This show is from 2002 when I went down the road in my home town to see Bob Dylan play a show at the now long defunct London Docklands Arena on May 11th when he was touring the UK on another leg of his Never Ending Tour. It was around nine months after his Love & Theft album which was released on September 11th 2001, and the show features a number of songs from it which I was hearing him perform live for the very first time.
It’s now well over a month since Bob Dylan’s two shows in Docklands, May 11th & 12th 2002. The time between seeing the man and writing my thoughts down is getting longer as the years go by, which makes me ask, are the fires still burning when it comes to Bob? Well yes, I have to say they are. After seeing the shows I had always intended to write something, and I guess it has just been laziness which has stopped me from doing so. The inspiration has been there though, make no mistake about that. Make no mistake partner or else we’ll just have to go round the back and settle this thing with a pair of shooters. All it has needed is the final push for me to sit for a few hours and set it all down.
Everything began at the start of the year when dates for Bob’s Spring 2002 Tour were first announced on Expecting Rain the primary Dylan resource site on the Net. It was therefore a simple question of deciding which ones I would go to. Or not so simple, whatever the case may be. All in all there were about 6 or 7 UK shows on the agenda spread over various dates in first half of May – Brighton, Cardiff, Bournemouth, Birmingham, Newcastle, Manchester and two in London. I knew early on that there would be no repetition for me of my time in 2000 when I kind of followed Bob around the country for five dates taking in the delights of Birmingham, Sheffield, Cardiff, Portsmouth and London in that order. Not quite the length and breadth of the land but a fair crack of the whip all the same.
This year I was already due to go to India for five weeks during February and March so naturally quite a bit of bread had to be put aside for that. It meant there would be some funds left over but not really enough to justify 300 quid on another Dylan blow out by way of half a dozen concerts. I would have to be discriminating and in that regard I decided quite early on that the most logical decision would be to get tickets for both the London shows and then, if after a couple of weeks I was still not sure that my Dylan fix would be satisfied, I could always try my luck at getting a standing ticket for the CIA in Cardiff, the city where I was born and where I had seen Bob couple of times before, a gig which I knew would probably not sell out until just a few weeks before the date of the show.
Since I was pretty quick on the case in terms of internal ruminations over what would be the best thing to do it wasn’t long before I was on the phone to Ticketline in order to get the best possible seats. For the May 11th Saturday show, tickets had already began to sell pretty damn fast, despite the fact that I called on the very first day they had gone sale, and the best deal I could get was two seats on the floor in row 40. I was told that the Docklands Arena had 75 floor rows and therefore that meant the seats were just over halfway back from the stage, not perfect but not quite on Desolation Row either. The woman at Ticketline assured me they were the best on offer because all the prime picks had already gone. There was little else to do but take them, and accept the fact a whole bunch of Dylan spunkers had got in there before me. For Sunday May 12th things were a bit better; again I got two floor seats but this time on row 21 which was well forward and in the context of the 75 pretty damn good. The whole 4 ticket bundle came to around about £110 quid which I thought was more or less justifiable, more than justifiable really, since it was Bob.
That was it as far as the first stage went. The tickets were booked and in my mind I felt like I had made the right decision. Nothing too over the top but two shows to look forward to all the same. In addition to that was the fact they would be in London Docklands which was only just down the road from me since I lived on the east side of town in Woodford. A simple tube ride on the Central Line to Stratford and then a quick change onto the Docklands Light Railway was all that was required in order to get there. The only things to think about at this early stage were who to offer the other tickets to. In fact that wasn’t really too difficult either. Marc Murphy was sure to want a ticket for one of the shows and which he would be only too happy to buy off me. We had already seen Bob together on a number of occasions – The Fleadh 93, Brixton Academy 96, Wembley Arena 97, Sheffield Arena 2000, Stirling Castle 2001– so there was no doubt in my mind he would be up for it on one of the evenings, even if it was just to acquire his 2002 statistic as far as Bob was concerned. For the other show I thought it would be good to invite Duncan “Dunc” Hutson along. Dunc was the guy who founded Wisdom Books the company where I had worked for over a dozen years shipping out books on Buddhism to the masses, well actually only to the few, but there you go, guess there was always hope. It would be good for him, he was into Eric Clapton and he used to always go to see him at the Royal Albert Hall in the early 90’s when Clapton, or “God” as his fans called him, made a habit of playing there for what seemed like a season. We’d always had a friendly rivalry, you know a Clapton V Dylan thing, and while he maintained that Bob was crap I knew he wasn’t being serious and that he would more than likely really get into it if he ever got the chance to see him play live. So I decided I would give Dunc that chance, do my bit for the good of humanity in terms of its betterment and welfare.
