Bob Dylan seems to enjoy keeping
his fans guessing, particularly when it comes to his song choices. In
concert, America's greatest songwriter is notorious for so altering the
arrangement of his material that even devotees are reduced to playing
name that tune. That raspy, at times barely intelligible delivery can
leave fans wondering if they just heard "Blowin' in the Wind" or the
theme song from "The Muppet Show."
On Tuesday night
at Prince George's Stadium, where he shared the bill with Willie
Nelson, the 64-year-old Dylan was in fine confounding form. Wearing a
rakish black cowboy hat and a black suit with red piping that made him
look like a 19th-century Mexican cavalry officer, he began the show
with a version of "Drifter's Escape" that veered far from the original.
And in the nearly two-hour set that followed, he and his five-piece
band reworked everything from "Highway 61 Revisited" to "This Wheel's
on Fire" to "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again."
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| Bob Dylan shared the bill with Willie Nelson at Prince
George's Stadium. |
Aside
from a quick "Thank you, friends," Dylan didn't address the crowd. But
judging from the set list, war is on his mind. He may not like being
labeled a protest singer, but it was hard not to hear anger in songs
like "Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)," "John Brown," the brutally
sad
tale of a returning soldier, or the seething "Masters of War." When, on
the latter, he sang, "You fasten the triggers / For the others to fire
/ Then you set back and watch / When the death count gets higher," his
voice sounded as cutting as it did when the song was first released 42
years ago.
As has become his wont in recent years, Dylan
played only keyboards and harmonica, abandoning his guitar for reasons
that have never been made clear. The keyboard-only approach isn't
always satisfying, but it did provide the night's humorous highlight: a
little between-songs tinkling that may have been Dylan's first public
rendition of "Mary Had a Little Lamb."
Earlier in
the evening, Willie Nelson warmed up the crowd of several thousand with
a 90-minute sampling from his sturdy catalogue of country hits. At 72,
the waaaay laid-back Nelson doesn't sing his songs as much as he
smooth-talks his way through them. His charming Texas drawl was the
perfect accompaniment for such breezy classics as "Crazy" and "Georgia
on My Mind." With backing from a seven-piece band that included two of
his sons, he upped the rowdiness quotient for other songs, such as
"Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys" and "Beer for My
Horses."
Fans expecting Dylan and Nelson to perform
at least a couple of songs together left disappointed. But the
different natures of their sets -- Dylan's driven, focused and
unrelenting, Nelson's carefree and relaxed -- perhaps indicates that a
duet might not have worked that well, anyway.