By 
When you buy a ticket to hear an ageing icon of the gravitas of Bob Dylan, a few things tend to happen.
Firstly, an insecurity takes hold and you start to feel somehow under-qualified for the job.
This is a serious artist, a god-damn nobel prize winner after all, so you begin to think that, despite having listened to his eight or so most popular albums hundreds if not a thousand times, you now have a duty to familiarise yourself with his entire discography before the night of the concert arrives.
Which, with an oeuvre comprising 40 studio albums, 21 live albums and 18 volumes of bootleg albums, is an undertaking that squeezes all other music from your life and leaves pretty much every second of your existence scored by harmonica, guitar, occasionally incomprehensible poetry and a level of nasality that makes me, a nasally fella in my own right, sound like Marvin Gaye.
The next thing you do is read or re-read Chronicles, rewatch the biopic, and then inevitably find yourself drowning in a sea of documentaries and interviews.
Somewhere around a month into this life-consuming process of preparation, which at its best feels like an edifying trip through some astral museum, and at its worst like an act of religious asceticism, your resolve begins to bow beneath the weight of what still lies ahead.
You start to entertain the idea that maybe his catalogue exceeds your capacity.
The thought of continuing upon this road becomes a frightening prospect, and you wonder whether your bloody-minded perseverance, designed to elevate your appreciation of the gig, will perversely be the very thing that spoils it.
In other words, you worry you’ll be sick listening to, looking at and hearing about Bob Dylan long before the concert arrives.
You begin to believe this. Or maybe you begin to believe that believing it is the only thing that might give you your life back.
“Sure, who says you need to know every last piece of tape somebody ever touched before you go to see them?” you say. “Bob Dylan, big deal. He’s just a normal guy; human like the rest of them. Leave the bootleg albums to the folklorists and Dylanologists. No shame in not knowing what colour of drawers he was wearing when he recorded Shot of Love.”
And then you go back to listening to the albums that made you buy the ticket in the first place: Blood on the Tracks, Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, Desire, Freewheelin, Highway 61 Revisited.
And life begins to look like it used to, as the shadow on the little bard recedes and allows space for the light of other music, other films, other people to enrich your world.
But then one day you realise you’re going to have to contend with something you’ve been keeping at arm’s length ever since you paid your £150. A knowledge you’ve repressed, but which now springs up from nowhere. Something as infamous as his rasping voice and as legendary as his acerbic lyricism: his unorthodox live performances.
Where the most narcissistic, egomaniacal and generally unhinged artists in the music business, even on their particularly drug-crazed days, will still attempt, for the most part, to play their songs in roughly the manner they wrote them, Old Bobby notoriously does not.
Many a casual fan has bought a ticket over the years with the expectation that what they hear will resemble the songs they’ve lived their lives beside, only to discover, somewhere around the third number, that they are listening to melodies they do not recognise, sung in a key they scarcely knew existed, delivered by a man who seems, at best, only vaguely aware that he wrote them.
I was listening to an interview with Paul McCartney, who, for the record, adores Bob, recalling one of his gigs from a few years ago.
“The show was about halfway through and I hadn’t recognised any of the songs,” said Sir Paul.
Then, the story went, he caught a fragment of lyrics through the chaos and deciphered it as the chorus of Like a Rolling Stone.
Shocked, bemused, disappointed, and yet impressed by Bob’s audacity, Paul sighed, “Aww, that’s not how the song goes, Bob!”
So God only knows what to expect…
I don’t know if Bob even knows what we’re gonna be in for!
But I was at Conor Keys and The Committed in the INF on Saturday night, so if Mr Dylan wants to earn the honour of ‘best gig I’ve been at this week’, he’d need to bring his A-game. Anyway, sure I might let ye know who came out on top in next week’s column…
