BOB DYLAN, Journal Pavilion, Albuquerque, July 22, 2007

©Michael Koster, July 2007

Bob Dylan hit the Pavilion stage on Sunday sporting his latest and most distinguished persona to date: the Spanish gentleman look. Neat bolero hat, spiffy dark striped pants and matching dress jacket, glinty bejeweled guitar strap. His crack five-piece band—all of whom are seemingly deft at just about any instrument you hand them, from fiddle to mandolin to guitar to ukulele—was dressed equally sharply, and the entourage had the look and feel of a fifties-era road band, courteous and nonthreatening, come to disperse good feeling among the good folks of your town.

A handful of the 16-song set—the elegiac “Walkingman’s Blues #2,” the traditional “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” (boasting some great slide guitar playing), the waltzy “Beyond the Horizon”—were plucked from Dylan’s latest record, Modern Times, a collection of vintage-sounding 12-bar blues that has defied all logic by entering the charts at #1 and selling gazillions of discs, downloads and ring tones. Even older numbers were given that jumpy, bouncy, bluesy rhythmic treatment so near and dear to Dylan of late, and the old man’s raspy croak suited these arrangements well. Gone was the silky smoothness of “Lay Lady Lay,” a concert staple in recent years. There was no trace of the swampy lurch that made “‘Till I Fell in Love With You” one of Dylan’s most underrated songs from 1997’s Time Out of Mind disc. Even the mock-stoner refrain “everybody must get stoned” from “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” sounded more Muddy Waters than sixties-era Dylan. This approach worked particularly well on the raucous up-tempo numbers like “Highway 61 Revisited” a notable highlight that got the crowd to its feet in a big way.

One of the biggest complaints from Dylan’s last tour was his decision to play keyboards the entire tour, a Yurtle figure lost behind the board, the vague outline of his profile the only visual clue that it was indeed a Dylan concert. So it was nice to see Dylan front and center again with a guitar in his hand, doing those weird, arthritically stiff, singularly Dylanesque shoulder rolls and dance moves, for the first seven songs anyway, before he disappeared behind the keys. It’s interesting that you couldn’t hear the keyboard very well; it was turned way down in the mix. Maybe Bob isn’t much of an ivory tapper, and everybody but him knows it.

Dylan was fairly coherent—you could make out 10 to 20 percent of what he was singing, depending on your interpretative skills and ability to isolate his staccato vocals, sung like he’s rushing to get the lyrics out and the music has to find a way to catch up. A concert goer later remarked that he employed quite a few French phrases that night; I hadn’t noticed.

His set ended precisely at the contracted 90-minute mark, having burned through a two-song encore with “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and “All Along the Watchtower” (both crowd pleasers). At the end of the show he did this weird, singularly Dylan thing where he sort of bows stiffly and points, both index fingers extended, to the crowd as if to say, “Hey there, thanks for coming. I even bow differently than everyone else.”