Indulge me in a theory: Tulsa has a hold on the interior life of Bob Dylan.
Case in point: He was born in Minnesota and despite having no known familial connection to Tulsa he chose our city as the home for a museum to his life and work. Dylan has also obliquely referred to the Tulsa Race Massacre in “Murder Most Foul,” the particularly gnarly late-period collage of seedy Americana that caps his latest record, Rough and Rowdy Ways. This year’s edition of the ongoing tour supporting that record started Tuesday night at the Tulsa Theater, a venue Dylan’s played several times before, which played an ignoble role in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. His longtime fixation on local lore and legends suggests that he’s not unaware of this history.
I carried all of this with me into the Tulsa Theater Tuesday night, alongside thousands of other fans ranging from the very young (I saw one woman with a baby in sound-canceling headphones wrapped against her) to the very old. Among them were baby Zoomer and Gen Alpha Dylan fans, swagged-out millennial dads in hats and T-shirts repping everything from MJ Lenderman to boutique Bob podcasts, grizzled boomer deadheads and even one guy dressed as Rolling Thunder Revue-era Dylan with full white facepaint.
The house lights went down four minutes after 8pm and the band (Bob Britt on guitar, Doug Lancio on guitar, Anton Fig on drums, Tony Garner on bass and guitar) revved up the crowd with “All Along the Watchtower.” They arranged themselves around Bob and his grand piano, which he stood at for most of the set.
The players, the lights, and the sound equipment formed concentric curves around him, starting some fifteen feet back from the front of the very large stage. The lighting burned yellow, almost candle-like. I imagine the people in the front row had a great view; even from high up in the balcony, I found the stage setup warm and personal.
Bob left the piano to play a stabby little guitar solo as a way of segueing from “Watchtower” into “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” Fresh off a long break, he brought vigor into the night’s performance of this 61-year-old song. At 83, his singing voice is strong, nimble and always searching out new crevices in old songs, leaning hard into the “r” of “it ain’t me you’re looking forrrrrrrrr, babe” at the end of each verse.
He switched back to piano, found a little chord progression he liked and repeated it a few times. The band provided a very light supporting touch all night scaffolding Bob’s piano playing and vocal work, which came through expressive and clear, more like a spoken word performance than a rock concert. I found myself enjoying the intimacy with Bob while also wanting some extra instrumentation, a mandolin or a slide guitar, for a bit more flavor.
For the first Rough and Rowdy Ways track of the night we got a restrained, dignified take on “I Contain Multitudes” and then a version of “False Prophet” that seemed to be missing some heft on the low end. The only real wacky track of the night came next: “When I Paint My Masterpiece” reimagined brilliantly as a samba. The guy sitting next to me said it sounded like the “Istanbul is Constantinople song” and he was dead-on.
We also got one of the stranger juxtapositions of vibe I’ve ever experienced in a live concert: “My Own Version of You” immediately followed by “To Be Alone with You.” The mood of the former, a spooky piece of folklore theater, was broken by the latter, which came through so chipper and jaunty that I thought it might break out into ”Sweet Caroline” at any moment.
The band took a short break and returned with a version of “Crossing the Rubicon,” a snaky blues that seemed just a little perfunctory. Dylan and his band have been touring the Rough and Rowdy Ways record for four years now, and it’s a tremendous piece of music, but the set bore a lot of similarity to the show I saw at the same venue in April 2022. (By the time the current run of dates is finished, they’ll have played more than 250 dates on the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, all told.) Both nights they played some of the same non-Rowdy Ways songs too, including “Every Grain of Sand,” “Watching the River Flow,” “To Be Alone with You” and the aforementioned “Masterpiece.” This repetition was, I’ll admit, a little disappointing.
But god, what a treat to hear “Desolation Row” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” in the second half of the set. It occurred to me that midway through “Desolation Row” that I was watching an 83-year-old man perform a song he wrote in his 20s. The crowd got on its feet for this one, giddy and expectant. I noticed a little performing tic of Bob’s: he throws his right shoulder forward occasionally as he rips it up on the keys. Seemed like he was feeling himself.
Is it possible for a Nobel Prize winner—one with both a university program and a destination museum devoted to his work—to actually be underrated? Maybe I’m being too glib in suggesting so, but after the show I stand by it. To me he’s closer to Shakespeare than to a musical peer like Paul McCartney or Bruce Springsteen. His work winds through language and culture in ways that take him far beyond the world of songwriting and records.
On Tuesday night we got Greek tragedy, old time religion, trancey flow states, gallows humor, folk noir and a little darkness creeping in. There was something larger and more powerful going on in that room than just a concert. Ghosts haunt downtown Tulsa, and I think Bob was talking to them.