All this was back in January over five months before the shows and I soon put most thoughts about them out of my mind. I was told by Ticketline when I made the booking that tickets would most likely be dispatched sometime in the not so near future and that if I still hadn’t received them 10 days before the shows were due to take place I should give them a call, but only then. Nevertheless this piece of information didn’t stop me calling again at the end of January just before I was due to go to India, in order to check they definitely hadn’t been sent out to me and somehow got lost. It was paranoia on my part for sure and unfortunately for me the kind of behaviour which was well in keeping with tendencies I had regularly manifested throughout the whole of my life. Tendencies based on a deep seated form of insecurity and a quite inexplicable fear of bad luck.
My reasoning this time around was that since I was just about to be out of the country for five weeks it would be prudent to check that they hadn’t been sent and therefore already got lost in the post since I hadn’t received them so far. This was because if they had been dispatched and lost it wouldn’t be until mid-March that I would be able to report them as missing, so doing it this way was nipping any possible sticky situations in the bud. In fact it was almost doing them a favour. All bullshit really, the plain fact of the matter was that I was desperate to get my hands on the tickets, despite the shows still being over four months away. When I called I was assured that the tickets definitely had not been sent and that in all likelihood they hadn’t even been printed yet since there was still such a long time to go before the shows. I felt a bit of a fool pestering them but there you go, that was how I sometimes operated over such things. Polite but mad as a hatter you might say. It would have been nice going off to India safe in the knowledge that I had four Bob tickets waiting for me in the top drawer of my cabinet when I got back but it was not to be, and I would just have to accept that fact, stop the craziness. So off I went, dreaming of the hot sun with thoughts of Bob Dylan soon flying right out the window as I passed over strange lands impossible to imagine from merely looking at any map.
It was mid-March when I returned to England. Another trip to India under my belt, another trip to the awesome land of the Om Vibration. The statistics on this were looking good, 6 trips to India and still not yet 40 years old; surely it was only a matter of time before people would begin to respect that and bow down at my feet? To write about India however belongs to another life, save to say that amongst many other things, it is the country where The Buddha lived, taught and died two thousand years ago and that it now has over a billion Hindus. After going through all the mail which had accumulated during our absence I didn’t come across any Bob tickets. This was not unusual of course, because I had been assured that tickets would be dispatched well in time for the shows and the shows were still two months away. Nevertheless in order to quell a few nagging thoughts which had begun to hover around the outer reaches of my consciousness I called Ticketline again after a few days in order to hear them confirm again that no, the tickets hadn’t been sent yet, probably still hadn’t been printed. Guess I just couldn’t stop myself!
It really is quite a tiring business phoning these ticket agencies because you have to go through a whole menu of different options and then at the end of it wait for around ten minutes listening to some old song. Do ya really wanna hold my hand? In fact even that is not really the end of it because when you finally get through you invariably talk to a person who initially doesn’t know what you are going on about, so you have to repeat things at least a couple of times. Things were also slightly complicated for me in that I had booked two sets of tickets for two nights and therefore had to reel off multiple digit booking reference numbers on each occasion, and which were then repeated back to me to confirm before they were verified. At the end of all this I was again told exactly what I had been told before, simply that the tickets hadn’t been dispatched yet. I berated myself for being unable to display a certain amount of inner cool and just wait patiently like everyone else for the tickets to arrive, although I imagined there were probably a few other Bob fans out there doing the same things as me. Or at least I hoped there were.
Then one day in April I came home from Wisdom Books to open an envelope which contained two tickets for the Saturday show and then a week or so later an envelope with two tickets for the Sunday show turned up as well. Such a good feeling, opening those fucking things. A few days after the Sunday show tickets arrived I came home to hear a message on the answer machine from someone calling on behalf of the London Docklands Arena. It was something about them having to re-locate the seats I had booked for the Saturday May 11th show. They said it was good news however because the seats had now been upgraded. Leaving a new reference number for me, they said that all I had to do was go to the box office on the night of the show with my tickets along with this reference number and new tickets would then be issued. I couldn’t quite figure out why they had decided to change the seats and a part of me was pissed off that now all of a sudden things had potentially got complicated. I was getting old after all, and what I wanted was simply to get my tickets through the fucking post and then go along to the show on the night with no further questions asked thank you very much. That was it, plain and simple. Why had they now picked on me and said it wasn’t going to be like that? Since it was already mid-evening however, I would now have to wait until the following morning to get on the phone and find out just exactly what was going on.
