To mark the announcement that Bob Dylan will be resuming his Never Ending Tour, by way of playing shows across the world from 2021 to 2024 in support of his Rough And Rowdy Ways album released in 2020, I have pulled a few more Bob tales out the bag from way back when.
The doors to the CIA opened at 6.45 which was a little earlier than I had expected but nevertheless most welcome. Suddenly Welsh security people were scurrying around and making themselves look busy, talking into their mobile phones with a gravity which made you think there must be a killer on the loose or that they had suddenly been charged with looking after a nuclear bomb. Stern warnings were given to people in the queue that no photographs were to be taken in any shape or form whatsoever once inside the arena. If this rule was transgressed people ran the risk of having their equipment confiscated and never returned, all of which was at the express request of the artist. Needless to say they would also be pulled out of the crowd and kicked out of the arena as well. That was Bob for you, there was no getting away from the fact he could be most mightily touchy when it came to what he saw as invasion of his privacy, something which extended to whatever the stage he was performing on in whatever country throughout the world.
To mark the announcement that Bob Dylan will be resuming his Never Ending Tour, by way of playing shows across the world from 2021 to 2024 in support of his Rough And Rowdy Ways album released in 2020, I have pulled a few more Bob tales out the bag from way back when.
June 2004 and two Bob shows are coming up. It seemed like it was not so very long ago that I had finished writing up Three Bob Shows which covered the three bob shows that I had been to in 2003; Sheffield, Birmingham and London in that order. Great shows, naturally, although I have to admit that I did get into a couple of scrapes along the way, which led me to believe at times I was getting a bit of beating from the gods and that I’d better learn to stay on the right side of the road. Enough of that for now, suffice to say that I just about managed to come out of it with the sun still shining brightly over my shoulder as far as my love of Bob was concerned and at the end of the day that was all that mattered.
Second of two posts today, 24th May 2021, to mark – on my blog – the 80th birthday of the incomparable recording and performing artist – Bob Dylan.
Happy Birthday Bob!!!
This one is a write up of the third of three shows I saw Bob play back in 2003. Whilst the first two were run of the mill arena shows, one in Birmingham and one in Sheffield, this one was always going to be special – a return to the legendary Hammersmith Apollo in West London. Sure enough, Bob didn’t disappoint, pulling some stone cold nuggets from out the bag, including a song which he hadn’t played in 26 years. Nice one!
So now it was a case of two down one to go as far as my Three Bob Shows for 2003 were concerned. There was a whole two days in between the Birmingham NEC show which I had been to on the Friday and the Hammersmith Apollo show on the Monday. That was a long weekend to get through in other words, a very long weekend indeed when I knew that Bob was in town, playing places like the Shepherds Bush Empire which would no doubt be packed to the rafters and full of adoring fans. This time I was going to see Bob with Duncan “Dunc” Hutson one of my partners in crime at Wise Words, the small distribution company specialising in books on Buddhism, which I helped run as well as being co-director of. Dunc had come to see Bob with me once before, the first of the two London Docklands Arena shows in May 2002 and at the time he had been suitably impressed with what he had witnessed. When I told him a couple of months ago that Bob would be back in London in November he jumped at the chance to come along with me to see him again. Therefore on the Monday I finished early at Wise and arranged to meet Dunc round my place in the late afternoon for him to park his car before we took the tube down to Hammersmith from Woodford.
First of two posts today, 24th May 2021, to mark – on my blog – the 80th birthday of the incomparable recording and performing artist – Bob Dylan.
Happy Birthday Bob!!!
Following on from my overview of Bob shows from the 1990s and also shows in the period 2005 – 2009, this post covers me seeing Bob Dylan live at the Tempodrom, Berlin on two dates in 2013, the Royal Albert Hall in London 2015, the Cardiff Interantional Arena 2017 and finally Hyde Park, London 2019.
