Bob Dylan in concert: or, the art of betraying oneself

If you can, go. And not because you’re a die-hard Dylanologist or someone with a keen interest in 20th-century musical archaeology. If you can, go and see Dylan’s latest (for now) Italian tour for one simple reason. He is the last living work of art in popular music. It’s a world away from the greats – including the Rolling Stones – who offer magnificent vintage experiences, merely rehashing their past.

He is still evolving. Hardly anyone recognises his songs straight away; his voice can be distorted, broken, recited, or detached from the music. The songs are not performed; they simply happen anew. It is a bit like attending the Angelus. One does not go to hear something new, nor even because one shares the faith. One goes because there is someone before us who embodies a story immeasurably greater than the man who speaks it.

Bob Dylan is eighty-five years old and is returning to Italia on the Lights of Autumn Tour. Milan, Rome, Bologna. That could be the news. Or perhaps something else. After almost forty years, the Never Ending Tour continues. It began in 1988 and, since then, Dylan hasn’t simply been on tour. He has transformed the concert from an album promotion into a permanent art form. Dylan has spent his life dismantling Dylan.

First, he transformed folk music, infusing it with poetry, politics, literature, personal perspectives and collective history. Without that revolution, it would be hard to imagine much of the music that followed, from De André to De Gregori. Then, by the time everyone had realised who Bob Dylan was, he had already moved on. At Newport in 1965, he plugged an electric guitar into the mains. He did it again by becoming a Christian, a crooner, a Nobel laureate and a Sinatra-style singer. By betraying his own identity, he remained true to his freedom. And he bagged a Nobel Prize, an Oscar, ten Grammys and even a Pulitzer Prize.

Now the latest heresy is old age. *Rough and Rowdy Ways*, his latest album of original material, blends Kennedy, Shakespeare, the blues, cinema, American history and pop culture. In ‘Murder Most Foul’, he doesn’t merely recount a murder; he compiles the playlist for the funeral of a century. And on stage, the process continues, without subjecting us to a karaoke version of memory. Dylan does not preserve his repertoire; he exposes it to the passage of time. At eighty-five, he still prevents the past from having the last word. Because Dylan, having reinvented folk, singer-songwriting and, ultimately, himself, has achieved the most difficult of paradoxes: becoming tradition whilst continuing to deny it, betray it and invent it.