“Well, I try my best
To be just like I am
But everybody wants you
To be just like them” (Maggie’s Farm, 1965)

“I do what I think is right – what I think is best” (Key West, 2020)

I’m traveling light, and I’m slow coming home. (Mother of Muses, 2020)

Bob Dylan always was his own man, like every artist should be. Any suggestion about him being owned by anyone else, a cause, a genre or a movement, was misplaced. It wasn’t him, babe, never was, maybe not even during the “Gospel Years”. Still, there is gifts he can give, gifts that we can cherish and save. Like when he sings “To Be Alone With You” and “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You”, a grateful audience most certainly takes it personal these nights in Paris, like the artist is singing it to them. The artist knows that, and he doesn’t really do anything to clarify a misunderstanding. Can it be that his mortal bliss is to stand there on the stage, alone with his audience? I don’t know, but there is some poetic beauty in that thought, I think, and it feels relevant when trying to understand the unique generosity shown by this introvert wayfaring stranger who seem to find the stage as a part of his home, as is his extreme urge to perform before an audience, to still tell the whole story. It’s life, and life only, of course. It’s generous, but without any compromise. He does what he thinks is best. So be it.

Even though the Memento Mori-theme always was there in his art, aging has this special effect for most of us, when the end is coming closer and the slow train is picking up speed, or like Dylan sings each night in “Crossing The Rubicon” – to us – “in ten, maybe twenty years, I’ll be gone”. If you didn’t think that way before, you one day might feel the hour glass is running with every grain of sand, that a false clock is trying to tick out your time. Its about mortality in general, the one thing we got in common. It makes every day a treasure to keep on to, and we can cling to the hope of being kept in some hearts for awhile. You don’t have to be a poet to think that way. Nor a religious person. One day we all shall be released. May the gods go easy with us. Poetry fights the issues of transcendence and mystic, the same place where mortality lives, beyond the words, just not the fact that we all will die. Then again, is death really the end? And so on. We beg to differ, and Iris DeMent suggests “Let The Mystery Be”. Poetry is trying to catch the answers blowing in the wind. Like Bob Dylan does. He was born here and he’ll die here against his will. It may look like he’s movin’, but he’s standing still. As true as is that he is collecting his thoughts in a pattern, moving from space to space. His eyes are still blue, and he is still searching for the great beyond of great poetry, beyond the horizon line, beyond what is possible to know and to say, and he still asks himself what Julius Cæsar would do.

Tonight’s show was, believe it or not, another step up from yesterday’s fabulous performance. Why? Because both “It Ain’t Me Babe” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” was top notch tonight. All in all the show was a bit sharper tonight, also when it comes to the piano. The sudden changes between harp, handheld microphone and the left or right hand playing piano leads to that some of the last words of some lines are fading into space, but for me not in a destroying way, just an observation of the energy of that restless, hungry feeling that still characterizes the artist, he got six carburetors and he is using them all, even if there is only so much breath for a night. The messages comes true and there are many highlights, both in songs and phrasings, and, not least, in some wonderful harp solos, like the deep down and dirty Little Walteresque blues harp at the end of “Watching The River Flow”, also tonight the solos for “Masterpiece” and “Desolation Row”, but also the harp work in “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself To You”. Another tango-version of “My Own Version of You” was fabulous, maybe my favorite performance of tonight, Dylan soon rapping, soon whispering the modernized story of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the bound-to-lose project of stopping age and death, though the performance are delivered with both youthful energy and great elegance, with both laughter and tears. The new arrangement is a stroke of lightning genius. I really hope he keeps that one, hoping I’m not jinxing it. The Song & Dance Man shines even brighter tonight, a little more jump in the steps away from the piano, a few more snake-bite movements with his head. He likes this a lot, and he is throwing many happy laughs back to Tony and Jim between songs. His singing and performing and acting when leaning over the piano is just great art, his eyes and lifting of eyebrows, grimaces, his hands and fingers, are all used as handy tools to underline what he really wants to tell us, with that look of “Don’t you understand what I say?” or “Don’t you agree?”

Doug Lancio and Bob Britt, both with their new caps on, makes them look like a pair of “Peaky Blinders”-brothers, but works non-violent and great together, I really love the acoustic when Doug runs free on some of the songs, like on “Black Rider” and “My New Version Of You”. Tony and Jim really get rhythm tonight.

The show again ends with another silent and quiet movement in the dark of people towards the stage, a lot more than last night, all in place when Dylan starts to sing a mesmerizing version of “Every Grain of Sand” – actually it then seems like all of the audience are standing. Dylan starts with handheld microphone mid-stage, then ending the song by the piano with a beautiful and very touching harp solo. It is as Mickey Raphael (Willie Nelson’s harmonica player) tells us about Dylan’s harp playing: “It’s all emotional”. Sure it is. On many of the songs tonight that’s also the case when he sings. As we know he can’t sing a song he don’t understand.

In one interview many years ago, Dylan’s advice was to “Never give a 100 percent!” I understood it then, and I understand it now, but tonight I am still thinking: Isn’t that exactly what he is doing right before our eyes, in his 84th year, this enemy of an unlived, meaningless life, just giving us all he have to give, night after night? More than we could ask for, for sure. It was a great night in Paris. A night to remember.

Johnny Borgan

P.s. Thanks to the happy girl beside me, making the show greater also for me because of her joy and enthusiasm, getting all her favorite songs this night. D.s