Bob Dylan in Swansea, in 17 tracks

1

It’s my first time in the Swansea Arena auditorium.  The building opened more than three years ago, but its usual diet of lesser comedians and tribute bands has never held much appeal.  But tonight’s different: the first of three appearances here by Bob Dylan.

2

Dylan’s known for his never-ending world tours, and this one, called the ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour’, is no exception.  It began in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 2021 and shows no sign of coming to an early end.  The title comes from a studio album of the same name, released in 2020.

I’m no Bobologist, and I felt I should do some homework before the concert.  I’d had the impression that ‘late Bob’ was of limited interest, but as I listened to the album the music and lyrics alike seemed to me surprisingly powerful, allusive and at times moving.  What would they sound like live, I wondered?

3

The four of us leave the car behind the gaol, where the warders park, and walk through the quiet, wet Sunday streets to the Arena.  We’ve stumped enough money to buy box seats, which seem quite good value: Dylan commands high prices for all seats.  This makes us, it seems, ‘VIPs’, so we bypass the queueing crowds and the man stuffing flyers for his latest Bob book into our hands.  Through a side entrance we go into the VIP Lounge and register ourselves, proudly declaring that we’re mobileless -this is officially a ‘photo-free show’.

4

Since we heard about the concerts we’ve been asking ourselves, why Swansea? And why three nights (or two full days)?  The obvious answer is that it gives Bob a chance to pay tribute to Dylan Thomas, whose first name he seemingly borrowed at the start of his career (according to his account in Chronicles, volume 1, ‘I had read some poems by Dylan Thomas’).  What would be more natural for him to spend time in the Thomas birthplace in Cwmdonkin Drive, or his grave in Laugharne? 

Of course, there’s no evidence that this might be his plan.  Silence, exile and cunning are as powerful an artifice for Bob Dylan as they were for the young James Joyce.  And if any of the people you might expect to be in on the secret, like the ‘two Dylans’ expert Jeff Towns, they’re not saying anything either.

5

It’s over an hour and a half to go before the show’s start, but we seem to be the last to join the other guests here.  The room looks like an airport lounge, with its rust colours and retro furnishings.  We’re shown to our seats, and our VIP nibbles – drinks, cold meats and cheeses – arrive.  Some people have dressed up for the occasion, with gowns and sequins, but most have dressed down, in deference to Bob.

Seated around larger tables are corporate clients, who greet one another with air kisses.  To judge by accents, though, most people here are local.  I push open a heavy door in search of the toilets.  A tall suited official steers me politely in the right direction, and away from another room that he’s guarding.  It dawns on me that this is a still more exclusive space, where the ‘V VIPs’ have gathered.  We’re just mid-level guests.

6

A. confesses he’s suffering from anticipatory nerves, and to allay them he suggests he leads C, L and me for a wander in the public areas.  Many people have already taken their auditorium seats; others throng the foyer.  There’s a long queue for the ‘merch’, overpriced T-shirts and sweatshirts.  Alas, there seem to be no fridge magnets for sale.  (Later, A. slides out of his seat half way through the concert – and buys a T-shirt.)

We notice that, both here and in the Lounge, people are actually talking to one another, rather than scrolling on their mobiles.  This, of course, is because staff have locked all the mobiles away in unbreakable pouches. It seems an improvement.

7

It’s called an arena, but the auditorium is just a big box, with heavily raked seating up to the back.  The place is now entirely full.  From our perch we can see the tops of a thousand heads.  Many of them are bald or grey, and we estimate that at least three-quarters of them belong to people around our own age, for whom Bob Dylan has been a constant since youth.  Actually, I just missed the original Dylanolatrous generation.  He appealed most to school friends in the years just above me.  The younger crowd were more interested in Cream, Led Zeppelin and, a bit later, Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart.

8

The lights dim, I fix my earplugs, and five figures walk on to the stage: four backing musicians, all middle-aged white men, and Bob Dylan.  Without introduction Dylan immediately sits down and takes his guitar, his back facing the audience.  The first track, I’ll be your baby tonight, starts, to a murmur of recognition: it’s one of the few songs out of the seventeen he’ll sing tonight that will stir the synapses of fifty-year-old memories.

