Bob Dylan and a story I won’t be telling my grandchildren

On 13 November, a Wednesday, I heard and saw Bob Dylan—the greatest living bard—at the Royal Albert Hall in London. I was one of the 5,272 individuals that the Hall can accommodate. It was a dream come true.

But I have jumped the gun here. First, the flashback.

Sometime in my late teens, I made a list of 25 things I wanted to do in my life. Back then, they didn’t call it a bucket list. Maybe they did, and I hadn’t heard of it. And like most such things, I managed to lose that list as quickly as I got around to making it. Or maybe I had it for a few years and then lost it. My memory is playing tricks here.

In a way it was good, because at 18 or 19—or however old I was when I wrote it—I was too young even to partly know the things I wanted to do in my life. But the three things I still remember from the list were wanting to watch Sachin Tendulkar bat, Jagjit Singh sing, and meet Ameen Sayani, the greatest voice I had ever heard. I managed to do these three things.

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The fact that I do not remember the remaining 22 things tells me that they wouldn’t have been terribly important—with my interest in them just being a passing phase—because if they had turned out to be important I would remember them now.

Also, the list was limited by my lack of experience and the fact that the future was yet to unfold. For example, the world hadn’t discovered the calmness of M.S. Dhoni. Forget the world, even Ranchi, the city Dhoni and I come from, hadn’t.

The times they were a-changin’.

I hadn’t discovered the godliness in the qawalis of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the soulfulness in the couplets of Wasim Barelvi, Nida Fazli and Salman Akhtar, which went beyond their love for the beloved, the neat black humour of Akbar Allahabadi, the mass-marketness, for the lack of a better term, of Altaf Raja, the beautiful and packed bookshops of London, the simple pleasure of reading Ian Rankin on a rainy day in Mumbai, the lovely prose of John le Carré, Philip Roth, Jonathan Raban and John Updike (I know, I know, all dead white men) and more recently that of Sally Rooney and Kate Atkinson, the very precise sarcasm of Harishankar Parsai and Sharad Joshi, the dark Scandinavian police procedurals of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Henning Mankell, Hakan Nesser, Jo Nesbø and Camilla Läckberg, the bourgeois worries of Sankar and the middle-class concerns of the Kolkata trilogy of Satyajit Ray, the New-Jersey angst of Bruce Springsteen, and finally, the universal-poetry of Bob Dylan.

Now, imagine the things I would have missed out on if I had continued to have that bucket list and kept chasing things on it. In my limited experience, bucket lists are made to be lost, so that we can move on to newer ones.

Cut to the present. On 12 November, a day before the Dylan concert, I went to the Royal Albert Hall to collect the tickets. In an age dominated by digital convenience—just try using paper money in London to see what I mean—Dylan remains steadfast in his preference for physical tickets.

The idea is to disincentivize resellers. These resellers buy the tickets when they are originally sold, creating artificial scarcity to drive up prices. Whether Dylan’s formula works is another topic for another day.

The concert is scheduled to start at 8pm on 13 November. But my Indian genes ensure that my sister and I reach the Royal Albert Hall at 5.30pm, so that we can queue up and enter the hall before others can. Surprise, surprise. We are the first ones there. There is nobody else.

It’s dark. I am feeling cold on the outside and sweating inside, a feeling I had totally forgotten about with not having experienced cold winters for more than 25 years and thus not having had to wear warm clothes.

As we wait, the crowd gradually starts building. Most of the audience seems to be in their forties and above. Every era has its musical heroes. No one lasts forever. The young ones have clearly moved on. Taylor Swift has probably taken all their money. Or maybe it’s Maroon 5. Or Ed Sheeran. Or Diljit. Or maybe even Arijit, given that their concerts are so bl**dy expensive.

The gates open at around 6.30pm. We are the first ones to get in, and then the wait starts. The Royal Albert Hall looks beautiful in pink light—or maybe it was red. I am not too good at identifying colours when they start getting too specific.

At 8pm, the lights go dim. And the music starts. I think Dylan and his band are singing All Along the Watchtower. I say “I think” because the musical treatment of the song isn’t anything like the way it was originally recorded. And it’s only when I hear the words, said the joker to the thief, the second line of the song, do I recognize it.

