Dylan is my musical god – but, my God, some of his shows haven’t been music to anyone’s ears. Or have they?

Could this be Dylan’s lost show? The Hammersmith Odeon 2004?

We know that the Never Ending Tour hit Finsbury Park in London that year and His Royal Bobness played an almost completely oldies show. The set-list included  Down Along the Cove, Maggie’s Farm and It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

And that year many said that it was all over for him too, after his magnificent return to critical and public acceptance with Time out of Mind.

The problem was old Bob had decided to re-establish his career using what is probably one of his most bizarre voices ever. It was coruscating, harsh and often sounded like nails scrapping a blackboard.

Personally, I loved the way he was performing vocally. It was yet another in the catalogue of Dylan’s voices.

I could identify the screeching of iron ore factories, the coldness, the hoarseness of the vultures in the barren lands, the voices of the old men on the stoops of a little Minnesota town. He was projecting his art with a voice parched by age and design.

But more than anything else he seemed to be living up to the accusation that he simply couldn’t sing. And in the concerts I saw at that time he appeared to want to prove it.

As he thumped away discordantly at his piano and croaked like a prehistoric bird circling above his audience – often tucked away to the side of his stage wherever it was – he was cold like iron, bound up in a musical experiment of alienation.

I loved it!

But 2004 isn’t as well chronicled as much of his career is. Perhaps it’s because of his vocals at the time…

Here a professional musician, with a pedigree going back decades, gives his impression of Dylan back then.

But he is also convinced that he saw him perform in 2004 at the Hammersmith Odeon. Or the Apollo.

So, did anybody else see Bob perform in either of those that year? And what did you think?

Has that show been indeed erased from the world’s digital memory? Or has Andrew Brel’s just grown dimmer with time?

Andrew was born in 1960 in Johannesburg to Greek parents. He grew up in the Apartheid years of South Africa before moving to England at the age of 24. After 29 years in London working as a musician, producer and author, Andrew moved to California and never looked back…

He writes: I learned music by listening to Bob, growing up in the 70s.

 Of course it was clear from the first album, the eponymously titled Bob Dylan in 1962, Mr. Z  was a remarkable singer even as the majority in my peer youth in South Africa rushed to explain he ‘couldn’t sing properly’.   

That first album with John Hammond was recorded in two sessions. Dylan with two mics, guitar and voice.

17 songs.

At the end Hammond asked if he wanted to redo any. “Can’t see myself singing the same song twice.” This remains a constant in Dylan’s recordings and may explain why the vocal tracks have dated so well. One take beginning to end. No cut and paste.

I never got to see Bob live in his peak years although I knew every album intimately. When I was a gigging musician I often played Dylan songs.

Then in 2004 I was invited to see him At the Hammersmith Odeon. How exciting. A favourite performer at a favourite venue.

The show began with Bob behind a keyboard – on one side of the stage – posing Little Richard style. Center stage was a red Stratocaster on a stand lit by a spot.

The first 20 minutes did not include one song.

Cacophonous loud noise is the musical summary.

I quickly concluded he was challenging the audience. Seeing whether the adoring packed house would notice if he just mumbled senseless word salad wavering in tone between a semitone sharp and flat with each phrase.

Deliberately.

All delivered against any recognizable meter. Jarring to the ear and the sensibilities. The shows tension built as the tuneless noise continued while the waiting hopeful looked at the red Stratocaster waiting for Bob to leave the keyboard pose and take up the guitar and start a song from his catalogue. To kick off the real show. This noise was just for fun. Surely.

Around the forty minute mark people started leaving.

The crowd was divided. Many applauded each sorry end to what I hesitate in calling a song in that it had no song like qualities, leaning instead towards Bob bashing out chords with no relation to each other on a Rhodes type keyboard, while the band played whatever thought came to mind within a limited set of opportunities determined by skill, or its absence.
By the hour mark perhaps half the room had emptied. A steady trail to the door looking confused and disappointed. The performer must have noticed, but did not waver in his commitment. “Are you having fun yet.”

I thought it was quite incredible.

That this truly great artist who could at any time have played any one of a hundred songs that would have given him the populist applause any lesser artist would die for elected instead to show that as a performer and artist, tonight he was going to try something different.  

“You know who I am, right?”

I especially liked his choice of drummer that night.

A player of limited skill at best who at one point simply ran out of beans with all the thrashing taking a two minute time out from his contribution to the cacophony in order to catch his breath.

Not that any of the other players seemed to notice.

There were no players on the stage to elevate the musicality with a solo of any merit. Just four guys bashing away independently. Bobs association with the best players of the era in his various bands was – for tonight at least – giving an opportunity to the unremarkable.

Bobs mumbling was mostly indistinct throughout but I remember making out the occasional phrase like “I’m just making this up. As I go along. It makes no difference.”
It was the only time I saw Bob live.

I left the Odeon that night blown away by how he had managed to reinvent himself in performance in a way I could not have foreseen.

I felt sorry for the sector of crowd who did not understand what they were witnessing. “He really can’t sing” I overheard in the pub afterwards.

The opportunity to be in the same room with the greatest singer songwriter of them all whose legacy needed no repeating that night. This show followed some 30 years of wearing out his voice on the world’s biggest stages.

I get why he wouldn’t want to do “Don’t think twice” with the new talking baritone his range was limited to. That was then. This was now. Just showing up was enough.

A great performer – one of the very best ever – with nothing left to prove.

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