Newsflash, Bob: you haven’t looked like that in a very long time.

Not even sitting in the heavy traffic heading to Candlestick for the Forty-niners-Seahawks game dampened our excitement the other night as we headed up the peninsula to San Francisco to catch a concert we’d been looking forward to for months. It was a double bill at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium with two of our favorites: Mark Knopfler, my favorite guitarist, and the legendary Bob Dylan.

We’d never seen Knopfler in concert, but back in 1975 or 1976, we’d seen Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue when it hit Tallahassee, Fla., featuring a motley cast of performers but including Joan Baez and Kinky Friedman, too. It was a rollicking good time — in our college gym, if we remember correctly– and we were excited to see Dylan again.

The mostly grey-haired crowd waiting quietly in line with us was a reminder that although we’d been in our 20s the first time we saw Dylan, we now qualified as senior citizens and Dylan was 71 years old.

{Side note: I zipped into the ladies’ room mid-concert. A woman at the other sink looked over, smiled and asked, “You don’t happen to have some weed, do you?”  “Not with me,” I responded, drying my hands. I took a better look at her. She was very thin, probably in her late 50s with a pleasant smile, long curly dark hair, lots of eye makeup on lifted eyes and that shiny skin that screams “chemical peel.” Her lips had been artificially plumped out. She wasn’t unattractive. Just artificial. I turned to leave.  “So, what do you do?” she called out.  “I teach and I write,” I said and returned to my seat.}

Mark Knopfler opened the show, but I’d like to open this post with Dylan.

Here’s my opener:

This is critic Bill Quick’s take–which perfectly reflected our own:

Dylan opened up with (I think) Tangled Up in Blue, a delicate, nuanced tale of love lost, found, and lost again. I had no idea what Dylan was signing until, on perhaps the third chorus, I was finally able to make out, over the thudding cacophony of the band, the phrase “tangled up in blue.”   Aha, I thought to myself. So that’s what it’s supposed to be.

The rest of the night went excruciatingly like that, interspersed with Dylan playing the harmonica like a dentist drilling a rotten tooth. My rotten tooth. Without anesthetic. That painful.

At some point everything just blurred together. I have maybe 90% of Dylan’s entire library memorized. Absent that, I would never have been able to figure out what he was singing at all. You couldn’t tell from the band–it was nothing but an overpowering rhythm machine.*

Our experience was exactly the same. Dylan was in very bad voice. Which is saying something, since at his best he is always in bad voice. What used to be poetry spoken-sung in his trademark, raspy voice was just noise. The songs were unrecognizable, except for the occasional barely discernible lyric. The band was loud, electric– a discordant mess– and drowned out Dylan’s bad voice with–well, they certainly couldn’t be called “tunes,” not by any means. Couldn’t even determine a song by its arrangement: I didn’t recognize any part of anything they played.

Love Minus Zero is one of my favorite Dylan songs. The only reason I know he played it was that two-thirds through I heard “and failure’s no success at all.” That was the ONLY lyric I could distinguish. At all.

Can you find him?

The stage was dimly lit, like a smoky club. No spotlight on Dylan, which ensured that fans couldn’t get a good look at him, unless they were quite close. When the show opened, he was wearing a hat and at a keyboard. But it took a while to figure out it was Dylan because we just couldn’t see. It seemed disrespectful to fans to not spotlight him, and to keep the entire stage mood-lit. Of course, Dylan’s not known for having much respect for fans. After a while, he cavorted awkwardly about the stage like some ancient gnome, every now and then blowing on his harmonica. Really, it was embarrassing.

After the fourth song we looked at one another and without a word, got out of our seats and left.   Bob Dylan: a living legend whose time had come–and gone.  We didn’t miss a thing and we had no regrets. One or two reviewers have raved about this concert; I think they must have been on drugs.

But Mark Knopfler? Another story entirely.

We love Knopfler, a Scottish musician who was the sound of Dire Straits and has had a successful solo career that’s included multiple Grammy awards.  His haunting songs, composed of beautiful lyrics and plaintive guitar layered in an original and affecting way, get under your skin.  Great band, too. He started with one of my favorites, What It Is, and really, we could’ve sat there all night and just listened to him. He was the opening act and much lower on the status ladder, judging by the size of his name in type on the ticket, but he really was the show.

A thrilling concert for me as I tapped my feet and sang along, and then saw that the guy across the aisle was doing the same thing. We knew every lyric.

The garrison sleeps in the citadel
With the ghosts and the ancient stones
High on the parapet
A Scottish piper stands alone
And high on the wind
The highland drums begin to roll
And something from the past just comes
And stares into my soul

Ahhh….those lines–chills.

I looked over at M and he said “I feel like we’re back on our Ireland/Scotland trip.”

This video was taken by someone else at the concert we attended:

A version of the song you can hear better, not from our concert

After years and years, musicians get tired of doing the songs that got them their fame and fortune, the old fan favorites.  We’re reminded of the lyrics to Ricky Nelson’s hit, Garden Party.

If you gotta play at garden parties, I wish you a lotta luck
But if memories were all I sang, I rather drive a truck

I have a different take. By playing some of the music that originally resonated with their fans, stars give a nod to their roots and show respect for both the fans and the music. I had hoped Mark would do some Dire Straits and he didn’t disappoint, closing the show with So Far Away, a Dire Straits hit. Of all Dire Straits’ songs, this one seemed to fit best with his solo sound. A good choice. Although yes, I admit, I would’ve liked to have heard Sultans of Swing or even Walk of Life.

But, I guess it’s true that you just can’t go home again. Knopfler is not Dire Straits, he’s a solo artist. With his own excellent sound.

And Dylan? Well, he’s no longer Dylan. Or maybe, more accurately, he’s more Dylan than he ever was.  He’s best consigned to memory and his original albums can sleep on my Ipod until I’m ready to revisit them. That was my last Dylan concert.
 

*See Quick’s entire review HERE.