The following day was really quite exhausting when I tried to unravel just what that message on my answer machine from the London Docklands Arena had actually meant. Things were complicated for a number of reasons. First of all I had to phone up Ticketline because I only had their number and not the one for the Docklands Arena, even though it was not Ticketline who had made left the message for me. After going through the interminable telephone menu system and the inevitable ten minute musical wait – Help! – I finally got through to someone. By the time I had explained the details and they had punched in a few keys, they seemed to be under the impression that what the message meant was that I had been upgraded because they were having to change the night I was seeing Bob from the Saturday to Sunday.
This just didn’t make any sense at all! I tried as calmly as I could to explain to them that this simply could not be the case I because I had tickets for the Sunday show already and that I couldn’t therefore see him twice on the same night. My neck was beginning to hurt by this stage, seizing up completely just above my left shoulder. Things seemed to go from bad to worse with no headway being made whatsoever and finally the woman I was speaking to just kind of gave up and told me that since the message had come from the London Docklands Arena and not Ticketline, I would be better off phoning them up to sort it out. At this point I lost my cool a bit and quickly pointed out to her that I had booked my tickets through Ticketline who had taken my money for them nearly five months ago and that if there was now a problem, they would have to fucking sort it out. Or words to that effect. This you see, was one thing that simply couldn’t be left blowin’ in the wind.
I was then put on hold for what was a very long time. It was clear to me the woman at Ticketline was phoning up the London Docklands Arena herself to find out what was going on. After what seemed like an eternity she finally came back on the line and thankfully things were quickly straightened out. It was simply that my Saturday night tickets had been upgraded from row 40 on the floor to a forward position on one of the side rows looking over the stage. The reason for the change in seating was that the mixing desk was now going to be located in floor area where row 40 would have been. My tickets and seats for Sunday night remained the same. As she was explaining all this to me I realised the reason for all the confusion was that in my haste to find out the reason for the upgrade, I had quoted to her my Sunday night booking references and not the ones for Saturday, so no wonder it had been so confusing. Put simply, I’d seriously jumped the gun! For me it was another lesson to learn in regard to the art of patience, if that was at all possible.
Anyway, thankfully everything was now sorted. The shows were now most definitely on and when Saturday 11th May rolled around I found myself spending almost the whole day in preparation for what was to come. Just doing not that much at all because in the evening I was going to see Bob Dylan again, first time since Stirling Castle in July 2001 which was nearly a year ago. I had arranged to meet Dunc on Stratford station at 7 pm and from there we would take a short ride on the DLR down to the London Docklands Arena. It was therefore with some degree of nervous anticipation that I arrived on the DLR Stratford platform at 6.50 pm to wait for him. Dunc did me the favour of arriving on time and we were soon on our way, through the depths of the East End via Canning Town and into the surreal landscape of Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs. By the end of the ride the train was full of the usual suspects in terms of Bob fans who were going along and it was no surprise that our carriage was left virtually deserted after it had stopped at the station for the London Docklands Arena.
It was a bit of a hassle getting off the train simply because of all the people. More than a bit of hassle in fact and a tester for one’s patience, being one of those situations where the only thing I felt like doing was stretching my arms out in front of me, clenching my fists and ploughing my way through. “Come on ya flippers, let me pass! My needs are greater than yours, so get out of the way!” Of course I had to keep a lid on such inclinations especially since I was with Dunc and instead I just tried to look cool in my jean jacket and new Dr Martens whilst slowly shuffling along with all the rest of the fans. At the entrance in front of the arena we had to go to the booking office in order to pick up our newly upgraded tickets. This turned out to be a bit of good fortune because by doing this we were able to jump the huge queue which was outside the main doors and slowly working its way inside. After a quip from one of the bouncers that it was Bob the Builder and not Bob Dylan who was playing that night, we were through the doors and inside the building. Of course I was now in good enough humour to forgive the overweight security blob for making such a dumb wisecrack, and even managed a smile for his benefit despite the fact his joke was pants.
It was the first time I had been to the London Docklands Arena and it soon turned out to be a bit of a maze with an almost unbelievable lack of signs telling people which direction they were supposed to go in once they were inside. Confusing didn’t even begin to describe it. The other immediately noticeable thing was that the bars were teeming with people, which meant that if we fancied a beer before the show it would mean what seemed like at least a 20 minute wait. What a fucking joke! It was as if those who owned the place had been completely taken by surprise that so many people would turn up to an event there. Dunc and I concentrated first of all on finding our seats and after finally making our way into the auditorium at the opposite end to what we should have come in we focused on that particular section of the side block where our seats were. After a few inevitable wrong turns and premature sightings, we eventually found them and they were good, really good, with an unrestricted view over the the stage and no one in front of us. Nice upgrade! We didn’t sit down however, just hovered by the end of the row before deciding to go and try to get a drink.
