Results tagged “brokenboysoldiers”

by William J. Hayes

I can't believe this year is over. It has come and gone in a haze of concerts, martinis, deadlines, endings, beginnings, highs and lows.

My preview for Saturday night's Dylan show at the Wachovia Spectrum was pretty enthusiastic, but I'll level with you: I'd heard the stories, and I wasn't expecting all that much from his performance. But even with my relatively low expectations, I was still a little disappointed. A number of times during Dylan's set, I thought I'd stumbled into an easy listening/soft rock concert by mistake, or that he'd been replaced by a froggy William Shatner. He talk-croaked his way through most of his songs, and his band seemed so concerned with not up-staging him that they barely played at all. As Dylan hunched, shuffling and swaying, over his keyboard and groaned out the barely decipherable lyrics, the guitarists mostly just quietly jangled in the background, while the drummer politely tapped his drums to keep time. Only at the ends of certain songs, when Dylan was done "singing," did the guys kick it up a notch and really bang out a great outro. More than once I found myself yawning and checking the time.

Guess who Phillyist is going to see Saturday night? BOB FREAKING DYLAN, that's who!! Sure, he's getting old, and we hear he's not always the best live performer anymore, what with his froggy voice and all, but the guy is a living legend - one of the greatest, if not the greatest, songwriters of our time; a man who changed rock and roll and folk music forever; whose protest songs actually made things happen; whose discography is a litany of classic albums. We've got his CD from this year, Modern Times, and while it's no Blonde on Blonde or Blood on the Tracks, it's definitely a good album, and in the same sort of wry, old-fashioned, bluesy style as his recent releases.