Bob Dylan, the Older the Fiddle, the Sweeter the Tune

"Tonight we saw Bob Dylan and his band electrify Kansas City's Starlight audience with Modern Times material and some old ditties revisited anew. Dylan's cinematic snapshots open up wonderful moments in the social climate of America spanning the counter-cultural movement of the sixties to his current perspective on New Orleans. The concert ended with an utterly spine-tingling rendering of All Along the Watchtower, with the crescent moon slipping into the night sky. Bob Dylan seems to appear slightly younger since I saw him last, the grooves more infectious, the mountains more thunderous, and in the midst of it all, an increasingly coherant, comprehensible and musical voice, rendering a message that deconstructs itself immediately, "something is happening, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" Or in delicate strains, an upright base, softening drums, pedal steel searing the heart, Dylan's piercing commentary finding that beautiful note then as if to obey some sort of divine symmetry, disappearing like a ghost in the machine, as if something has happened and we don't know what it is. But it is not a function of age that diminishes the energy, for it was there at the Starlight, old songs, sacred to us, made fresher still, leaving us with little ripples of spiritual joy."
by Mark