For some reason, the route we took to what we thought was a bar went up to a gallery instead where soon Dunc and I ended up in a kind of no man’s land. It seemed strangely typical that we should find ourselves there and after a very convoluted passage in order to get out, something which saw us going up and down a couple of flights of stairs with no one else to be seen, we finally found a bar for which Dunc immediately joined the queue. I told him that there was no point in both of us waiting and that I would go to get us some water, just in case he didn’t have any luck in getting served. It really did seem unbelievable that the arena was so poorly equipped. Huge queues at all the bars and now a huge queue in front of the dirty stinkin’ hot dog stand which was the only place to get any water, and where a solitary sullen girl was serving everyone from behind the counter. All in all it added up to being the worst of British. People packed in like sardines and getting completely ripped off after being made to queue for what seemed like ages. It was a case where the management should have been taken outside and given a damn good spanking, even a bullet between the eyes wouldn’t have gone amiss so that it would be a lesson to everyone else. To ensure it never happened again and that customers who’d handed over their hard earned bread would always and forever more receive efficient good value service with a smile.
Quite a few Dylan fans in the queue were clearly getting a bit hot under the collar over the situation as well and it was difficult for people to refrain from swearing and uttering bitter comments over their treatment. It was not beyond the bounds of possibility that Bob of course had ordered the management of the arena to run a skeleton staff in order to wind everyone up. I wouldn’t have put it past him! I had a picture of him sitting there backstage with a stack of TV monitors showing the faces of frustrated poseurs, has been’s an’ wanna be’s all trying to stay civilised and not boil over into an uncontrollable rage, my sad old mug right in amongst them. Complete fantasy of course, and more than a little weird of me to have even thought such a thing, must have been a rogue splice of my own frustration I guess. The only compensation when I finally came to be served was that the hot dog stand also sold plastic bottles of Carlsberg, somewhat inevitably not very cold, but nevertheless alcohol in the form of lager. Due to the stresses and strains I had been through beer seemed a better option than water, the circumstances had made it so, which meant I bought a couple of small bottles of Carlsberg at three quid a throw and made my way back to the bar to find Dunc.
On meeting up with him I saw that had also succeeded in getting served and where, lo and behold, he emerged from the scramble with two bottles of Carlsberg for each of us. That meant with mine from the hot dog stand we had six bottles between us which would be more than enough to keep things ticking over through the course of the show. Sippin’ warm beer for Like a Rolling Stone? Well, sometimes it just had to be done, success lay at the end of the tunnel, after all. We now made our way back to our seats following the same strange twisting route as before, through a part of the arena where it appeared that no one else had ever been to and which might have been full of ghosts. The row we were on was by now pretty full so it was with a feeling of some considerable relief when we finally got to our seats, setting our bottles down at our feet. It wasn’t long before before we were taking good slugs from the ones we held in our hands and sometimes, just sometimes, Carlsberg probably is the best lager in the world!
It was now about 7.45 and by my calculations show time would be 8 pm without too much of a wait beyond that. The incense had already been lit, Nagchampa I thought, and if this was indeed the case it meant that it came from India, the Sai Baba organisation no less, but this was at best an educated guess. Probably a wrong one because Bob had never to my knowledge shown much of an interest in that mystical Indian scene of gurus, magic men and meditation wizards which had pulled so many in, myself included. The joss was rolling over the first few rows of people on the floor in clouds, with a sweet, heady fragrance which I for one couldn’t get enough of. All part of the ritual for darshan possibly, an audience with the master, something which could most definitely be applied as far as I was concerned, when it came to my relationship with Bob. This was always one of my favourite times, waiting for the show to begin, taking in through my nostrils that incense aroma, watching the rows of the arena fill up with people, looking down at the front where the diehard Dylan fans stood around in excited clusters talking with one another, heads held high in anticipation, no doubt speculating on which songs they were going to hear that night, and which ones they weren’t.
Then there was the stage itself where the usual faces were up there making themselves busy. The young Oriental guy who had been on the road with Bob for at least the last five years, probably longer, the huge guy with the beard and the pony tail on the left hand side of the stage who’d been with Bob for as long as I could remember. He always got to make the announcement of introduction just before Bob and the boys came on stage after appearing from out of the shadows. Then there was the guy who looked just like Bob himself, who hovered around like he was a deliberate plant in order to get people excited, fooling them into thinking that it was Bob they were looking at when of course it actually wasn’t. Just a trick of the light, that’s all. The music equipment looked pretty much like it always did, racks and racks of guitars, all of them needed because most songs required a change of instruments for at least three band members, sometimes four. It was an impressive arsenal, all of which needed tuning and protecting night after night as they wound their way around the world getting played in show after show by Bob and the boys on their Never Ending Tour.
