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Article by Off the Shelf correspondent Richard Wilhelm

Touring behind his 2020 release of original songs, Rough and Rowdy Ways, Bob Dylan played a three-night stint at the Orpheum on November 3rd through the 5th. On the night of November 5th, the set began promptly at 8 PM, opening with one of his old chestnuts, Watching the River Flow. Though he focused the set on songs from Rough and Rowdy Ways, he also included some older hits such as Gotta Serve Somebody and I’ll be Your Baby Tonight. The latter song was altered a bit but hardly beyond all recognition as Dylan is often wont to do with his songs in concert.

The songs on Rough and Rowdy Ways have a lowdown, outsider persona describing his feelings, perceptions, and actions in a slow, at times dirge-liketempo, one that would be hard to imagine working in a concert setting. But Dylan and his band pulled it off. The backing band had a lot more presence in concert than on the record where they play mostly laid-back fills, an exception being on Goodbye Jimmy Reed, an up-tempo blues shuffle. The band brought the underlying structure of the songs, largely based on variations of I-IV-V progressions, to the fore and gave the songs more shape. Dylan played piano throughout the set backed by bass, drums, two guitars, and a pedal steel guitar.

It should be noted that Dylan chose, perhaps wisely, perhaps not, to leave out the seventeen-minute-long song that comprises the album’s second disc, Murder Most Foul. (The phrase comes from Shakespeare and is uttered by the ghost of Hamlet’s father.) This song stands as a masterful work of art in which Dylan memorializes the assassination of John F. Kennedy by means of postmodernist bricolage, bringing into the song cultural milieu of the era. We encounter the Beatles, Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando’s character in On the Waterfront) Wolfman Jack, Rhett Butler’s “Frankly Miss Scarlet, I don’t give a damn.” Many songs mostly from the mid-60’s he introduces by use of anaphora, singing “Play (this song”), “Play (that song.”) He’s asking Wolfman Jack to ease the sense of horror and tragedy by giving him – us – music to soothe our heartbroken souls.

The one major bummer about the concert is that, at least in the nosebleed section where I sat, nearly all the words were indecipherable. Only repetition of the song’s titular phrase allowed one to figure out what particular song was being played. The fault was not Dylan’s but was that of the sound system. There was a lack of vocal clarity in the upper balcony of the Orpheum, which was unfortunate because Rough and Rowdy Ways depends heavily on the lyrics.