BOB DYLAN : DÜSSELDORF 2024

 

Disc One (56:04)

  1. All Along The Watchtower
  2. It Ain't Me, Babe
  3. I Contain Multitudes
  4. False Prophet
  5. When I Paint My Masterpiece
  6. Black Rider
  7. My Own Version Of You
  8. To Be Alone With You
  9. Crossing The Rubicon

Disc Two (60:17)

  1. Desolation Row
  2. Key West (Philosopher Pirate)
  3. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
  4. I've Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You
  5. Watching The River Flow
  6. Mother Of Muses
  7. Goodbye Jimmy Reed
  8. Every Grain Of Sand

Label : no label

Venue : Mitsubishi Electric Halle, Düsseldorf, Germany

Recording Date : October 27, 2024

Quality : Audience Recording (A+)

Review : Excellent wonderful audience recording ! Dylan, at age 83, is in great shape.

Concert Review (Boblinks) : Dylan has for a long time been in the process of reinterpreting his songs in a very peculiar way. It almost seems like an experiment in phrasing, where he delivers the lyrics with a rhythm/metre that almost never follows the underlying chord changes in a conventional way, while simultaneously almost completely stripping the lines of their melodic content. To take a random example from the setlist: in Desolation Row the lines almost all end in some sort of growl which resembles either the root note or fifth of the scale. How he reaches this growl melodically doesn't seem to matter much, such that the song becomes (melodically) almost unrecognisable and interchangeable. Generally the more recent the song, the less it has suffered from this process of degradation (although it was probably less melodic to begin with). The songs from Rough and Rowdy Ways, therefore, were passable and at times even moving. But the influence of the "cruel experiment" is still noticeable. I Contain Multitudes has some sort of melody on the album, for example the major third in "... yesterday too" in the first line, but this melodic flourish was surgically removed in the live version. This process I assume is known to all Dylan fans on this site. However, Bob has reinvented himself once more. An entirely new part of the experiment involves adding piano intermezzos in almost every song, which consist of very basic scale runs, arpeggio's or chords that often do not match the underlying harmony. In Desolation Row he runs up and down the E dorian scale (that is, a minor scale) over a very basic progression of E, A and B major chords, which produces a sound that is very out of place in the rock/folk/pop genre. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that it sounds like a toddler bashing keys at random. One has to (sadly) assume that it is intended. The process seems to have become so automated that Bob throws in some "wrong scale runs" in between lines or even while playing harmonica, such as in It's All Over Now, Baby Blue. I am fascinated to learn where this experiment leads and how musicologists will look back on it decades from now. I will, however, not be visiting a Dylan concert again.