Wikimedia Commons / Hwn2013
Bob Dylan performs onstage in Milwaukee last year. Photography wasn't allowed at the singer's San Antonio show on Sunday.
Dylan wasn’t kidding when he titled his current tour Rough and Rowdy Ways, after the album he released in 2020. Songs from the LP — which had critics doing backflips — occupied nine of the setlist's 17 slots, with only the epic “Murder Most Foul” omitted. Given the runtimes of the Rough and Rowdy Ways material, those numbers may even understate the dominance of the new songs.
Dylan is playing a standard setlist for the tour as well, marking the first time since the '80s that he's taken such an approach. He’s making it clear: you will enjoy Rough and Rowdy Ways, people, or you won’t bother.
Few performers besides Dylan can pack a venue with the promise of relying so heavily on new material bereft of the hits. Anyone foolish enough to show up expecting “Like A Rolling Stone” or “Blowin’ In The Wind” left disappointed.
The band played on top of a square lattice pattern, illuminated by below-the-floor lighting. The end result was that the backing band was bathed in more of the glow than Dylan himself, largely because he played piano, which blocked the lights.
At first, it seemed an odd choice. First, well, he’s Bob Dylan, but second, because his voice is so central to the newer songs. But in the end, the stage setup benefitted the new material by downplaying the performer himself. Typically tight, his band included a drummer, two guitarists, a bassist and a multi-instrumentalist who laid the foundation for the singer's craggy voice.
Never fear, though. Dylan did an elf-like dance away from the piano several times, showing a spry energy that belied his status as an octogenarian — and a willingness not to completely shrink from the spotlight.
Dylan intoned songs such as “I Contain Multitudes” and “Black Rider” like God instructing Moses from on high. With minimal backing from the band, his words floated in the ether, his voice sounding like Tom Waits if he was born before Muddy Waters and taught the latter to sing. Among the more melodic songs, “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You,” was a clear standout, with the refrain filling the theater and holding the audience rapt.
New songs may have dominated, but Dylan's handful of inclusions from his back catalog were well-selected gems. “Gotta Serve Somebody” was a highlight, the Slow Train Coming classic retrofitted to fit the performer's late-career schtick: bluesy with a hint of Pentecostal.
In reality, reinvention is what Dylan does. There's no person named Bob Dylan. Instead, there is Robert Zimmerman, a man who's played an array of characters named Bob Dylan for all of his career: a folk singer, a born-again troubadour, a rock star, all before settling into his latest form, a roadhouse bluesman intoning tales from a psychedelic West that never existed.
It’s telling that two of the older pieces in the setlist were a pair of then-new songs tacked onto the singer's 1971 release Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Vol. II to grease sales.
Most artists would ignore material left off “regular” albums, particularly if they had a bench a deep as Dylan’s. But he opened with “Watching The River Flow,” which also held down the slot for any number of shows from his prior tour. Dylan also dropped “When I Paint My Masterpiece” early in the show, adding a country-blues veneer absent from the original studio recording.
Finally, things wrapped up with “Every Grain of Sand” from 1981’s Shot of Love, a favorite among aficionados. It was the perfect song to tie it all together: a classic but fitting in with his current approach. Like the rest of the material, it had room to breathe, and the emphasis remained on Dylan’s lyrics and poetic intonation.
It may not have been a long show, clocking in at just over 90 minutes. But it's hard to imagine anyone who enjoys modern Dylan leaving disappointed.
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