Not Dark Yet

One last call for the great troubadour

Bob Dylan has played the Royal Albert Hall many times but perhaps last week for the final time. Our correspondent Michael Henderson was in the audience to witness a remarkable occasion.

Farewell, Bob

‘WE have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow’.

Bob Dylan took his leave of our shores last week at the Royal Albert Hall, with 5,000 people cheering him on a victory lap. Dylan is 83, and too frail to stand unsupported for long. He occasionally needs notes for his lyrics, but he will never surrender. I’m a performer, he seemed to say throughout every minute of the hour and 40 minutes he was on stage, and performers perform.

It's fairly clear we won’t see him again. The three nights at the Kensington Bowl ended the British leg of his ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ tour, which seems to have been going on since the relief of Mafeking’, so this felt like a valediction. When he closed the set with Every Grain of Sand the audience rose, block by block, and by the time the house lights went on he had left the building.

Falstaff’s words are often used as a reflection on the passing of years. And it is six decades since Dylan first played the Albert Hall, when the folkie with an acoustic guitar became the electric troubadour. Though it was at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, not London, where an outraged purist shouted ‘Judas!’ at the amplified apostate.

He returned to the Sixties for the opening numbers at the Albert Hall. All Along the Watchtower set things up, followed by It Ain’t Me, Babe. It was like watching an opening batsman strike his first two balls to the cover boundary.

There weren’t many familiar songs thereafter from his back pages. No Tombstone Blues, or Black Diamond Bay, or Simple Twist of Fate. No My Back Pages, for that matter. And no Blowin’ in the Wind, for which much thanks. But he did give us It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue and (hurrah!) Watchin’ the River Flow.

Best of all was a pounding return to Desolation Row, propelled by the drumming of 82-year-old Jim Keltner. This was a remarkable version, which brought to mind (yes, really) Johnny, Remember Me! No surprises left in Bobby’s bag of tricks? Think again.

Dylan has not always excelled in recent years. His appearances at the Albert Hall a decade ago were flawed by an inability to project songs from the Great American Songbook. If you want to sing The Night We Called It A Day, then you must hit the back of the hall, and Dylan has never had that kind of voice.

The current show features songs he has written since then, and they worked wonderfully well on so grand a stage. Words which on other lips might appear trite acquire the patina of hard-won experience when he mouths them. He has earned the right to sing whatever he wants, and it was moving to see this trouper stand on the ground of his choosing. He wrote some great songs in his salad days, and if the ones he has composed since he entered his eighth decade are not so compelling they come from the same spring.

What is that fountain? America: past and present, real and imagined. He has been a teller of tales personal and metaphorical, ‘from the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol’. Like Walt Whitman, he heard America singing, and sang back. Some of those songs don’t always hit the sweet spot as they did. When I Paint My Masterpiece came and went last night (what number was that?) but Key West worked a treat. Not all stones are gems.

It was a bluesy set from a band which swung, At the end the two guitarists, the bass player who doubled on double bass, and Keltner joined the audience in applauding the man taking his leave. The world’s greatest concert hall has occupied a special place in the Dylan mythology, and the arena was full of ghosts. At least two people present summoned the memory of Robert George Dylan Willis, the former England cricket captain, who saw Dylan so many times, in so many places. He died five years ago next month to the sound of Forever Young and Positively Fourth Street. Dylan composed the soundtrack of his life.

Age has withered him. There’s no sugar-coating that. But the minstrel who strummed his guitar in the coffee houses of Greenwich Village in 1960 refuses to bend the knee. He is exhausted, and the voice is a thing of threads and patches, yet it doesn’t matter. His will is unconquerable.

‘I’m living in a foreign country’, as he didn’t sing last week, ‘but I’m bound to cross the line. Beauty walks a razor’s edge, some day I’ll make it mine’.

You crossed the line long ago, 5,000 voices reminded him. Here was a final wave of gratitude and love, which set the seal on a moving occasion. And if a few tears were shed, they were not tears of rage.