Bob Dylan played a last-minute gig at the 9:30 Club Friday night, part of a weekend trilogy that saw the rock icon take the stage at American University’s Bender Arena and the fancier digs of the Warner Theatre.
Now, I can’t actually prove Mr. Dylan was at the downtown club, packed as it was to squirm-inducing capacity. In fleeting moments, through a porthole-sized opening between someone’s left shoulder and someone else’s head, I saw a slight man in his early 60s, secreted away on stage left under a cowboy hat and playing a keyboard for about two hours, who very well may have been Bob Dylan.
Whoever it was, he never spoke a word the entire night — neither a “Hello, good evening,” nor a “thank you” nor a “good night.” He stepped out in front for a band introduction, but that was scarcely audible.
It could have been an impersonator, if not for the voice. And there’s no mistaking that sawtooth wheeze. Mr. Dylan played new songs and old songs Friday, but because of that limited voice and his endless churn of rearranged phrasing, they’ve all taken on a samey melodic quality — roughly, the sound of a lawn mower engine at the first tug of its pull-cord.
Oh, lighten up, Dylan-head; I love the guy, too. When some ignoramus makes fun of Bob Dylan’s voice, I’m the first one to pipe up in his defense. But even the most generous of fans can’t forget that Mr. Dylan once was able physically to nail those tenor-register notes of songs such as “All I Really Want to Do” or “Meet Me in the Morning.” Today, he doesn’t come close, or bother to try. Yet this seems to matter very little.
On a seemingly nonstop, Grateful Dead-like tour of America, Mr. Dylan’s career has taken on an improbable new vitality in the last decade. His last two studio albums, “Time Out of Mind” and “Love and Theft,” have been as fine as any in his opulent back catalog. And, as evidenced by his presence on college campuses like AU, he has street-cred with young as well as old. He’s Strummer, he’s Marley, he’s Cobain — except he’s still alive, and dressed like a Wyoming ranch hand.
It helps that Mr. Dylan has one of the hottest roots rock combos backing him up — multitalented guitarists Larry Charles and Freddy Koella; bassist Tony Garnier; and drummer George Recile. Little Feat’s drummer Richie Hayward stopped by for a chugging “Highway 61 Revisited” on Friday.
But it wasn’t the classics that pleased the most. Songs like “Just Like a Woman,” “Like a Rolling Stone” and “All Along the Watchtower” sounded perfectly fine, but Mr. Dylan plays them with no hit-parade pomp or urgency. They’re done casually, passed through the leveling meat-grinder of late-period Bob Dylan. But for the lyrics, you barely notice he’s doing the standards. “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” however, received a Lysol treatment that all but blew away its Guthrie-folk origin, and the evening’s opener, “Drifter’s Escape,” once a gamboling country rocker, is now a jumpy, electrified boogie.
The warhorses aside, it was the new roadhouse blues of “Tweedle Dee Tweedle Dum,” “Summer Days” and “Honest with Me” that splattered the grease in the frying pan, the latter sliced through with Mr. Charles’ steely bottleneck riff.
Ballad-wise, Mr. Dylan chose “Time Out of Mind’s” “Not Dark Yet,” the kind of mortality-facer that’s all too rare among rock’s granddaddys. And there were a few deep-cut gems: “If Dogs Run Free,” from 1970’s “New Morning” ; the rarely-heard “Hazel,” from 1973’s “Planet Waves” ; and “Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine” from 1966’s masterpiece “Blonde on Blonde.”
A jokey, taped introduction of Mr. Dylan made sport of the singer-songwriter’s status as former countercultural icon who “found Jesus” and managed to become cool again. It may be coyness or false modesty or some other pose, but Mr. Dylan seems through with all that. He’s become, simply, a creature of the road. He’s on a mission to play under every public roof from Reno to Rio.
Friday, incidentally, wasn’t the first time Mr. Dylan has played the 9:30 Club: He turned up for two nights in December 1997 while in town to pick up a Kennedy Center Honor. There was no special occasion this time — just the ferocity of a guy who hopes to leave a ticket-refund fiasco in the wake of his death.
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