Translated material
Alien prophet
Bob Dylan, the most influential rock musician of our time, gave his first and only concert in St. Petersburg.
Bob Dylan spent the entire performance at the St. Petersburg Ice Palace standing at the electric organ in profile to the audience. Whether or not to regard this as a special gesture was apparently a matter for the left half of the palace stands, which could only see the master’s back. But by closing the stage space in this way, the musician created a feeling of intimacy, like on a club stage. By the standards of Ledovoy, the size of the audience was indeed close to the scale of an intimate event. Having nurtured, without knowing it, the domestic rock revolution of the 70s and 80s, Bob Dylan remains in Russia a lot for the lazy and extremely curious. He is alien to many because of his closeness and the flair of an “intellectual.” In addition, not everyone can hear familiar words in the singer’s indistinct but inspired muttering or catch unexpected twists in the musical plot from the monotony of blues-rock standards.The listeners, who filled the hall about halfway, seemed to be trying to prevent a repeat of the embarrassment that happened to Dylan in Moscow in 1985. Then he came to Luzhniki to perform at the Evening of World Poetry, but there was not a single real fan at the concert, only excellent Komsomol students with wooden faces. Today's audience is much better prepared both in terms of hardware and emotionally: every song, especially from the arsenal of the 1960s, was greeted with applause, actively sang along and danced. It was Dylan who attracted, perhaps, the most pleasant St. Petersburg audience: dignified, gray-haired “rockers” with families or friends, business men in suits without a tie, slender, reverent girls and “serious” young men, a match for Dylan himself in his youth. Many began to dance immediately from the first composition, Cat's In The Well, catchy and frivolous, and some even demonstrated professional rock and roll steps. The program as a whole was conducive to active body movements; it even came to mind that Dylan makes music that literally corresponds to the term intelligent dance music: dancing plus smart lyrics.
However, the literary-centric nature of Dylan’s work faded into the background at this performance. Today, his singing is more reminiscent of an unintelligible, encrypted recitative, and the hoarseness acquired with age only makes it difficult to perceive. In blues slow numbers, this muttering manner gave weight and edification to the final words of the verse, but in general it was perceived as a set of phonemes. Dylan mainly performed songs from the 2006 album Modern Times - slow ballads filled with mystical images. The beautiful Ain't Talkin', which sounded almost towards the end, stood out for its whimsical arrangement with alto passages performed by Donnie Herron, who during the concert also picked up an electric mandolin and something like a gusli, adding spicy shades to the well-coordinated but slightly bitter blues sound .
As part of the “Never Ending Tour,” which has been going on since the late 80s, Bob Dylan, together with The Never Ending Tour Band, gives up to hundreds of concerts a year, filling stadiums. Although there is an opinion that many of his songs sound more interesting in the lips of others, at the St. Petersburg concert it became clear that their bizarre imagery and complex dramaturgy truly come to life only in Dylan himself, even through illegible diction and a distinctly detached manner of performance.