Or as Alexis Petridis of The Guardian put it: “The crowd at the Royal Albert Hall are accustomed enough to his approach to reserve the kind of applause that usually greets the opening notes of a greatest hit for the moment in the song where Dylan hits a lyric they recognize: Oh my God, it’s that.”

Now, Dylan is known to do this. He can turn up at concerts and sing a song in an absolutely different tone and tune from the way it was originally recorded. The second song of the concert, It Ain’t Me Babe, originally a slow country number, is turned into a rock song. The greatest living bard has a habit of turning the familiar into the unfamiliar and taking the audience along with him. Don’t believe me? Ask Barack Obama. 

Oh, I might have jumped the gun here a little bit again. So, other than physical tickets, Dylan also insists on banning phones at his concerts. And 13 November was no different. Before getting into the concert, our phones were taken and placed and locked in what is known as a Yondr pouch. I carried the pouch with me, and it was only opened by the security team after the concert ended. 

A BBC newsreport on Dylan points out that “Yondr pouches have been used in US schools since 2014 to try and tackle the problem of phones disturbing lessons”. Standup comics, Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock, have used these pouches at their gigs to protect their material.

Now, what does Yondr ensure? First, one can’t take any pictures of the concert. Second, one can’t record the concert. Third, it helps the original creators protect their new material—be it a new joke or a new song—from getting onto people’s phones before they have been able to adequately monetize it through gigs and concerts or perhaps even a Netflix special.

Creativity is difficult. And letting a lot of it end up for free on people’s phones is no business model.

But these commercial reasons aside, I think I found it important for a totally different reason. We live in an era where experiencing the beauty of the moment often takes a backseat to capturing and showcasing it. Instead of fully immersing themselves in experiences, people are preoccupied with clicking pictures and creating reels from every conceivable angle.

The focus has shifted from being mindful and present to meticulously documenting experiences, only to publish them across various social media platforms—whether it's X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, or even LinkedIn.

This pursuit of documentation often extends beyond the experience itself, driven by the desire for likes, shares, and external validation. Crafting the perfect photo and brainstorming an engaging caption seems to have taken precedence over simply living in the moment.

If you have seen any concert reels lately, almost everyone has their phones out and is recording the concert. They are all looking into their phones and not at the stage where the singer is singing or even the big screen for that matter. The act of projecting an experience—through posts, photos or elaborate narratives—has become more significant than the experience itself.

Phones locked in a Yondr pouch force people to be more mindful. This might sound like some pop Buddhist philosophy, but what I—a smartphone junkie—enjoyed the most about the Dylan concert was being in the moment. No distractions at all. No trying to build memory by clicking pictures and recording songs, but only experiencing the experience. Life is not a bureaucracy where everything needs to be documented for posterity. Indeed, the best memories are made in the mind and not digitally. That’s where nostalgia stems from.

Now, back to the concert. The question that had been bugging me was what would happen if I somehow managed to open the Yondr pouch and click pictures quietly. The answer came during the concert when one woman tried this stunt and was literally carried off by the security people, with her shouting out: “I hate you.” Dylan continued playing. It was some scene.

Over the decades, Dylan has been known not to sing his best songs or the songs that made him really famous—the times they are a-changin’ or the protest song, the answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind—in his concerts. This isn’t a recent phenomenon. He has been doing this since the 1960s when he first achieved stardom and decided to go electric after starting out as a country singer playing an acoustic guitar and a mouth organ.

This explains why Dylan performed at a much smaller Royal Albert Hall even though London has bigger concert venues. (On a different note, he performed three evenings in a row, from 12 to 14 November.)

Why does he do this? First, creative people are not normal in the conventional sense of the term. If they were, they wouldn’t be creative to start with. They would be corporate people, probably trying to sell insurance or soap somewhere, which is why anyone who isn’t really creative doesn’t seem to get it. If I have an astonishing body of past work with which many people are still familiar, why wouldn’t I choose to exhibit it? Make more people happy. Make more money. Why not do that? Because I am Bob Dylan.

