On this night he was a live wire.ĭylan as piano man. But if you give it a chance, it grows on you and pretty soon you find yourself totally digging it. It’s like the folkie protest Dylan was one guy, and the Highway 61 Revisited Dylan was another, and the man who recorded the Basement tapes and John Wesley Harding was someone else again.įirst of all, I thought Dylan was in great voice, and having listened to a recording of the show I can say that with even more force. Well you can’t compare the Dylan of the past and the Dylan of today, I said. I was there with a long time friend, and later during the show he asked me how this show compared to when I’d seen Dylan in 1974. Bob Dylan got dressed up on this night for this crowd. This isn’t gonna be Chuck Berry doing just another gig. And you know what, Dylan dressing up the way he does each night, sends the audience a message before he even sings a note. No way, he was here in a grand old theater and he had dressed the part. He wasn’t showing up in his streetwear - jeans and a hoodie. The flat-brimmed white hat, something a Spanish Don wore in the ’20s perhaps. Whatever my pre-show worries, as soon as the band kicked off with “Things Have Changed” I relaxed.ĭylan came onto the stage, a character out of one of his more surreal songs. And no guitar, ’cause he doesn’t play guitar anymore. There’s a wisdom that sometimes comes with age.īut Dylan? With his ragged frog of a voice. And I saw Muddy Waters when he was 65, and he was damn good too. What would that be like? I’d seen John Lee Hooker perform at the Sweetwater when he was past 80 and he was fantastic.
Frankly, it was a shadow of the show I saw in 1974 when Dylan and The Band played the Oakland Coliseum and tore the place up. I last saw him live at the Greek Theater in Berkeley in June of 1986, and it wasn’t the best show. Those lines made sense when he wrote them, when he was in his early 20s. “Ah, but I was so much older then/ I’m younger than that now,” he once sang, though not on this night.Īnd it was good he didn’t. How could he compare to the Dylan of old? Was I excited, yeah baby! Yet I was worried too. The clang of an ancient gong announced that Bob Dylan was in the house, and that his first set for the final night of a three-night gig (October 30, 2014) at the beautifully restored Paramount Theater in downtown Oakland, CA, had begun.
Paramount Theater, Oakland – October 30, 2014