When one goes to a Paul McCartney concert, the audience member usually knows what they’re getting themselves into; McCartney will play hits that the majority of his fans will know with relative accuracy in terms of pitch and timing to achieve as little deviation from the original recording of the song. This is done in order to please fans—to allow fans to believe they got their money’s worth by getting to hear their favorite singers sing their favorite songs as exactly as they heard them when they fell in love with the songs in the first place. On the other hand, Bob Dylan, in his concerts and live performances, throws all of these expectations out the window intentionally, and it’s not always a pleasant or desired sight for fans to see and hear.
The audience at the Ithaca College’s Athletics and Events Center was a dead giveaway that we were encroaching on Dylan turf. Gray-haired Bob Dylan fans, many of whom likely had known him since his humble beginnings in the 1960s, packed the modern stadium. Much to the annoyance of audience members, swaths of these Dylan devotees would rise up to dance later in the concert. One would think that it would be impossible to boogie to some of Dylan’s songs—the rhythm doesn’t really lend itself to dancing—yet it seems Dylan’s fans are capable of doing the impossible. Looking around, there were also small pockets of teens and college students distributed throughout the audience. Clearly, though, youth was the minority at this concert.
The concert started at 8 P.M., when all the lights of Ithaca College’s Athletics and Events Center immediately shut off and an excerpt of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” mixed in with guitar riffs of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” started playing, catching everyone in the audience off-guard. Dylan’s sudden entrance provoked a wave of applause and enthusiastic cheers from the audience.
Wearing identical silver blazers coated in glitter (a demonstration of impeccable sartorial taste), Dylan and his band went on to perform songs from across the spectrum of his long-lasting career; the oldest song having been released in 1964 and the newest song having been released in 2012. After each song, no matter how mediocre the performance, a roar of applause came from the crowd. One individual sitting in Section 1 of the audience was so blessed to be in the presence of his hero that, like clockwork, he would scream “Bob Dylan!” at the top of his lungs every five minutes.
Unsurprisingly, Dylan’s infamous unpredictable singing and raspy voice completely destroyed the coherence and quality of older songs such as “Highway 61 Revisited” and “It Ain’t Me Babe.” However, it was par for the course and, strangely, was more understandable for some of his newer songs like “Early Roman Kings” because his voice was ruined by then anyway. The pacing and diction of his singing were lackluster and incomprehensible at times; some moments he would monotonously mumble through entire sentences in mere seconds, while other times he would linger far too long on some words for no particular reason. For these reasons, it became incredibly difficult to identify the song he was actually singing until the chorus (if at all) for two reasons. One: he and his band used and played a different version than the studio recording (which sometimes robbed the song of its original mood), and two: no one could actually understand a word Dylan was saying. However, more emotionally-charged songs such as “Make You Feel My Love” and “Girl From the North Country” brought, or forced, greater clarity and variety within Dylan’s voice and pitch, though he still strained to hit the high notes of both songs.
The instrumentation of the performance also faced problems. Many of the songs on Dylan’s setlist were during his late ‘90s and 2000s classic rock/folk phase, a period in which songs tended to be repetitive, as attention was supposed to be diverted primarily towards processing Dylan’s masterful lyricism. Yet, because Dylan refused to let himself be understood and was insistent on croaking throughout the entire concert, the blaring chords of his backup band took over much of the acoustics and drowned out what little could be heard from Dylan. As a result, the repetitive structure of Dylan’s songs became undoubtedly apparent. Dylan loudly muttered through a few lines, the band played the same riffs over and over in response, then Dylan continued with the next stanza—rinse and repeat. The obvious rhythmic patterns in Dylan’s songs got excessive at times, so much so that it was a challenge not to fall asleep.
It often felt like Dylan and his band were fighting over who could blow out the most eardrums by the end of the night, and no one was really winning. Using concert earplugs helped to isolate some of the sounds (which were all muddled together), but the situation wasn’t entirely salvageable. Dylan’s murmurs and grunts in some of his songs were still almost unintelligible, no matter how effectively you could eliminate some of the odd acoustics and background noise that hogged the soundstage.
After eighteen songs, the concert seemed close to an end. The crowd of old-timers watched in awe as Dylan and his crew left the stage—which was strangely decorated with Roman busts and an array of mannequins clad in formal attire—and soon people began to leave. Then Dylan returned to play two songs from his seminal work, Highway 61 Revisited: “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” and massacred them as well. At last, the stadium’s lights turned on (after a standing ovation and many a cheer and yelp from the crowd, of course) so we could finally leave.
We do not hate Bob Dylan. Some of our first articles for The Tattler were about his excellence, both in lyricism and rhythm. Dylan’s music is not bad. The songs he performed for the concert are not bad songs. But his live performances leave a lot to be desired, in terms of coherence and musical variety. Additionally, for those who are easily frustrated, the audience at Dylan concerts poses a major threat.
For those interested, there is a playlist included below that has all the songs that Dylan performed in the concert their original and ideal states, which are infinitely better than what was performed at Ithaca College that night.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/44SAIKkeD9bh4nn5qlnkVK?si=eZ1w4i2pTk-Ave8FwpO_2w