Anyone who has seen Bob Dylan perform in recent years was probably not surprised when the poet laureate of rock started singing Monday night and you could barely make out a single word.
A Dylan concert is not so much about the quality of his voice, or even if you can understand what he's saying. It's the experience of seeing up close and in person this man who history will remember as forever changing the face of popular music.
Dylan, 64, doesn't really sing these days; he recites poetry in a voice that is more talk than song. For nearly two hours before a crowd of about 6,400, he pontificated about not wanting to work on "Maggie's Farm" no more and the sad, ol' "Lonesome Day Blues" that leaves him "doing the double shuffle, throwin' sand on the floor."
If you were a die-hard Dylan fan, you probably could sing or speak along. But lukewarm fans found themselves bewildered as Dylan, standing at the keyboard and alternating between it and his harmonica β playing both simultaneously a couple times β mumbled lyrics that made absolutely no sense.
To be sure, Dylan has long had a reputation for not enunciating while he sings, so no one should have been too surprised if all you could make out was the title refrain of the bluesy "'Til I Fell In Love With You." The rest of the words came out in a jumble of sounds that had hints of words but nothing you could string together unless you had the lyrics committed to memory.
This is not say that Dylan's show wasn't perfectly entertaining. Seeing him on the arena stage, dressed in black with a hat that was a cross between a fedora and an Amish going-to-services hat, and backlit in red with a red curtain behind him, Dylan struck an unforgettable pose.
And when he sang "Make You Feel My Love," there were flashes of familiarity among novice fans. But the familiarity had more to do with Billy Joel and Garth Brooks, who both had hits with the song, than the man who penned it.
Even if we couldn't understand what he was saying, Monday's audience wanted him to stick around beyond his dozen-song set and two-song encore. When the lights went out after the final song, "All Along the Watchtower," the crowd stuck around in the darkened arena chanting his name. And when the lights came up and Dylan was nowhere to be found, some people booed.
Dylan's opener, the legendary country crooner Merle Haggard, performed for an hour, showing off a renewed vocal strength that comes courtesy of recent dental surgery. Haggard sounded just as strong and flexible as he did when he made hits decades ago of "Today I Started Loving Her," "Fightin' Side of Me" and "Just Stay Here and Drink."
β Bob Dylan and Merle Haggard in concert Monday at the Tucson Arena.
