes he's kinda country, and other times he's just surly and never even shows his face to the audience. It's okay. He's a legend. He's allowed to do whatever the hell he wants.
But this concert was different. Dylan always reinvents his work in his live shows, rarely faithfully reproducing th hits the way some fans yearn for him to do. In fact, he seems to take some pleasure in remaking these songs from our subconscious into new and unfamiliar pieces that become less touchstone and more a nagging sense of deja vu. But Dylan outdid himself. He was back and he was, well, he was hot. I don't purely mean sexually alluring, although I am sure some in the audience were pleased to see him make some moves for a change. I mean that from the first note, the whole place was electrified and Dylan himself radiated, yeah, it looked like he was totally enjoying himself. Not only, did the band (including Charlie Sexton) rock, but Dylan rocked, the audience rocked, we all rocked. Together, like in the shared artistic experience that only live performance can provoke. It was Dylan covering Dylan and making the old new and the new new-er and remaking us as an audience in the process.
Of particular note, were the songs; Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat, Don't Think Twice It's Alright, Ballad of a Thin Man, Highway 61 Revisited, All Along the Watchtower, and a version of Like a Rolling Stone that was genius. (Yeah, the version you are thinking of is genius, but this reinterpretation was simply amazing. The song lost none of it's intellectual profundity, but gained teeth - and an unforgettable beat.)
The Las Vegas paper may have called Dylan's voice a "croak" and his fans the "middle-aged office crowd", but I prefer to go gentle on the ignorant journalists of this city (one mis-referenced the seminal Dylan album as Blonde AND Blonde). For us, as the brave, clever, lucky few that got to see Dylan this weekend, we saw an artist - at 68, no less - play one of the best shows of his career.
Shhhhh...it's a secret....Rock is not dead.
It just blew my mind.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
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