It was to be just over two years later at the end of October 2013 when I next saw Bob by way of going to two shows in Germany on October 24th & October 26th at the Tempodrom in Berlin. Just so happened that I was over there paying a visit to my old friend Thomas Deilecke, otherwise known as Toby Ruft and who takes a leading role in some of my Indian writings which appear on my website Traceless Path, specifically in a novel on there by the name of Tiger Trails, but also in a number of shorter pieces found in a section called Om Reflections. But I guess this is something which I might have mentioned before! The tickets for the shows had been bought well in advance of my visit and I guess they were the main reason why was I was making the trip over, not solely of course, because it was great meeting up once again with Thomas but Bob was most definitely in my sights, no doubt about that. He was actually playing an unbroken three night stint at the Tempodrom, a concert hall in the middle of town built in the fashion and shape of a circus tent and we had tickets for the first night and for the third. Now it has to be said that the night of my first Tempodrom show was also my first day in town, having landed at Berlin Tegel in the early afternoon and gone straight with Thomas to his flat in South Berlin in order to dump my stuff and have a late afternoon meal with him and his wife Beate who would also be coming to see Bob with us. There was no question that I was very excited over the prospect of seeing Bob not once but twice in Berlin, which meant we all arrived at the venue pretty early as we had standing tickets and I wanted to make sure we had a good position down on the floor.
Thought it would be nice to mark the beginning of May, the month of Bob Dylan’s 80th Birthday, with another in my series of accounts of going to see Bob in concert, something I have been lucky enough to do on 37 separate occasions. Needless to say this figure pales in comparison to many, many other Bob fans out there, but all the same it is the number I have so far been allotted and believe me, I have no complaints. After this I’ve got a similar piece on NET shows 2013 – 2019 but I think I’ll save that one for the big day itself – 24th May 2021. Following on from my brief overview of Bob shows which I went to in the 1990s, this post covers me going to see Bob Dylan play live at on three occasions at the Brixton Academy in 2005, once at Wenbley Arena in 2007, once at the London Roundhouse in 2009 and finally a brace of shows at the Cardiff International Arena in 2009 and 2011.
In writing about these 2005 – 2009 Bob Dylan shows mention first has to be made of the three Brixton Academy shows which I saw Bob play in November 2005. For some reason I did not write these up at the time and so they didn’t make it into my 2000 – 2006 period of live show full write ups, although of course they should have. A number of these full write ups I have already posted onto this blog over the last couple of years. My lack of notes for the Brixton Academy shows is an anomaly which now, fifteen years later, I can’t really explain, other than to say it was probably the case that work at Wise Words, the small book distribution company which I managed, must have been pretty stressful at the time. That would no doubt have made the prospect of writing up reports on those three shows beyond my capabilities, which is strange because I know that I really enjoyed them. Needless to say it is way too far down the line for me to remember them in any great detail, beyond what I will write here and even what I write here involves a little bit of cheating in that I have had to go online to check what the set lists were, as even these were not listed down by me at the time.
Yes, that’s right, there were no less than 10 Bob shows in the 90s that I went to – 4 at the Hammersmith Apollo, London in 1993, 1 at The Fleadh, Finsbury Park, London in 1993, 2 at the Brixton Academy, London in 1995, 1 in Hyde Park, London in 1996, 1 at Wembley Arena in 1997 and last but not least 1 at the Cardiff International Arena which was also in 1997. What you can read below is a brief description of all of them, prefaced by an account of how Bob came into my life, or if we wanna go Biblical, how I found Bob.
Now I first got into Bob towards the end of 1992 thanks to Good As I’ve Been to You which I bought from a CD shop just off Walthamstow market in North East London. Yes Good As I’ve Been to You was my first ever Bob Dylan album, which in some way is kind of ironic since it is a work of traditional folk and blues covers with not an original Bob Dylan song on it. Just saw it there in the CD racks of the shop and when I picked it up to take a closer look there was something about the photograph of Bob on the front which made me want to buy it there and then, immediately, on the spot. It is certainly the case that I hadn’t been intending to get it when I had walked in there but when I got to play it later that evening, after clocking off from another day of work at Wisdom Books, I was simply knocked out by it and from that point onwards never looked back.
