Bob Dylan
February 2^nd, 1991
SECC, Glasgow

Spats. That’s what I think I remember. Bob Dylan, as he careens around stage wrestling with his guitar, is wearing a weird little pork pie hat, a thick, heavy-looking plaid lumberjack jacket, and, when I push forward far enough to glimpse his feet, what looks very much like a spivvy, shining, shocking pair of black and white spats. Maybe it’s just two-tone brogues. Either way, he looks like he got dressed during a blackout in a small town charity shop. In a hurricane. Physically, he’s puffy, fuzzy, grey. All out of focus. He sounds the way he looks.

He charges at a suicidal set like some rock’n’roll Custer, leaving his bewildered band scattered and bleeding on the plain behind him. It begins with what I belatedly recognise as “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine),” and from the first notes, it’s like these guys barely know each other, let alone what song they’re playing. Everything’s too fast – not the sulphate surging of the ’60s, but a slurry headlong stumble, songs tripping and falling into each other, some landing on their face.

It gets more chaotic yet with an abandoned “Lay Lady Lay.” Dylan’s rhythm guitar is all clatter and flail. His voice a lost noise. He appears to forget words, substituting runs of smeared and winy mumbles in their place. The melodies he conjures up seem willfully perverse. He doesn’t so much sing his songs as occasionally collide into them and then go speeding away. It’s not a concert. It’s a hit and run.

The damned thing is, though, he seems to be having himself a whale of a time. “Than-yew!” he chirps after “The Man In Me,” going bizarrely on to inform us, “that was from an old album of mine called Blonde on Blonde. Huh? “This is from my recent album called, uh… summat-or-other,” he continues, and here comes a version of “Wiggle Wiggle” which seems to consist solely of the words “wiggle” and “like a big fat snake,” and shakes itself like concrete.

But then, but then. During the acoustic set, something begins to happen. It doesn’t start promisingly, but as it goes on it’s as if Dylan begins drawing strength from his songs. He’s still hitting bum notes on guitar, but the elastic snap comes back into his voice. On a forceful and fragile “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” and a thrumming “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” he begins phrasing with intent, forming words, rather than just bending them out of shape.

Something of that spark remains when the full band returns. The rest of the show is fitful – the bedlam groove broken up by moments of real fire: a sharp, Stonesy “Seeing the Real You At Last,” good enough to make you revisit Empire Burlesque. The weirdest moment comes when, from who knows where, he digs out a seemingly endless “In the Garden.” An off the wall version – just when you think it has finally spiraled away to the very last of nothing, he forces the band back into playing an extended coda that begins to feel like it’s being stretched on a rack. “Than’ yew everybody! That’s a long song with an awfully long ending – but it’s over now!”

The set finally collapses with possibly the shortest “Like A Rolling Stone” he’s ever played, that majestic unspooling hymn cut down to a couple of ragged verses, swiftly discarded. He returns to encore with a perfunctory “The Times They Are A Changin.’”

But then, but then. From out of nowhere, he produces a furious slash-and-burn through “Masters of War.” It’s a metallic, burning thing, hot metal, pure chaos, but this time it works. His wild, ululating vocal lines take on an almost Arabic character. Hearing Bob Dylan rage through this while Gulf War One rages far away outside means something. Against all the odds, he pulls off the oldest trick in the book: he leaves us wanting more.