As usual the speaker stacks were suspended from the ceiling above the stage. Speaker stacks I always looked up to when the louder, harder, electric songs in the set came along, closing my eyes to let the sound wash over me, open my heart to the sun. It just so happened to be the case that to my ears the noise Bob Dylan made after plugging in was a wonderful one indeed and which has now been around since the mid 60s when he’d helped to change the rules of the game by way of playing fuckin’ loud and not giving a toss whether people liked him or not because of it, fans included. The last time I had been in front of those speaker stacks was nearly a year ago, when me and Marc Murphy had seen Bob and the boys play in the grounds of Stirling Castle, well actually in its car park, on a wild Scottish summer evening in the middle of July 2001.
That was when banks of clouds had been rolling in and around us from out of the Highlands. Clouds continuously threatening rain for the duration of the whole show but miraculously they held off and only materialised after it was all over. By then Marc and I were walking back down the cobbled streets of the ancient Scottish town with our hearts light and our ears ringing from the magical sound of Bob and the boys who had given everyone their very best in a show that had lasted for over two hours. That one had been special, out in the open air of the north country with Bob on fine form, and a hipflask of finest Bushmills Irish whiskey in my jacket pocket which during the course of the show Marc and I had taken enough nips from to leave it very nearly empty and our eyes very, very red. Oh yes indeed, that had been a show to remember!
In the London Docklands Arena the stage was set some way in front of the curtained back drop which had Bob Dylan’s Eye of Integrity emblazoned on it. This meant there would be quite a few yards of empty space which Bob and the boys would have to cross before stepping up to face the audience. At the back was a set of steps clearly lit so that no one would trip up when they made the ascent and I tried to imagine what it would be like for Bob when he stepped into the lights of his equipment filled stage, taking in the roar of the crowd before once again playing yet another show on his Never Ending Tour. Well, it was impossible to imagine of course, for an ordinary fan like me. Probably it was just another night, another show for him on the endless road he had been on since 1988. The only thing which stood in the way of everyone coming back again and again was mortality. If we were to return in 100 years time the place would be empty of all the people who were there now, in fact the place itself would probably be long gone, lost in the mists of London history. Death was the ultimate spoiler and in that sense what I was witnessing was really quite poignant, the sands of time were slowly but surely trickling away for all of us, even Bob, up there as he was in the realm of the gods.
After a blast of Fanfare for the Common Man over the PA system at just gone 8 pm there was that most familiar and welcome announcement from the huge guy with the beard and the pony tail. “Good evening ladies and gentlemen, would you please welcome Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan!” As usual it was magical, simply magical for me to hear those words again, to listen to the roar of the crowd as five figures emerged from the shadows, as if from out of nowhere. Amongst them was a slight built man considerably older than the rest and who had a huge white Stetson hat on his head. Yes, it was none other than Bob Dylan! They were soon up the steps and onto the stage with minimal acknowledgment given to an arena full of cheering fans, and where they then proceeded to pick up their instruments to get down to the business of the day, because now once again it was show time!
First up was I Am The Man Thomas one of a selection of traditional songs which Bob uses to open his sets and has done for the last couple of years. It was great, these trad songs are warm ups really, just to get things going in a loose relaxed kind of way, probably for the guys to fix the sound levels and other stuff like that. Just an opportunity for folks to get re-acquainted again before getting serious. From our position I had a good sidelong view of Bob with his huge white Stetson hat, the back of which seemed to trail along after him like a salamander’s tail. Larry Campbell was to our near side, Charlie Sexton was over on the far side, with bass guitar player and band leader Tony Garnier, along with drummer Jim Keltner in the middle and towards the back. Keltner was the one change in the line up to when I had last seen Bob and the boys in Stirling Castle, because back in 2000 and 2001 it had been the ex-Jerry Garcia Band member Dave Kemper on the skins but he had now left the band, and by all accounts under supposedly acrimonious circumstances. Jim Keltner, a seasoned studio pro from the depths of LA whose association with Bob went back many years, including being on the drums for Saved, was therefore Kemper’s temporary replacement. The sound of the band and the sound of Bob’s voice washed out of the speaker stacks above us and it suddenly felt like we were off, back in business capital city style, over on the east side of London.