Bob’s voice was ragged and dirty from having been around the world a million times over and done pretty much everything you could hope to do as a 20th century recording artist. When it came to popular music back then, there were a handful of names which immediately came to mind for the vast majority of people and The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan would almost certainly have been among them. It was probably the case that in any given city throughout the Western world you would have been able to bet your bottom dollar the vast majority of buskers out on the streets and in the parks would have known at least one Bob Dylan song. Yet here he was on the cover of Good As I’ve Been to You looking pretty fed up, world weary and almost it seemed at the end of the line. Guess in some strange way it would be true to say my heart went out to him, it really did and pretty much from that moment onwards I was on his side, wanting to see him pick himself up again and get back to where he belonged.
It is also true to say that Bob came along at a time in my life when I might well have needed him as by late 1992 I was just over three years into what would turn out to be a 27 year stint working at Wise Words. It was a case of having stumbled into working there in the autumn of 1989 after returning in the June of that year from what had been an eight month trip to Nepal, India and Sri Lanka. My journey to the East had seen me do a number of Buddhist meditation courses as part of some kind of spiritual quest I was on, at least when that quest wasn’t interrupted by prolonged periods of dope smoking, playing those opium bongos and all the rest of it. Wise Words specialised in the distribution of books on Buddhism and it was through connections I’d made whilst I was out there that I was able to find casual work back in London, stuffing flyers into catalogues for sending out to people on the Wise Words mailing list. It was not long before I moved onto packing books for them in their small warehouse in Walthamstow, then after a year or so I had worked my way up to processing invoices, before a couple of years later becoming their office manager at the same location.
As you can see, I ended up staying at Wise Words a very long time and for a great number of those 27 years I was managing what in reality was a tiny book company which never employed more than 5 or 6 people. After 10 years trading in Walthamstow, Wise Words moved to larger premises in Ilford, East London, in late 1999, something which on reflection was probably the high point as far as the company was concerned. The further we progressed into the 21st century the tougher things became to stay in business, which meant that for a lot of the time trying to keep the whole show on the road was really quite stressful, whilst the salaries we paid ourselves were modest by anyone’s standards. Eventually in the autumn of 2015 we woke up to the inevitable and decided to pull the plug by way of Wise Words going into voluntary liquidation, something which finally happened in June 2016 after we’d spent six months trying to tidy things up as much as possible in relation to our creditors. Throughout those years from late 1992 onwards it was a great source of joy for me to have Bob in my life, his music for me to listen to and his shows to go along to. It is probably true to say it was a blessing and something which I felt lucky to have, still do as a matter of fact. Yet after all this time I consider myself to be just a fan, one of many, not an expert, not someone who would be able to discuss in any great depth the ins and outs of Bob’s words and music. The only thing I can say is that I love it all, even the bad stuff, of which there is actually quite a lot!
So anyway, as I have already mentioned, it was only at the back end of 1992 that I first got into Bob by way of Good As I’ve Been to You and yet by the middle of February 1993 I would be able to proudly tell anyone who would listen that I had already seen Bob Dylan play live! This was because he did a string of five shows at the Hammersmith Apollo in February 1993 out of which I went along to no less than four of them. The first two, Monday 8th and Tuesday 9th, I bought tickets for in advance whilst the latter two, Thursday 11th and Friday 12th, I went down and bought tickets off the touts lurking outside the venue. Guess that might give you some idea of what kind of impression seeing Bob Dylan play live had on me. In fact it would be no exaggeration to say that the first moment I saw him step on stage I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was a performer on a whole different level of magnitude when compared to anyone else I had previously seen. Those first two shows were so damn good that I just couldn’t resist going back down again and again, to buy tickets at inflated prices sold to me in the shadows, just so long as I would be able to see him.
This show is from 2002 when I went down the road in my home town to see Bob Dylan play another show at the now long defunct London Docklands Arena on May 12th 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.
