BOB DYLAN : ESCH-SUR-ALZETTE 2024

 

Disc One (56:18)

  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 (59:45)

  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 : Rockhal, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

Recording Date : October 28, 2024

Quality : Audience Recording (A+)

Review : Another excellent audience recording !

Concert Review (Christopher Rollason) : Autumn in 2024 saw, on 28 October, Esch-sur-Alzette, second city of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, welcome Bob Dylan for the fourth time in its history (and the fifth in Luxembourg), at its Rockhal venue, for another evening in Dylan’s current ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ tour. That tour, conceived in the first place to promote the album of that name (released in 2020), has seen a number of vicissitudes as regards its song content. Originally split between the then new Rough and Rowdy Ways (henceforth RARW) songs and earlier Dylan classics, it was interrupted by the ‘Outlaw Tour’, with a selection excluding the new material, and then brought back with a different selection of older numbers. The current setlist, seventeen songs long, has been operative unchanged every night for 15 consecutive dates, including Esch and starting with 6 October in Prague. It features nine songs from RARW and eight others – some of the latter in versions which are not so much new as harking back to Dylan’s Covid-era release Shadow Kingdom (studio performance 2021, CD release in 2023). Notably, the present list consists entirely of Dylan compositions: breaking with a tradition dating back a good while, there are no cover versions. Bob Dylan and his musicians were received rapturously by an audience predominantly of a certain age, though young people were not absent. The public was not living in the past, as applause greeted the RARW numbers as well as the familiar chestnuts. Local colour had its moment when one of the RARW songs, ‘Key West’, which contains a reference to Luxembourg, elicited a spate of cheers from the public. Bob Dylan is 83 and it would not be reasonable to expect vocal perfection from him. Tonight in Esch and predictably enough, his performance was a shade erratic, albeit the musicians’ support was constant, with a finger-picking guitar sound dominating alongside Dylan’s own eloquent piano and harmonica. The newer songs featured in arrangements not necessarily identical to those on the album: several were performed in the purest of blues idioms (‘False Prophet’, ‘Crossing the Rubicon’, ‘Goodbye Jimmy Reed’), while others merited a quieter, more reflective treatment (‘I Contain Multitudes’, ‘I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You.’) The eight songs selected from Dylan’s back catalogue received a variegated treatment. One, ‘To Be Alone With You’, has ended up so radically trnsformed as to become a different song altogether from the 1969 original – lyrically since it first appeared in Shadow Kingdom, and now musically, boasting a rocked-up idiom light-years away from the original on Dylan’s (excellent) C&W album Nashville Skyline. Whether the changes are an improvement is another matter. ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ and ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’, two absolute classics from 1964 and 1965 respectively, were both given ornate arrangements which didn’t feel entirely compatible with Dylan’s vocals. On ‘Baby Blue’ he seemed to lose his way in this lyrics here and there: this version did not compare well with the spare rendition of this song on Shadow Kingdom. ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’ and ‘Watching the River Flow’ (both 1970) were among the liveliest performances of the evening : parts of the ‘Masterpiece’ lyric were a long way from the original (‘grease’ replacing ‘Greece’!), but one cannot really cavil about sacrosanct lyrics with a song whose very title suggests process and evolution. The least satisfactory older song of the evening was, alas, ‘Desolation Row’ from 1965, arguably the best song Dylan has ever written, but – no doubt due to its ten-stanza length – liable to be cut in live performance: sometimes drastically, as tonight, with Dylan singing only five stanzas: the first three, the fifth (Einstein) and the last. This was only half the song, and the spectator is surely likely to feel short-changed. By partial way of compensation, the Einstein stanza is rarely heard live and Dylan did sing it with conviction ! The two best interpretations of the evening turned out to be the opener and the last song. The show opened with Bob Dylan’s performance number 2,289 (yes really!) of ‘All Along the Watchtower’ (1967), the song he has visited live more times than any other in his catalogue. The song proper was preceded by a long and ominous instrumental passage. When Dylan came on his delivery was firm and clear throughout, bringing out the sinister atmosphere of the song. He arguably didn’t hit that height again until the closing number, ‘Every Grain of Sand’ from 1981. Of this, surely one of his half-dozen best songs ever and by now familiar in end-of-concert position, Dylan gave us a magnificent interpretation, complete with harmonica solo. His performance was word perfect and delivered in half-sung, half-spoken mode, caressing the lyrics and coaxing out all the symbolic power of images like ‘every leaf that trembles’ or ‘the chill of a wintry light’. The ‘Master’s hand’ evoked in the song may refer to a divine agency, but also at work is another master’s hand, the hand of Bob Dylan. With a concluding atmosphere like this and its felt sense of a meaningful universe, the spectator could only return home entranced.