There’s a pattern to how Dylan plays most of the numbers.  He’ll start with guitar while the rhythm and tune are established, then he’ll turn to face the baby grand and take the piano part, mixed occasionally with mouth harp solos.  The piano has a nice, honky-tonk tone. When ready to sing, he bends the microphone towards him. The band, two guitars, bass and drums, vary their instruments, sometimes reducing the volume using acoustic versions.  It’s a tight sound – maybe too tight: the jazz-lover in me longs for one or two of the players to break loose and improvise.

9

Dylan’s a dark figure, with a shock of grey hair and a face almost always bent over his instruments.  We’re too far away to make out its details or expressions.  (Many in the audience will sit through the whole set without catching sight of him at all.) There are a few terse nods to the band, but otherwise he’s taciturn. Every few songs he rises, straightens his back, then sits back down.  At the end of each number, his fingers immediately flick over the page of his playlist booklet, and he’s off on to the next one, with no break.

10

The singing is strange.  Often it’s not singing, but a sort of conversational talking-to-himself.  Overall, the experience is like listening to a voice over a very poor phone line: you miss many of the words and most of the sense, and interference distorts the pitch.  You begin to wish that you’d made more attempt to memorise the lyrics of at least some of the songs before you came, or that ‘opera surtitles’ had been supplied.  The words I’d heard on the album were as powerfully expressive and vivid as ever, though they seemed to carry more than a faint valedictory tone.

11

Yet Dylan’s voice is still capable of hitting the notes and making them count, and he still has that nasal twist in his voice that was so much part of the sound of the young man from Duluth and Hibbing, Minnesota, back in the beginning. It’s a sound that combines assertion with a kind of defiance or contrariness.

12

To my (muffled) ear, the rocking, bluesy numbers from Rough and Rowdy Ways are the ones that work best.  In the slower, more contemplative ones, the words tend to fade and the instrumental lines wander: ‘Key West (Philosopher Pirate)’ drifts into meaninglessness.  With a faster momentum and driving backing, songs like ‘False Prophet’, ‘Black Rider’ and ‘Crossing the Rubicon’ seem to carry more weight.  ‘When I paint my masterpiece’ has a lovely, unexpected Latin beat.  Best of all, though, is the final number, the Blakean ‘Every grain of sand’, a song from Dylan’s born-again phase in the early 1980s. It ends with a fine harp flourish. Though maybe ‘flourish’ is a touch hyperbolic: it’s been a powerfully impassive performance.

13

By now Dylan’s been going for well over an hour and a half. There’s been no interval or break of any kind.  It’s a remarkable thing for someone who’s 84 years old.  How does he do it? More crucially, why does he do it?  Maybe it’s just that he knows no other way.  Rolling stones tend to keep rolling, and perhaps it’s the endless travelling and performing that keep him from ageing and worse.  His beloved folk, country and blues singers tended to do the same. Blind Willie McTell, for example (alas, we’re not treated to the Dylan song of that name).  Or Jimmy Reed, who kept on working through illness and neglect: ‘Can’t you hear me calling from down in Virginia?’, sings Dylan in the penultimate song, ‘Goodbye Jimmy Reed’. Or Jimmie Rodgers, who, in ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ (1929), sang, ‘one day I thought I’d settle down / … but somehow I can’t forget my good old rambling days / The railroad trains are calling me away’.

14

The singing stops and the guitars rest.  Bob rises from his seat and leads the others to the back of the stage.  They stand there, strung out in a row, for a few seconds.  Then they leave, Bob a bit slowly and uncertainly.  He’s said not a word to us from start to finish.  They don’t return, despite the applause and encouragement from the audience.  There’s a ripple of renewed, hopeful clapping, but it’s only the crew coming on to unplug the equipment. People rise to leave.

15

‘Ignoring the fans’ I find admirable. He’s come all this way to play and sing for us, what more do we want? Why should he bother with the fake bonhomie and crowd-pleasing most performers indulge in? What’s wrong with playing to please yourself and your fellow-musicians? With going your own way, and ignoring vulgar expectation?

16

I take out the earplugs.  They didn’t seem to work, and outside the Arena there’s an unfamiliar and eerie silence.  We walk back to the gaol. Someone says, did anyone think of piping ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ live to the prisoners, to lighten their load?  We wonder, too, whether Bob will succeed, during his time in west Wales, in connecting, at last, with the other, dead Dylan. 

17

But there is one thing we’re certain about: that we’ve been part of an important, historic event. We’ve managed to see, before his stone ceases to roll, a performance by the greatest singer-songwriter of our times.