GLASTONBURYOFTHEMIND

BOB DYLAN   WEMBLEY ARENA APRIL 16th

He comes here so often thant some may have got blaze about seeing Bob Dylan these past few years.

Tonight is different, so much that’s new - New Dylan album being played for the first time in London at the all new Wembley stadium, new opening appearance (Bob back on guitar for first  in whatseems like yonks), new white hat.

What is evident from the get go is the show’s clarity of purpose. Dylan and his  band may come in with 4 guitars on Cats In The Well - a slipping and sliding,a hit you tween the eyes piece of rock n roll mischeif. With its sights trained on the ongoing madness of the world, the song sets a wiry and energetic, dancing on the toes, pace.

Playing for half the ticket price of Dolly Parton’s recent show at the same venue Dylan stubbornly and heroically refuses to compromise to many of the usual arena staples. There are no big screens, no big gestures, no digital tomfoolery.

This is essentially the same show , the same cool interplay, the unfussy, totally confident mastery of resources, he and this band (minus female fiddler Elena Fremerman) have been finessing since opening up to the public 2 years ago back in Seattle Paramount Theatre.

Since then Dylan and this band - drummer David Recile, bassist Tony Garnier (the single longest serving Dylan musician ever , once introduced by Dylan himself as “the man who has played more of my shows than I have), guitarists  Denny Freeman, Stu Kimball and violin pedal steel guitarist Donnie Herron - have produced the  superlative Modern Times. Made in  a tour break with the exact same, self contained collective that appears onstage, Modern Times is  thus a totally different entity to the equally well received predecessors  Love and Theft and Time Out Of Mind.

This continuity between stage and studio has allowed  Dylan the musician to fully blossom, roaming far and wide over the rock n roll landscape, in a way few could match - safe and in control knowing the band are hot on his tail all the way.

People tend to think of Dylan as a vocalist, a legend, a hasbeen, a songwriter but his role as amusician  deserves fuller acknowledgement . 

He  is on top of essential musicanly attributes like  finding  scope, a reach, freshness and curiosity.

Spokesmen for a generation come along, well, every generation. They aint - by definition - such a rare thing.

A musician as quixotic and capable of making dazzling connections as  Dylan is a much rarer, more valuable, proposition.

Take It Ain’t me Babe - as played tonight its melodic influences , part way between Spector and Bacharach, fly free, there’s a  sugary romance in the sound of it, the music given a sexual sensual feel as it rubs   against the calm  rebuke of the lyrics.

As he reveals himself in his memoirs Chronicles Volume 1 Dylan was the little guy dreaming big in the Rust Belt of the isolated MidWest in the repressed mid 50s. There’s a big part of Dylan the soon to be 66 musician that just cant beleive his good fortune at having been able to hop on board that moving rock n roll stage coach when it came through his  town all them years ago.

He is the Song and Dance man moving through history, the band his travelling machine as he does bluesy vamps ala Bessie Smith  while the open tuned guitars roar and blast like a frazzled brass section and Reciile’s drums come down like silver hail.

Dylan is a constantly on the road musician - a totally different stripe to 60s contemporaries The Stones, Paul MaCartney’s  rather shameless Beatles tribute, Neil Young’s next big idea.

Dylan does without the trappings, the sponsorship, the media blitz. His performance is not predicated on rehashing the song book, in fact if anything its the newest songs - Thunder On The Mountain, Spiirit On The Water, a beautiful Nettie Moore - that  elicit the warmest crowd response of the evening.

What it  is all about is keeping the music alive and interesting - for himself as much as his audience.

So on Levee from Modern Times its like Bob the Bantam weight fighter has been landed in a pounding classic Chess Chicago session back in the mid 50s, Willie Dixon’s throbbing bass swagger evident in Garnier’s stand up, the dark glare of Hubert Sumlin’s guitar breaks through too.

For Spirit On the Water you are back to 70s Clapton , when he was on fire with Derek and The Dominoes, but just as soon the fiddle takes hold and its a Eurojazz cafe in the Parisian 30s, Django Rheinhart wreathed in Gauloise mist. All that before you  hear the merciless, marvellous twin guitar drive lay the ghost of Mike Bloomfield (“the best guitarist I ever had, ” Bob told Scorsese in No Direction Home) to peace.

Yeah you can go through the whole show and hear Bob alight at marvelous moments or monuments in vernacular rocking music history, making them fresh and real and new.

Most importantly, he makes them all bend to his will, to his musical version of the universe.

But by the time that  Bob and his band  get to Blind Willie McTell  you just have to throw the comparison sheet away. They don’t sound like any other band, they sound like themselves.

It is not like they are trying to sound like they did when they or Bob were young.

It is not like they are trying to recapture some faded halcyon days gone by now.

It is that they are in  the sound, the sound of the here and now, living for and capturing the moment.

There’s not many that still can do that  - and even fewer that still do.