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"You walk into the room / With your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked / And you say, 'Who is that Man?'
You try so hard / But you don't understand
Just what you'll say / When you get home
Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is / Do you, Mister Jones?"
— Ballad of a Thin Man, 1965
Three decades later and Mr Bono, Mr REM, Mr Elvis Costello, Mr Christy Moore, Mr Patrick Bergin and Mr Gerry Ryan knew something would happen in Vicar Street — but they didn't know what. The rumour was that the venerable Bob Dylan would play an acoustic set... or perform a full-blown unplugged session with U2 and, possibly, Lou Reed. Or a back-to-basics solo set for 15 minutes without a band of any description...
Just three chords and the truth.
Only time could tell. Dylan was supposed to be onstage at 8.30pm. But like a bride at a wedding, it is Bob Dylan's prerogative to waive punctuality. Suddenly, just before 9pm, out of the darkness, in a blur of spindly limbs, stepped Robert Zimmerman. The roar from the crowd was literally thunderous.
The Rosebud of popular culture, Bob Dylan remains a mystery. After 40 years of public scrutiny, he is still, intriguingly, there.
"It takes a lot of medicine to keep up this pace," Dylan told Robert Shelton of the New York Times in 1966. "It's very hard, man. A concert tour like this has almost killed me. I'm really going to cut down next year... " He didn't. Dylan has been touring regularly for the last twentysomething years. At Vicar Street on Wednesday there was no let up all night.
The speed at which he tore through "Maggie's Farm" made it sound more like T-Rex's "Jeepster," and his re-arrangement of "Blowin' in the Wind" made the track practically unrecognisable.
Almost JD Salinger-shy, he looked mortally anxious whenever the fanatical crowd — shouting and calling his name like zealots at a political rally — registered their approval. He never once spoke between songs: Robbie Williams and Liam Gallagher, please note. Fastidiously installed in white-and-black, spats were worn beneath a dark, chic, almost midnight-cowboy suit with a brown shirt and a black tie almost as skinny as his legs. At certain entirely-bizarre moments during songs, Dylan would shake his left leg from side to side almost in slow-motion, bringing to mind a young Elvis Presley. It was an endearingly odd personal tick.
When he finished songs, he would sometimes kneel for a second and then jump up again. Other times, like at the end of "Rainy Day Woman Number 12 and 13," he would take off his Fender Stratocaster as if it was a pickaxe he had been working with, then hold it over his head for 30 seconds before putting it over his shoulder again for the next song.
"Girl From the North Country" and "Desolation Row" continued the heightened excitement building since "Tangled up in Blue." When he kicked into "Like a Rolling Stone," the 800 people present were transported to another spiritual stratosphere — an alien galaxy where smiling paroxysms of ecstasy and joy are de rigeur.
In the late Sixties when The Beatles were ignoring what was happening in Vietnam with "Magical Mystery Tour" and "Fool on the Hill," Dylan was exhibiting, on John Wesley Harding in 1968, a savage awareness of the war and its effect on the American' people. While far from a protest album, its mood, as Jon Landau once noted, contained questions that seem to ask: "What is this country made of? Where did it come from?"
As I watched our genius-in-residence, Elvis Costello, jump up and down in his seat like a 14-year-old during "Like a Rolling Stone," I knew deep down that Dublin was not going to see a Dylan this great ever again. It was a night to savour. Everyone seemed to be scrutinizing each and every syllable the Bard uttered.
"But there is not a person on the earth," he told the New York Times in 1966, "who takes it less seriously than I do. I know it is not going to help me into heaven or keep me out of the fiery furnace."
Not so fast. On the basis of Wednesday night's saintly performance, Bob, I wouldn't be so sure.
There is something happening up in heaven. But you don't know what it is, do you, Mister Dylan?
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