By The Beachwood Bureau of Bob Dylan Affairs
Catching up with his performance last Saturday night.
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“Dressed in what’s become his custom attire – a wide-brim hat, bolo tie and military-style suit that looked pulled out of the attic of a Civil War battlefield general – Dylan led a crack backing quintet that, given its sharp black suits, low-key demeanor and angular movements, could’ve passed as a gang of mob hit men from the 1930s,” Bob Gendron wrote in the Tribune.
“Friskier and looser than at his previous local appearance, Dylan spent half of the concert liberated from the constraints of his keyboard, taking the opportunities to sing at center stage and blow harmonica solos in between verses. A number of songs – ‘Summer Days,’ ‘Thunder on the Mountain’ – hopped and skipped, the jumping rhythms owing more to swing jazz than rock or Americana.”
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“The last notes of a rousing ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ faded and that was supposed to be it for Bob Dylan’s show Saturday at the Riviera Theatre, according to setlist reports from the latest leg of his Neverending Tour. But the band wasn’t moving to the front of the stage to bask in show-ending applause. Instead, everyone huddled near Dylan as he instructed them to play one more song, ‘Forever Young,'” Dave Miller wrote at ChicagoConcertgoers.
“Those lucky enough to be at the sold-out show on Halloween Eve caught Dylan and his band on a particularly good night. Hard-core fans were buzzing about the 17-song setlist, which some called the best of this edition of the tour. The show engaged from the start. The musicians took the stage looking like they just came from a funeral. They were dressed completely in black with the exception of Dylan’s light-colored hat and the stripe running down the side of his pants. They opened with the fashion-ridiculing ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.'”
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Flickr photo set.
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“Still backed by a beefy band, led by chiseled guitarist Charlie Sexton, Dylan croaked through a remarkably fan-friendly set list, switching between organ, guitar and harmonica,” Thomas Conner wrote in the Sun-Times.
“Things really swung in the middle of the two-hour show, with Sexton on a hollow-body guitar for a jumping-jive version of ‘Summer Days,’ then a slow, swaying retelling of ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.’ ‘Cold Irons Bound’ (‘Oh, the winds in Chicago have torn me to shreds’) thundered with big drums, courtesy of George Recile, and Dylan stood at the microphone visibly at ease while spitting out the words and blowing a hot harp solo, then brushing his gray locks back underneath his gray hat – and smiling, a rarity that held through the cool pace of ‘Simple Twist of Fate’ and surfaced later on a workaday run through ‘Tangled Up in Blue.'”
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Audio: “Jolene.”
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Tweet from Paul Suwan: “I was let down last time I saw #Dylan too–two yrs ago maybe–but having Charlie Sexton back in band helped a lot.”
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Set List:
1. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
2. The Man In Me
3. Things Have Changed
4. Positively 4th Street
5. Summer Days
6. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
7. Cold Irons Bound
8. Simple Twist of Fate
9. High Water (For Charley Patton)
10. If You Ever Go To Houston
11. Highway 61 Revisited
12. Tangled Up In Blue
13. Thunder on the Mountain
14. Ballad of a Thin Man
Encore:
15. Jolene
16. Like A Rolling Stone
17. Forever Young
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Comments welcome.
Posted on November 5, 2010