Second was Times They Are A Changin’ a song in which Bob often succeeded in fluffing his lines as indeed he did this time, despite the fact he has now played it literally thousands of times. It was a nice arrangement but not as good as the performance he did of it in Sheffield 2000 where he really nailed the golden essence of this particular early anthem in a way which was hard for me to ever forget. You can’t hope for that all the time however, anyway the whole process of evaluation is hopelessly subjective, an ever changing scene so hard to pin down. Third was It’s Alright Ma I’m Only Bleeding which was well received by an already receptive audience and it was a much better It’s Alright Ma than those he was performing a couple of years ago in 2000 but probably still not up to the heights of what he could be capable of as far as this Bringing It All Back Home classic is concerned. It was followed however by another number from that album, a fantastic It’s All Over Now Baby Blue in a new, really wonderful arrangement with Larry on pedal steel guitar and Bob getting his harmonica out to play in a far more meaningful way than what he had just done on Times They Are A Changin’. Funnily enough I had been listening to It’s All Over Now Baby Blue a few times recently due to having purchased an album by Bryan Ferry which went by the name of Frantic, containing as it did two Dylan covers, both of which Bob happened to play during the show. The Ferry version of It’s All Over Now Baby Blue was a grower, but Bob on this one rendition blew it a million miles into space because it was quite simply brilliant!
From our favourable seating position on the side and close to the front, it was really nice to be able to look over the rows and rows of people stretching all the way to the back of the arena. The place was full, it seemed to me that every last seat was taken, not bad for a 61 year grandfather who had now been treading the boards for over 40 years. Not bad at all in fact. Things got noisy on the next song, an electrified Solid Rock from Bob’s Christian work Saved, the second album of his religious trilogy with the others being Slow Train Coming and Shot of Love. At the time of its release Saved was a work despised by critics and not held in high regard by fans either. This was not so much to do with the songs but simply the way in which they were recorded, which was lacklustre to say the least, and decidedly poor when compared to the live versions of them he was performing at the time. This Solid Rock was tremendous however, quite simply tremendous, with Bob, Charlie and Larry forming a front of stage Fender guitar union which knocked anything which stood in their way right out of the arena and would have put the fear of god into anyone who tried to question what they were doing. Dunc really got into this one as well and I could see that he was now busy re-evaluating his previously held opinions about Bob, as quite frankly any sane person would have had to do the same under the circumstances, because the simple fact of the matter was that already Bob was seriously smokin’!
The first song of the night from Love and Theft, Bob’s most recent album which had come out the previous year in September 2001 and had received nearly as much critical acclaim as 1997s game changing Time Out of Mind, came next. It was Floater, a song which up until that point had passed me by when listening to it at home, but now made me sit up and take serious notice. In subsequent weeks I would play this particular song many more times, listen to it in awe, because with effortless ease Floater takes you on a trip to the heart of the Mid-West and into a family story sprung from the depths of the banks beside a mosquito buzzing river lying in a yellow fever tinged emptiness enveloping everything and everyone. Subterranean Homesick Blues followed, which was interesting by way of the form in which it appeared, but would have been unforgettable if Bob had played it in the original breakneck version found on Bringing It All Back Home. Nevertheless it was still pretty enjoyable, so any such wishful thinking on my part remained strictly in the realm of dreams, and we were more than compensated by the fact that we got to hear this relatively rarely played mid 60s classic at all, a song which in my humble opinion, ranks as one of the very best Bob has ever written.
The Fender guitars stayed out for what was the second number from Love and Theft that night, a hard straight down the middle and thoroughly no messin’ Lonesome Day Blues with a version which was strong enough to shake the arena to its foundations. When I initially bought the album this song had been my favourite and I had been looking forward to hearing it live from the first moment I heard it. Whilst it didn’t disappoint, I kind of thought there was still work to do on this one before Bob and the boys chugged it into the truly classic live offering it most certainly had the potential to be. All the same though, not bad. Mr Tambourine Man followed Lonesome Day Blues and, like Times They Are a Changin’ whilst very pleasant, it didn’t take me to those transcendental pastures of the really great performances which Bob is capable of pulling out of the bag when he is really in the mood to show his waving hand. But that was alright, he hardly wasted our precious time and anyway, if he was always able to effortlessly make every Tambo extra special it would cease to be so when those truly magical performances did come along.
The next two songs, Visions of Johanna and Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright, were really top quality however. Played back to back they brought the house down, where that special genius-like luminosity of his great songs from the 60s was really displayed for the first time during this particular show. Visions of Johanna had extended acoustic guitar interplay between Bob, Larry and Charlie which could have gone on forever for all I cared because it rolled along in gentle waves to beguile, seduce and then slam the audience. Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright was just a simply stunning version of the other song which had appeared Bryan Ferry’s recent Frantic album. This time Bob struck gold and effortlessly evoked that timeless halo of evanescence for which his best songs from the 60s are so highly revered. Dunc was also most mightily impressed with this one and it was good for me to see him enjoying himself, getting himself a proper musical education by way of seeing a true music legend in his life for the first time. This was important to note because prior to this point Dunc had in my opinion been way too over exposed to middle of the road fare from the likes of Dire Straits and 80s Eric Clapton and then convincing himself it was the business. Bob looked in a good mood too from what I could see of him on the stage, which of course was a bonus, although in all honesty it was rather difficult to tell because his face was well hidden by his huge white Stetson hat which at times appeared to be the size of a map of Texas.