At a certain point in proceedings that familiar smell of Nagchampa incense began to fill our nostrils as it rolled over the front rows of the crowd, having now been lit in the buckets at the back of the stage by the huge guy with the beard and the pony tail. There was a palpable rising of the energy levels of the crowd as the majority of people began to sense the time was soon about to descend upon us again when show time began. I stood there staring straight ahead at the huge black curtain behind the stage with the Bob Dylan Eye of Integrity stamped into the middle of it. I hadn’t seen it properly the night before due to fact that our seats had been to the side. The Eye of Integrity was Bob’s unofficial logo, or at least had been for the last few years and there were various pieces of merchandise you could buy with it on such tempting items as t-shirts, hoodies, baseball caps, key rings, coffee mugs and stuff like that.
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 was now about 7.45, by my calculations show time would be 8pm without too much of a wait beyond that. The incense was already lit, Nagchampa incense I thought, if this was so it meant the incense came from India, the Sai Baba organisation no less, but it was at best an educated guess, probably a wrong one as Bob had never to my knowledge shown much of an interest in the whole Indian mystical guru scene. It was rolling over the first few rows of people on the floor in fragrant clouds with that oh so familiar sweet, heady smell. All part of the ritual for darshan, an audience with the master no less, all of which could apply as far as I was concerned when it came to me and Bob. This was always one of my favourite times. Waiting for the magic to begin, taking in through my nostrils that incense perfume, watching the rows of the arena fill up with people, looking down at the front where the diehard Dylan fans stood around in clusters excitedly talking with one another, heads held high in expectation, no doubt speculating on which selection of songs they were going to hear that night.
This show is from July 2001 when I went on the road up to Scotland from London to attend a show by Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan given in the grounds of Stirling Castle and who by that point was over 12 years into his Never Ending Tour.This is the Part Two of the story.
By 7 or so the sound check was over, with Bob and the boys now probably back stage having a snack or maybe even a light meal before the show, fresh Scottish salmon possibly. Things were running late, it said on the tickets the gates to the castle would open at 6.30 but we were already way past that and they still remained firmly shut. No one seemed to mind however, the setting was great, the vibe nice and peaceful, so no one was getting unduly excited or agitated that still not much was happening. We began to move forwards at around 7.15 with people on high alert for any possible queue jumpers who might just try to barge in as we slowly made our way towards the castle gates. There was none of that thankfully, which meant that in a stop start kind of way we slowly got closer and closer to the inside of the castle, a slow but sure advance to get within those walls. Finally we got to the castle gates and it was with more than a degree of excitement that we handed over our tickets to let the stewards tear off the stubs. We were in, now it was simply a question of taking a brisk walk up the steep incline into the castle grounds before a mad dash in order to find the best place possible to see the show.
This show is from July 2001 when I went on the road up to Scotland from London to attend a show by Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan given in the grounds of Stirling Castle and who by that point was over 12 years into his Never Ending Tour.This is the Part One of the story.
Really hadn’t thought I would want to write about Bob’s Stirling Castle show in July 2001. After writing up the five September 2000 shows I hadn’t done anything since then with regard to words on Bob for months and I didn’t think in the build up to Stirling the fires would be re-ignited. However after seeing the show I realised I was wrong, way wrong, that the energy was there to make me want to sit down and put down on paper my impressions of the whole damn trip.
The September 2000 shows had been special for me after all. Five Bob Dylan shows in five different cities over a period of about a week or 10 days and getting into more than one or two scrapes along the way. That brilliant feeling of arriving in a new city with the knowledge I was there to see Bob Dylan live that evening was simply unbeatable, unbelievable and unrepeatable!!! A privilege that can only have happen if you are lucky enough to have the liberty plus a little bit of cash. This time it was different. There was only one show I was going to for a start and it also happened to be a hell of a long way from London, up in the grounds of Stirling Castle and within spitting distance of the Highlands of Scotland.
TracelessTrails 