Second, there is only so much money that can be made and put to use in one life. Beyond that what’s the point in earning and leaving a lot of money for your children and let them waste it through their lives? I guess, Dylan gets that.

Third, Dylan is 83. Very few musicians who burst on to the scene in the 1960s and the 1970s still perform and sell concerts. Those who do, sing the songs that made them famous because that is what the market wants.

Over the years, many famous musicians, as they grew older and grew accustomed to the wealth and luxurious lifestyle their success afforded them, ceased to produce the exceptional work that had defined their earlier years. In fact, as the old cliché goes, most famous musicians come up with their best stuff in their twenties and then live off it.

David Remnick makes this point in his excellent 2012 profile on the singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen in the New Yorker magazine: “Unlike The Rolling Stones, say, who have not written a great song since the disco era and come together only to pad their fortunes as their own cover band, Springsteen refuses to be a mercenary curator of his past.” 

The Rolling Stones is a rockband that became famous in the 1960s and is still around doing and selling gigs. And what’s true about Springsteen is truer about Dylan, though Springsteen’s concerts are a nice balance between the old hits and the new songs.

The point is, at 83, Dylan can refuse to be the mercenary curator of his past, like he always has been, simply because he has continued to write excellent songs. It’s the 2020s, and he can choose not to keep belting out his 1960s hits. There is a life lesson here for almost all of us who continue to try to find meaning in our current lives in our past. It’s time to move on.

Dylan’s concert on 13 November was a part of the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour, held in support of his 39th studio album, Rough and Rowdy Ways. It started on 2 November 2021 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and ended on 14 November at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Some journalists like to point out that the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour is a part of the Never Ending Tour, which began in June 1988. This Nobel laureate has been on a tour for over three and a half decades.

So, on 13 November, Dylan performed nine out of the ten songs that make up the Rough and Rowdy Ways album. His renditions of I Contain Multitudes, I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You, Mother of Muses, Key West and Goodbye Jimmy Reed were extremely soulful. This was despite his singing voice, which was never really there, cracking up even more with age and ironically getting even better.

In between, he also sang a version of his 1965 song Desolation Row. For me, the highlight of the concert was another 1965 classic, It’s All Over Now Baby Blue. As Petridis of The Guardian described it, the song was performed as a “fragile, fractured piano ballad” on an evening where, as is typical of most of his concerts these days, he never once picked up the guitar that first made him famous.

This was a song he supposedly wrote for Joan Baez. What he did to that song on that day is was what makes Dylan, Dylan. The mouth organ piece that Dylan played on it was totally psychedelic. At this point, I felt my paisa had been totally vasooled.

The concert ended with a lovely rendition of the 1981 song Every Grain of Sand, with Dylan’s words echoing through the Royal Albert Hall:

“Then onward in my journey I come to understand That every hair is numbered like every grain of sand.”

Some said it was Dylan’s way of saying goodbye. Some others said that he was possibly talking about his mortality. Maybe he was. Maybe he wasn’t. Who knows. But how can a man who has been on the road non-stop for more than 35 years ever stop travelling and singing? How can he even die?

Finally, as this year comes to an end, it leaves me with a feeling of some happiness. This is the year I heard Bruce Springsteen live. I also met my favourite writer, Ian Rankin, at his favourite ‘Oxford’ Bar in Edinburgh. He had a gin and tonic, I had a beer (the only instance in many years). The conversation that flowed with the spirits was lovely. Then I saw Bob Dylan. 

The year will end with Bryan Adams. While Adams’ impact on my life is nowhere near the other names I have just taken, hearing Summer of '69 live is an experience everyone should have at least once.

The Dylan story is possibly something I could have told my grandchildren. But to have grandchildren, one first needs to have children. And if I did, these days I would have been a part of the rat race, in the hope of fulfilling their dreams rather than chasing mine. That sounds very selfish. Maybe, kind of. Life is a series of choices we make and then live with.

But what I can tell the world at large, and with due apologies to the poet Firaq Gorakhpuri, is this:

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Written by Vivek Kaul

Edited by Feroze Jamal

Produced by Vertika Kanaujia

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