BOB DYLAN in Albuquerque, April 11, 2006

©Michael Koster, April 2006

If you were close to the stage at the recent Dylan concert at Tingley Coliseum, I bet it was a swell show—tight band, bold arrangements, striking musicianship. But for the rest of us the music tended to float about 30 feet into the crowd, then drift upward and wrap itself around the unsightly steel beams, notes mutating into a bent, muddled mess before resuming their journey to our disappointed ears. I had studiously avoided the coliseum for a decade or so, and this concert brought home why. Tingley, which was at perhaps 70 percent capacity that night, is one of the most god-awful, sound-deadening structures in all creation—a truly horrible venue to experience live music. It's too bad, because Dylan's current six-piece touring outfit is top-notch.

Dylan himself remained hunkered over his keyboard for the entire evening (sadly, the man never even touched a guitar) and you could see only his hobbit-like profile, of which his unmanageable hair is the most prominent feature. I never actually saw his face. Interrupting his hunched playing only occasionally to raise a hand or some equally exciting gesture, Dylan opened with a gruff version of "Things Have Changed," the first of an astonishing string of killer songs that alternated mostly between recent material and a mother lode of hits from the sixties. None were given the reverential, note-for-note, album-version treatment. On "Cold Irons Bound," for example, one of his best songs in recent years, he ditched the swampy lounge feel of the original in favor of a brawny, retro, seventies arena-rock approach. The band rocked it hard and hit it out of the park. "Lay Lady Lay" was another highlight in which Dylan's groovy keyboard fills contributed a subtle texture missing from the high-country sound of the recorded version (although his croak of a voice seemed at odds with the inherent smoothness of the song). Even the criminally bad sound in Tingley couldn't dampen the brightness of these new arrangements. And Dylan wasn't shy about blowing his harp, which he brandished again and again, a high-register wail that cut through the muck nicely.

But for every bright spot there were at least three tunes that were fatally afflicted by the Tingley curse. Among the most grievously damaged were "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum," an underrated song from the Love and Theft disc whose attention-grabbing guitar fills were lost in the rafters, and "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," which I heard from the far end of the room as a nearly unintelligible coagulation of mangled parts.

I couldn't bring myself to hang out for the entire encore, despite the undeniable energy of "Like a Rolling Stone" and the crowd's noble attempt to ignore the show's flaws. Ultimately this otherwise fine gig was robbed of its power by a promoter (Clear Channel, masquerading as Live Nation) that yet again put profits above music by rejecting smaller, better venues in order to sell more tickets. I could go on all day about the inadequacies of Tingley—uncomfortable seats, bad sight lines, concessions consisting solely of overpriced junk food and bad beer—but at the end of the day it's about the music. We just couldn't hear it.