I wrote my first, official, live music review for a publication back in 1985. I attended my first real concert about a decade before that and have been a music fan since before that, but I still don’t have a definitive opinion on how I feel about artists who change up songs when playing live.
As a fan, most of the time I like to hear a favorite song the way I heard it when I first liked it. Black Jacket Symphony has proven to be very popular here and elsewhere playing live note-for-note versions of classic albums and hits by well-known artists, so a lot of people like it the way they “heard it on the record,” as we say.
I’ve also heard reinterpretations that are pretty great. Prince’s guitar work on George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” comes to mind.
I saw Paul McCartney in the old Georgia Dome in Atlanta years ago during the time period when he was changing up his many hits during live shows, and I saw him at Bonnaroo in 2013 doing straight-up versions of the songs we all grew up with. I much preferred the latter. The show in Atlanta was pretty cheesy, actually.
I bring this up because it’s been the topic of several discussions since the Bob Dylan show at the Tivoli on Sunday. Dylan, of course, is famous for playing whatever he wants to play, however he wants to play it, and fans are essentially expected to be happy they were able to go along for the ride.
There are legions of fans who document, catalog, dissect, analyze and discuss Dylan sets ad nauseam. The hardcore fans know what to expect. Fans who go thinking they will hear 90 minutes of hits, or even familiar songs done the way they expect them, are almost always disappointed – and surprised, for some reason.
I’m a Dylan fan, but not a big enough fan that I compare sets or even pretend to know how he puts together a show or tour. I do know that Sunday night’s show included “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Gotta Serve Somebody,” “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Ballad of a Thin Man,” which if you’d asked me to make a list of songs I hoped he would play, they’d be on there.
They were rearranged, reinterpreted and changed up and, as you would expect, executed beautifully by his band, which is always great.
If I have an issue with the show, it was not that the songs were reworked; it was that the songs throughout had a sameness that made the entire set sound like one long song. That’s not true, of course, but it seemed that way to more than a few folks.
In any case, it was classic Dylan.
Contact Barry Courter at bcourter@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6354.