Bob Dylan Live In London Review: The end of Rough And Rowdy Ways?

Bob Dylan

Royal Albert Hall, London, November 14, 2024

Four songs into what many suspect will be the last night of the Rough And Rowdy Ways tour, Bob Dylan wanders away from his piano and over to where his faithful bassist, Tony Garnier, is paying close attention. As he walks, he sings – the song, incidentally, is False Prophet – in a voice of uncanny resonance and surprising power. “I opened my heart to the world,” he declaims, “and the world came in.”

It's a moment of grand theatre and, in his own way, great candour. And as Dylan returns to his baby grand to hammer out the blues, drama intensified, a thought occurs: might this be the last time he ever sings False Prophet, and the songs of Rough And Rowdy Ways?

The Rough And Rowdy Ways tour began a little over three years ago in Milwaukee and has encompassed 231 shows including tonight. Each of those gigs has seen Dylan rigorously focus on nine out of the ten songs on that 2020 album (the tenth, Murder Most Foul, remains stubbornly unperformed). When Dylan took a detour this past summer to join the Outlaws tour across the States with his indulgent senior, Willie Nelson, all the RARW songs disappeared from the setlist – an expediency for festival punters maybe, though Dylan’s track record hardly frames him as a conventional crowd-pleaser.

Whatever incarnation of the Never-Ending Tour comes next, there’s a strong chance it won’t feature False Prophet, or I Contain Multitudes, or even a nailed-on new standard like I've Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You. This last night at one of Dylan’s most notorious London hangouts, then, is freighted with a sense – projected, sure, but no less moving – of an artist bidding farewell to a batch of songs and savouring every last syllable of them.

My Own Version Of You and Key West (Philosopher Pirate), in particular, are performed virtually solo, Dylan’s empathetic band dialling back their contributions to ever more impressionistic gestures, ruthlessly pushing Dylan’s voice and piano-playing into the spotlight. If that voice was noticeably steadier on his last London visit two years ago , in this stark environment it’s a further revelation: warm, elegant, conspiratorial, rarely wavering. “People tell me that I'm truly blessed,” he concedes in Key West, a strange and forbidding icon, re-enchanted.

The piano playing is startling too. This leg of the Rough And Rowdy Ways tour is without the long-serving fiddle and steel player, Donnie Herron, leaving a gap between the atmospheric filigrees of guitarists Bob Britt and Doug Lancio. It’s a space that Dylan seems happuly determined to fill at his baby grand, carrying – and inventing – new melodies as he navigates esoteric paths through the songs. The clusters and sprays of notes, the avant-garde rethink of New Orleans tradition, pitch Dylan these days somewhere between Messiaen and James Booker. But the discordance is less than last time out – save some jarring punctuation on Every Grain Of Sand – and at times, like the closing solo of the Putting On The Ritzified When I Paint My Masterpiece, gorgeously close to jazz orthodoxy.

If that last London gig I saw in 2022 was spectral, silvery, there is a more visceral edge to some of tonight’s show, from the moment Jim Keltner – another octogenarian at the top of his game – rolls uncompromisingly into All Along The Watchtower. Keltner’s force behind the kit is a contrast to the brushed stealth of the 2022 incumbent, Charley Drayton, and he can spur on Dylan to mighty crescendos. Desolation Row, back in the setlist for the first time since 2018, has a blasted grandeur: the insistent pulse of Keltner; Lancio and Britt’s epic thrum; Dylan’s synchronised knee-bend when he sings the title line for the first time.

It's Dylan at his most playful, leaning nonchalantly on the piano, or beginning To Be Alone Wirh You with a raucous laugh. His compulsive touring over the years has sometimes seemed baffling – a dogged determination to stay on the road with a concomitant reticence to stay out of the spotlight. But best guesses would suggest Dylan is having a hell of a time onstage right now, of a piece with his behaviour through 2024, from the September night in Buffalo when he accompanied Desolation Row by tapping a tiny wrench on his mic, to becoming a charming late adopter of Twitter (Oct 30: “Nick Newman had replied to a tweet a few weeks back asking me what movies I would recommend. I told him to try The Unknown with Lon Chaney and go from there.”).

These are not all songs that immediately suggest boundless fun, of course, but there’s still a striking tenderness to the version of It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue – again, almost solo – that’s not always been so apparent. It Ain’t Me Babe, too, is superb, from an opening jam with Dylan on third guitar, to the piano fills that provide emotional emphasis and find new melodic subtleties in these elaborate, ever-renewing masterpieces.

Rough And Rowdy Ways and Shadow Kingdom, in some readings, relocated Dylan to a liminal interzone, where his songs were reborn as ethereal manifestations. But as this significant period of a monumental career apparently draws to a close, it feels as if this most elusive genius is coming back into focus and engaging, in his own peculiar way, with the world. Full transparency might be a way off, but where Dylan heads next – at a clip perhaps, motored there by Jim Keltner – could be more interesting still.

Setlist:

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Photo: Bob Dylan performs in London's Hyde Park, July 12, 2019 (Credit: Dave J Hogan/Getty Images)