He can't help but fall dutifully into the other man's shadow. He's playing an acoustic guitar, for starters — toying with the kind of sounds that give his
performance the air of an act of homage. Besides, everyone here knows that, like Springsteen and Neil Young before him, Elvis Costello is the kind of figure who would have been unthinkable in a world that hadn't already played host to the headliner.
He turns in a lovely performance, too — founded not only on the quality of the songs, but an obvious feeling of boyish glee. "Isn't it great?" say the gestures of a widely-worshipped man in no obvious need of his own idols. "I'm supporting Bob Dylan."
Maybe he knows. Perhaps, like the gaggles of diehard Bobcats clustered around the auditorium, he's already witnessed one of Dylan's new model shows and come away reeling...
It happens to us all tonight. For sure, there are moments when we behold the spectre of the grizzled, workaday troubadour who once ground his reputation into the dust — but almost everything Bob Dylan plays tonight is endowed with an emotional potency that sends his public into justifiable rapture.
The crux of the pleasure is clear from the off. The idea that he feels duty-bound to remould his songs, for too long the preserve of blinkered apologists, now makes consistent sense: "I Want You," once a delirious, speeding encapsulation of desire, is now a poignant expression of a love that sounds like it was unrequited; "Just Like A Woman" is imbued with a similar sense of sighing retrospection; and "Ballad Of A Thin Man" is drained of the scorn that it once oozed, dripping with a creeping sense of heartfelt pity.
On occasion, he simply recaptures a wonder akin to that of the originals. It happens during two acoustic segments, when the band conspire to create fluid, expansive music, and Dylan sings "Mr Tambourine Man" and "Boots Of Spanish Leather" and "Don't Think Twice It's Alright."
So it's true: Bob Dylan is currently carrying himself with confidence and grace and soft-spoken dignity, and seizing a question that's bedevilled him for years: can a middle-aged man take the songs he wrote when he was a dreamy-eyed chaser of unfathomable American myths, or a stick-thin ball of seething cynicism, or a young man in love for the first time, and render them convincingly? The answer, unequivocally, is yes.
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