So Nettavisen, Adresseavisa, VG, Dagsavisen and Aftenposten all went to see Dylan in Oslo last night. Though reading their reviews it’s quite difficult to believe that they really went to the same concert.
According to Nettavisen, it might be time for Bob Dylan to retire. This because he delivers a “standard blues repertoaire” in the first half of the concert (and, as we all know, he can’t sing, so what’s the point?) and though the concert improves in its second half, the audience still does not get any of the old Dylan classics. Which makes you wonder whether the journalist has heard Guns and Roses singing Knocking on Heaven’s Door and been told that it was a Dylan song and so, since that was not played, assumed he did not play any classics.
According to VG it was all a bit so-so, part good, parts not so good. It’s hard to take this review seriously, though, because it contains the lines:
“Desolation Row” er blant undertegnedes absolutte favoritter. Hvorvidt Dylan dro låten i går kveld, er nokså uklart, men jeg velger å stole på en kollega som mente han dro kjensel på den.
(“Desolation Row” is one of my absolute favourites. Whether Dylan did that song last night is uncertain, but I chose to believe a colleague who claims to have recognised it.) If you can’t even recognise your own favourites then maybe you you should go home and listen to some records, preferably some bootleg recordings so that you might learn that a song can be played in several different ways and still be the same song. Desolation Row isn’t a favourite of mine, but I had no problems recognising it.* VG also runs the review under the heading “Dylan in A4” which is an odd judgement, seeing as what I would expect someone to mean by “A4” in this connection is an artist who comes on stage and delivers the 13 songs from the last record exactly the way they sound when studio recorded. And that, certainly, was not what Dylan did.
Dagsavisen, Aftenposten and Adresseavisa seem to have kept up with Dylan a little better. According to Adresseavisa Dylan delivers a series of “weird” versions of his old classics in a heavy blues rock style. And the journalist appreciates this, but acknowledges that it might not be a concert for anyone, you might need to be a bit of a Dylan expert to enjoy it all. According to Aftenposten there were a few low points to the concert – they did not like the version of Boots Of Spanish Leather at all – but at least they do not start spouting nonsense. Dagsavisen, on the other hand, claims that Boots of Spanish Leather was beautiful, but seem to think the concert was only so-so even so. (Still, they acknowledge that Dylan so-so is miles ahead of pretty much anything else, which is fair enough.)
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* The playlist before the ‘encore’ seems to have been the same in Oslo and Karlstad and included: To Be Alone With You, Cry A While, It’s Allright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding), Boots Of Spanish Leather, Desolation Row, Things Have Changed, Highway 61 Revisited, Like A Rolling Stone, Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues, Don’t Think Twice, Shooting Star, Forever Young, Cats In The Well, All Along The Watchtower, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, Every Grain of Sand, Summer Days and It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue. In Karlstad we also got a rather splendid Mr Tambourine Man.