All the Bob Dylan Concerts I Have Seen
20 August 2008 — Hamilton, Ontario — Copps Coliseum
My first Bob Dylan concert, attended with my parents. I’m 19 years old and finished my first year of undergrad, where I downloaded much of Dylan’s discography from my dorm’s file-sharing network. I’m well-enough versed in the classic albums — your Highways 61s, your Blood on the Tracks — as well as the more recent Modern Times, which I gave my parents as a Christmas gift. I’m not deeply immersed in Dylan lore, although I have seen both Don’t Look Back and No Direction Home, and know enough to know that Dylan is an ornery man who is not necessarily a crowd pleaser.
We’re in some crummy seats in a side balcony. Dylan stands behind a keyboard at the side of the stage for the entire concert wearing an enormous cowboy hat that obscures all but a sliver of his face from our vantage point. The setlist has some Time Out for Mind and some Modern Times, as well as some classics, the majority of which I don’t recognize. The audience sings along to the chorus of “Just Like a Woman.” The encore is “Like a Rolling Stone,” and an enormous cheer greets the iconic opening notes, followed by general confusion as the new arrangement goes hither and tither while Dylan grunts the lyrics. Finally, a sense of collective relief as the great man unmistakably arrives at “HOOOW does it feeeeeeel….” and everyone sings along.
In the car on the way home, my parents and I agree that it’s a fun novelty to hear re-arranged versions of classic songs, and that the whole point of Dylan is that he doesn’t give you a vacuum-sealed, pandering show like, say, the Rolling Stones do. We also agree that he is, objectively, a piss-poor entertainer, and that it would have been nice if he’d done a little banter with the audience. Even so, the general consensus in the car remains, “Well, that’s Bob — gotta love him.”
7 November 2009 — Kitchener, Ontario — Memorial Auditorium
Dylan returns to Southern Ontario, this time to the city where my parents live, so we’re all eager to see him again with our expectations adjusted. A guy a few rows behind us tried to lead a chant of “We want Bob!” before the show, and later could be heard chanting “Play Mr. Tambourine Man!” during the long stretch of new material. We chuckled knowingly. Bob isn’t going to play that.
Bob is more mobile than before, at one point getting up from behind his piano to sing directly to the audience, and doing something with his body that might be considered in the same galaxy as a dance. “Like a Rolling Stone” is the encore again, sounding very different from when we’d last heard it. Consensus among the family is that Bob was on good form and this show was much better than the last.
17 November 2014 — Toronto, Ontario — Sony Centre
Having internalized my parents’ belief that it’s irresponsible to spend money that could be put into savings, I buy a cheap ticket near the back of the balcony. Whether it’s the big-city setting or the more intimate venue or simply the passage of time, Dylan is up and active, and is, by his standards, a friendly stage presence. No banter with the audience, but he’s moving between the guitar and the piano regularly. Lots of Tempest and Modern Times material, which is fine by me — I love his sandpapery voice and old-bluesman persona. The encore is “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which catches me off guard, as I didn’t think he fucked with that early shit anymore. He sings a beautiful arrangement that you can hear here.
5 July 2017 — Toronto, Ontario — Air Canada Centre
I attend this stadium show with my friend, Michael and Us cohost, and fellow amateur Dylanologist Luke S. We splurge on floor tickets, but it’s a stadium so we’re actually still pretty far back. The little man in the distance puts together a satisfying setlist that’s evenly divided between Tempest/Modern Times, solid-gold classics, and the standards he covered on his then-recent albums Shadows of the Night, Fallen Angels, and Triplicate. These standards albums, especially the first one, moved me very deeply when they came out. Technically imperfect but infused with feeling, his voice seemed to embody heartbreak. Often when you hear “Some Enchanted Evening,” you’re hearing it from the perspective of the the guy who found her and didn’t let her go. Not late-period Bob.
Luke and I have drinks at Jack Astor’s after the show and skim through a Dylan zine that some guy was handing out outside the venue. At one point I go off on a long riff about Dylan being a complete fraud who lied about hopping trains to New York, then ripped off Woody Guthrie and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott before finally discarding the 1960s protest culture as quickly and cynically as he co-opted it. I’m mostly joking, of course, but Luke has to stop me mid-riff because he’s getting too angry.
5 October 2022 — Berlin, Germany — Verti Music Hall
Dylan and I happen to be in Berlin at the same time. At the encouragement of my partner, I shell out for a very expensive front-row ticket, on the grounds that he’ll probably be dead soon, and hey, maybe I will be too, I mean you never know.
Befitting the “Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour” moniker, the setlist is mostly material from his latest album, with a handful of classics thrown in. I chuckle at his delivery of “When you go your way… (*four-second pause*)… andIgomine.” I’m surprised to hear him bust out a rollicking arrangement of his Christian-era hit “Gotta Serve Somebody,” during which I’m pretty sure I saw the typically stonefaced artist crack a smile. I’ve listened to Rough and Rowdy Ways a lot, so inside I’m hootin’ and hollerin’ when he sings that line from “I Contain Multitudes” about Anne Frank and Indiana Jones. The Rough and Rowdy songs are long and wordy, and with the low-key din of the band throughout, it feels a bit like what I imagine hearing some of that coffeehouse poetry Dylan heard in the Village as a youngster felt like. I have a lot of time to contemplate Dylan’s 81-year-old voice, which I find enormously pleasurable. It’s not as flexible as it used to be, of course, but I love his throaty rasp and his gravelly low rumble and his occasional piercing high notes. For a long time I’ve said half-jokingly that Dylan’s career has been a 65-year exercise in figuring out how to make a broken voice sound beautiful, but y’know what? If this is broken, I don’t want to hear what fixed sounds like. Soft pillows can feel nice, but so too can a well-placed scratch.
Dylan sits behind a big piano facing the audience, occasionally getting up to do a little strut between numbers. He is a wee, hunched man in an outfit that can only be compared to Glimmer Man-era Steven Seagal, and I feel a twinge of awe to be so close to this man who is history, not just a witness to it. There he is — the kid who busked in Washington Square Park, who was so mean to that journalist in Don’t Look Back, who “went electric” at Newport, who broke Joan Baez’s heart, who had the motorcycle crash and receded into eight years of domesticity, who went on the Rolling Thunder Revue, who found Jesus and evidently lost him again a few years later, who splayed his tiny body across that chair in Masked and Anonymous (2003). I’m also grateful that he occasionally stands up because he has a Kleenex box on top of his piano that, from my very expensive front-row vantage point, sits right in front of his face for almost the whole concert. I like to think the great man put it there for me personally, knowing that it would be against the spirit of a Bob Dylan concert to give me a completely perfect experience.