A relatively rare performance of Blind Willie McTell came next which happened to be the best of the three versions that I have now witnessed Bob play of it, still not as good as the one on The Bootleg Tapes Vols 1-3 however, but then again how could it be? The Bootleg Tapes Vols 1 – 3 recorded version of Blind Willie McTell simply led you by the hand and into those sun drenched cotton fields of the far Deep South, where before the tollin’ of a bell real danger at the midnight crossroads might well lie in wait for you. All the same this version was really not too bad at all and under the circumstances would do very, very nicely, extra special nicely as a matter of fact, because in parts you could tell this Willie was as hot as hell.
Summer Days was the third Love and Theft song of the night and this was a revelation because unlike Lonesome Day Blues which was a pretty straight forward replication of what is found on the album, Summer Days really came alive, going way beyond the recorded version and giving Charlie Sexton the opportunity to exhibit some truly exceptional guitar playing whilst Bob and the rest of the boys looked on with approval. It was quite simply tremendous, about twice as long as what it is on the album and the best of all the Love and Theft songs Bob played that night, best in fact by a country mile. This was a real surprise because on the album I had barely paid Summer Days much attention, but now it manifested qualities which only Bob could have known about when he originally wrote it, seeing the potential back then of what it might become.
It was yet another example of his genius for creating what was in effect a template for a song which was to be moulded into different shapes depending on time and occasion. That is what his best songs are all about, not just simply recordings stuck in time, forever to be repeated only in the way they were first laid down, but to be subject instead to constant and sometimes strenuous re-interpretation. Everyone went wild over Summer Days and quite rightly so because the version Bob pulled out the bag was a real stunner. It made me smile to think that Bob also seemed at his happiest when the music he was playing was at its loudest and noisiest, at its most hooligan, and there really was nothing wrong with that, in fact there was everything right about it.
Summer Days set things up for what has now become a scorching version of Cold Irons Bound from Time Out of Mind. It is now in a radically different arrangement from the 1997 recorded version, again as if the song on the album only barely hints at the qualities it is able to display when played live. It was ridiculously loud and suddenly Bob had never looked more contented as he tore through the white hot metal of Irons with Charlie and Larry standing right beside him letting it rip. The main set then finished up with Leopard Skin Pill-Box Hat, one of my favourite Blonde on Blonde songs and whilst not up to some of the great September 2000 versions he played at virtually every show, it still brought a big smile to my face. Yes, this particular Pill-Box saw me close my eyes, take in the wall of electric noise which was coming out of the speaker stacks suspended high above the crowd, wash my head in the sounds, and think to myself that I could never get enough, never get enough of it. Needless to say everyone went wild when it was over, before Bob and boys once more lined up for The Formation, each of them staring expressionless into the cheering crowd then taking their leave of the stage with Bob as usual walking off last. A solid as a rock main set, no doubt about that, no doubt at all, and the only thing left to do now was to get stuck into bringing them back for the encore.
The main set had comprised 15 songs and from my studies of set lists so far on this 2002 Spring leg of the Never Ending Tour, there had been upwards of 20 or 21 songs played each night with one or sometimes two encores. Therefore as I stood there in the darkness, full of the sound of the cheering London Docklands Arena crowd, I had high hopes we were still going to get upwards of another half dozen songs. It turned out that the encore was to be only four more songs and when, after a long sustained period of cheering for more, the house lights came on it most definitely signalled to everyone that the show was over. Guess in retrospect walking away with 19 songs under my belt for the night was a little bit of a disappointment when others might have seen him in another place along the road and got a full 21, but it didn’t feel like it was a bummer at the time, far from it in fact.
Like a Rolling Stone kicked things off again when Bob and the boys reappeared, this song had now changed position to first song of the encore rather than being embedded in the electric part of the main set like it had been in 2000 and 2001. It was clean, crisp, very enjoyable, a sure-fire 100% guaranteed crowd pleaser and an opportunity for Bob and the boys to get a look at the audience because it was during Like a Rolling Stone that the bright lights of the stage always shone on the crowd. I looked back across the arena, down at the rows and rows of ecstatic people and I thought how thoroughly addicted Bob must have been to it all as he stared out over thousands of arms waving in the air, people dancing in the aisles and screaming for his attention. It must have been just what he needed to make him feel like it was worth carrying on, keeping the whole show on the road and to get as much out of it as possible for as long as he could, including of course a nice big pay check. Honest with Me followed Like a Rolling Stone, the fifth song to come from Love and Theft, a logical choice for this stage of the show because in some ways its nearest counterpart is Highway 61 Revisited which has performed a similar function as a rousing encore song probably thousands of times down through the years. It gave a chance for Bob and the Boys to line up once more in a Fender guitar union and rock like a bunch of suit clad hooligans straight from out of the US of A, thus ensuring that Honest with Me more than did the business.
