Bob Dylan Live: Cardiff International Arena 18th June 2004

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.

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Bob Dylan Live: Gettin’ My Tickets & Bein’ Burglarized

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.

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Bob Dylan Live: London Hammersmith Apollo

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.

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Bob Dylan Live: Five Never Ending Tour Shows 2013 – 2019

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.

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Bob Dylan Live: Seven Never Ending Tour Shows 2005 – 2011

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.

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Bob Dylan Live: London Docklands Arena Reloaded

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.

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Bob Dylan Live: London Docklands Arena

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.

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Bob Dylan Live: Stirling Castle Part Two

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.

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Bob Dylan Live: Stirling Castle Part One

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.

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Bob Dylan Live: Wembley Arena

This show is from October 2000 when I went on the road in the UK to attend 5 shows by Colombia recording artist Bob Dylan who by that point was over 10 years into his Never Ending Tour.

Well I got see Bob at Wembley but it was a close run thing, oh man oh man with one thing and another it really was a close run thing. I was due to meet Madeleine and Ngawang, a Swedish-Tibetan couple with whom I was going to see Bob, outside Wembley Park tube station at 7pm, in order to give them their tickets for the show. But massive problems on the tube meant that I didn’t get to Wembley Park until 7.15 because everything was running late. There was no sign of Madeleine and Ngawang but I wasn’t too worried about that as it was pretty clear everyone going to the show by tube was in the same boat as far as being delayed was concerned and that it would only be a matter of time before they appeared.

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