Dylan vs. Pynchon

[John Carvill]

> I was lucky enough to see Dylan live maybe almost a decade ago now...

I've seen Dylan numerous times. Maybe the first time will ever remain
the most memorable. In terms of musical enjoyment, or of 'seeing Bob
Dylan' it was in many ways a total washout. It was around 1989, I think,
in Dublin at the RDS, first of 2 nights. Bono, who I have always
detested, appeared with him on the second night. Dylan bootleggers refer
to the gig I saw as 'the one where he wore the hood'. He had on some
sort of tracksuit with the hood pulled way up, you could see virtually
nothing of him, maybe just a hint of nose and chin, and after a
literally unbearable interval between the dreadful support band and his
arrival onstage, he launched into a version of Subterranean Homesick
Blues at around 4 or 5 times the usual speed. No-one near me had any
idea what song it was until it was about half finished, at which point
my friend, a real hard-core Dylan fan who had managed to catch a
familiar lyric as it whizzed past like the Roadrunner, turned to us and
exclaimed, "It's 'Subterranean'!", this revelation swept through the
crowd like a wave, and the applause kicked in. The whole experience was
like a massive slap in the face. Dylan later admitted, in Chronicles,
that during this period he was 'only a notch above a club act'. I'd give
him the notch out of love, but not for the performance.


In around 1993, I saw Dylan in Glasgow, probably the best I've ever seen
him, beautiful, magical performance, and at an all-standing venue small
enough that we could get within a few rows of the stage, and at one
point I swear he looked straight into my eye and promptly spat on the
stage. Then we took a train and ferry back to Belfast and read the
papers on the way. This was still during the Dylan Dark Ages, when the
mainstream press were so far out of whack they might as well have been
reviewing Dylan the Rabbit from The Magic Roundabout. One of the most
outrageous claims (and this leads me to take with a pinch of salt all
these write-ups about aging boomers in Lexuses (Lexi?) filling his
concerts today) was that Bob's audience are dying with him, he has no
younger fans etc. Then we got to the Belfast concert and there were
legions of teenage girls, right in front of us, yelling 'Bobby!
Bobbyyyy! Bob-eeeeeeeeeeeeeee!' continually.

Nowdays, Dylan is selling out much bigger venues. Good for him. But it's
a bitch going to see him somewhere like the MEN Arena in Manchester, a
big soulless metal shed, all-seated, etc. But you still have to go, an
opportunity like that is not for passing up, no matter how far away from
the stage you'll be, no matter how different Bob's latest phrasing of
'How does it feeeeeeeeeeeeel?' may be from the one on the album.


Cheers
JC









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