Next was an acoustic Blowin’ In the Wind, which for me was the weakest number of night but probably only because I wished it could have been something different. There are only so many times I can listen to Blowin’ without getting a feeling of claustrophobia and I think I have now crossed the point of no return, despite singing my heart out to it less than a year ago when I saw him play it up in Stirling whilst full to the brim with Bushmills although that was probably why. Too many flying cannonballs, immovable mountains and sandy white doves for Blowin’ to still have much meaning this time beyond it being an iconic sign off from a legendary artist. God knows what the real Bob die-hard fans, the ones who have seen him literally hundreds and hundreds of times, felt when they heard the opening bars to Blowin’ being played yet again. It certainly had me sitting there wishing for something different, some little baby bolt from the blue, but no, on this occasion it was not to be.
Things were finished off with All Along the Watchtower and the only complaint one could have was that it was over way too soon, being a somewhat curtailed version, similar in fact to the abbreviated Watchtower we got the previous year up in Stirling. Not enough lead guitar, not enough noise, not enough doom, not enough horse rider visions on the far horizon, not enough time to sit there with my eyes closed so as to lose myself once more in the electric life-giving power sounds of Bob and the boys being blasted from out of those speaker stacks suspended above our heads. All in all then we got a 19 song set clocking in at just under 2 ¼ hours and although we hadn’t hit the 20 song mark, let alone 21, it still felt like pretty damn good value for money. Dunc was really knocked out by it, I don’t think he had realised up until that point just what a serious, committed and amazing performer Bob Dylan really was, but then how could he when he’d spent so much of his time listening to Eric Clapton?
When the house lights came on all that was left on the stage were a few lights still glowing from the amps and these were switched off one by one by the young Oriental guy who was now beginning the mop up operation along with the rest of the roadies. Something still hung in the air, a smoky collective residue, now slowly fading as people left the arena soon to be scattered like ants across the vast city of London and into the great beyond. But quite a lot of them would be back the following night for the second London Docklands Arena show from Bob, that was for sure, including myself of course.
We filed out of the Arena and into a London Saturday night full of May drizzle. There was a huge queue just to get onto the platform of the DLR railway station so Dunc and I decided to walk on up through the rain to Canary Wharf. Many others made the same decision and soon we were striking a path within the landscape of London Docklands under the rail tracks and into its heart beneath those big towers of banking institutions which stood at the forefront of London capitalism. There was a procession of bridges over water filled quays which we had to cross and when we eventually got to Canary Wharf we took refuge in a bar which was still open. It was reasonably full with an unsuspecting Saturday night crowd now about to be invaded by a mass of thirsty Bob Dylan fans.
A pint of ice cold Grolsch lager at that stage of the proceedings was more than welcome, in fact it was fantastic, and as I drank it down I was feeling good. Coming as it did on top of my gradual consumption of the three plastic bottles of Carlsberg during the show, it went straight to my head for some reason and got me tipsy. By the time we made it to the tube it was way past eleven and when we parted ways at Stratford it was coming up to midnight. I think Dunc went home a happy guy, we’d had a good time and I was more than pleased he had shown his appreciation of the man in the big white Stetson. It must have been 12.30 am by the time I rolled in through the door back home. The house was empty but luckily I’d had the foresight to record Match of the Day and was therefore able to enjoy an hour or so of footy whilst slowly finishing off the remains of a bottle of red wine along with cooking myself up a couple of veggie burgers and a bunch of oven chips. I slept well that night, and if I had any dreams, I didn’t remember them the next morning.
First part of my 2002 London Docklands Arena Bob Dylan shows successfully accomplished. Over and out.
Setlist Docklands Arena May 11th 2002 –
I Am The Man Thomas
Times They Are A Changin’
It’s Alright Ma I’m Only Bleeding
It’s All Over Now Baby Blue
Solid Rock
Floater
Subterranean Homesick Blues
Lonesome Day Blues
Mr Tambourine Man
Visions of Johanna
Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright
Blind Willie McTell
Summer Days
Cold Irons Bound
Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
Like a Rolling Stone
Honest with Me
Blowin’ In the Wind
All Along the Watchtower
TracelessTrails 
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