REVIEW: A reinvigorated Bob Dylan at Proctors Theatre

At age 82, Dylan sings old and new songs with unprecedented command and authority

Oct 31, 2023

(SCHENECTADY, N.Y., October 30, 2023) - With a band sporting black suits on a dimly lit stage and songs filled with images of darkness and death sung in a voice seemingly channeling another dimension, Bob Dylan’s concert at Proctor’s Theatre on Monday night could well have been a Halloween special.

Except for the fact that pretty much every Bob Dylan concert and new song since at least 1997 has had a Halloween-ish aspect to it, or a battle with mortality, after the Nobel Prize-winning rock poet almost met his maker (or, as he likes to say, “almost went to see Elvis”), having succumbed to a rare heart infection that had obituary writers scurrying. But Dylan battled back from the infection and delivered a series of intense new albums, and over a quarter of a century later, at age 82, Dylan seemed as lively and urgent as ever in concert, part of his four-year self-dubbed “Rough and Rowdy Ways” international tour, named after his late-career “comeback” album released in 2020.

In many ways, Dylan seemed more alive and engaged in his performance than he has since the beginning of his so-called Never Ending Tour (not his coinage) in June 1988. This is not to say that those shows were uniformly indifferent or lesser Dylan: they were as thrilling as they were shambolic, often threatening derailment only to offer moments of blissful transcendence.

But if Monday night’s concert is any indication of what Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways tour has been offering (and unofficial concert tapes strongly suggest it was), Dylan has not been as keenly focused and engaged onstage as he has these past few years since such standout tours with distinctive sounds and character as 1975-1976’s Rolling Thunder Revue, or the previous year’s Before the Flood tour, or even his 1965-1966 international tour with the Hawks, soon to become the Band, when he dragged audiences kicking and screaming into his new world of electrified folk-rock.

For one, Dylan has come to terms with his voice, playing its limitations as strengths, working with it rather than against it. There is no struggle here, but rather masterful phrasing and diction, colorful tones running through his register from the top to a gleefully eerie deeper bottom. You may not catch every word, but if you did not know them ahead of time, you rarely could. Plus, Dylan is constantly rewriting his lyrics, especially on his older songs, as he did Monday night with such deep catalog chestnuts as “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” and an entirely rewritten “Gotta Serve Somebody.” But familiar with them or not, you could hear lines and phrases pop out in a manner akin to a prophet – false or not – on a hillside: “Maybe you’re hallucinating, you may have seen a ghost,” “I can’t sing a song that I can’t understand,” “I opened my heart to the world, and the world came in.”

If you have been dwelling in a cave for the past decade or so, you may not have known that Dylan long ago retired his guitar in favor of the piano keyboard. He rules the roost from the baby grand, and after several years of muddy fumbling with the black and whites, he is an eloquent player, well-versed in styles ranging from honky-tonk to bebop abstraction to Gershwin-like discordances to the basic boogie-woogie chords that he first learned to play as a teen-ager modeling himself after Little Richard. Guitar duties have been fully taken up by two or three other guitarists (depending on how you count) in arrangements that boast a level of precision rarely heard in Dylan’s career as a live performer. While various instrumentalists, including long-time bassist and musical director Tony Garnier, occasionally donned electric instruments, for the most part Dylan was complemented by an “unplugged” string band, with long-time sideman Donnie Herron handling quadruple duties on violin, mandolin, pedal steel and lap steel, Bob Britt and Doug Lancio handling dual six-strings, and Jerry Pentecost doling out some extra oomph to what may sound like simple blues, folk, and rock rhythms, but what are often complex and sophisticated variations on those traditional forms, turning on a dime at times and always determined by the mercurial man at the microphone.

Supporting these various new approaches to vocals, instrumentals, and arrangements is the cleanest, sharpest sound ever. Unlike in the past, the band never overrode Dylan’s vocals or piano licks, and the picking and strumming by all the string virtuosos shimmered with acoustic delight. I was never left wanting to hear a professionally recorded live concert album in all the many years I attended Dylan concerts during the Never Ending Tour; I feel different about this one, and while decent-sounding unofficial concert recordings circulate with only a modicum of stealth, I’d spring bucks for a professional live recording this time out.

Of the seventeen songs Dylan played, nine were from the Rough and Rowdy Ways album. Credit Dylan for truth in advertising by naming this tour after the album. It is in no way a greatest hits tour – no “Like a Rolling Stone” nor “Blowin’ in the Wind” nor “Tangled Up in Blue.” He highlighted a handful of late-1960s/early-1970s songs that thematically and musically fit perfectly with the new material, including “Watching the River Flow” and “To Be Alone with You.”

Dylan has often added one or two numbers to his recent setlists that refer to the location of his concerts: a pair of Chuck Berry numbers in St. Louis; a John Mellencamp song in Indiana; some Muddy Waters in Chicago; and a Leonard Cohen number in Montreal on Sunday night. Going into Monday night’s concert, one wondered what tribute he would pull out of his musical jukebox of a brain to honor Schenectady. As I predicted going in, based on his past behavior, he would forsake the geographic connection (there not being any obvious artist or song associated with Schenectady) in favor of his default strategy: a Grateful Dead tune. Leave it to Dylan to choose “Truckin’,” which, among its many place names, invokes Buffalo, or more precisely, “up to Buffalo.” The reference to upstate New York was close enough. And, to my eternal puzzlement and mystification, the audience responded to this number with the biggest frenzy of the evening, finally standing up in place and giving Dylan his biggest ovation of the night. The Grateful Dead was in many ways a Bob Dylan cover band, so turnabout is fair play, one supposes. And whatever one thinks about the Dead (don’t get me started), Dylan did turn in a rollicking version of “Truckin’,” such that it remains in my mind as the biggest earworm of last night’s concert. (I will solve that problem as soon as I am done writing this review by listening to … anything but the Dead.)

Some notes for Dylanologists who eat this stuff for breakfast: Dylan played the first five songs bareheaded (he still sports a head of wild, curly locks). Before launching into the sixth song, “Black Rider,” he donned a white hat. Also, whenever he sang, “Black rider, black rider,” his voice was treated to an echo effect. The arrangement of “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” began with two free-metered, rubato verses, before the band kicked in with a “Suzy Q” like rhythmic underpinning, bringing the number to its conclusion with a taste of stripper music. Besides its wholly rewritten lyrics, “Gotta Serve Somebody” was transformed into a swamp-rock number featuring some crazy metallic electric guitar riffs. “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” featured a piano interlude that seemingly nodded to George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” and in this as in all numbers, Dylan just seemed to be having great fun playing piano, such that his guitar was never missed.

Going into this night, I felt confident that this would be the final time I would attend a Bob Dylan concert. I lost count how many times I have seen him live -- somewhere in the 80s or 90s. Maybe it’s been over a hundred times; I just don’t know. I am happy to have this concert be the one that caps that lifetime of seeing Dylan onstage, burning it into my memory. But based on his performance, his vitality, and the overall excellence of the night, I may just see him again next time he swings by after all.

May God bless and keep him always….

Seth Rogovoy is the author of Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet (Scribner, 2009).

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