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21 talking) badly about Larry lately. Before the current tour, and especially after
22 the Stockholm show. I heard about this great version of Boots from Helsinki, and
23 had some expectations, which were all thrashed after hearing it in Stockholm.
24 Usually, I welcome a new arrangement, but this? A dull run of parallel thirds
25 and sixths, with some dubious part writing (yeah, well, music analysis is what I
26 do for a living, so what can you expect?), and my guess is it comes from Larry –
27 he's the one playing it, and it fits well in with what I consider to be his
28 style: very professional, very stylized, pretty, pretty, but, hey, there's
29 something missing in there, isn't there? He probably has a bag of tricks and
30 licks that is bigger than most guitar players alive, and he is capable of
31 piecing them together in a way that both works musically in their own right and
32 holds the back-bone of the song. But still – his playing is a musical reflection
33 of his clothes style: impeccable, elegant, in style, but where is the deep
34 involvement with the world, with experience, blood, guts, love, dirt under
35 finger nails? Larry has no dirt under his finger nails.</p>
36 <p>Cue to the other guy, the scruffy little bum standing on the left, the slightly old, slightly bald punk who looks like he slept in his suit. His playing is unpredictable. Not that he doesn't repeat himself – he has his bag of tricks as well, and it wouldn't surprise me if Dylan will get bored by them after a while: the asymmetrical rhythms, the quick pull-off ornaments, the odd sustained notes. But still, they are subversive rather than conservative. Here's a transcript from the brainwave recorder placed on Koella's skull:</p>
37 <p class="quote">Wonder what happens if I put my finger somewhere around here on the fretboard and strike the string now? <br />
38 Hm. Interesting sound. <br />
39 What if I just move the finger up and down a little? Yeah, I'll do that. <br />
40 Wow! That was cool! I'll do it some more. <br />
41 Hey, there's a thick string way up here on my guitar, wonder what kind of
42 sound that produces.<br />
43 Fascinating! It's really dark! Once more! </p>
45 doesn't work and falls flat. But surprisingly often, one is left with a wide
46 grin on one's face, and a bewildered feeling of what-on-earth-just-happened?
47 </p>
48 <p>Cue back to the tall guy with the fancy
49 beard again. Transcript again:</p>
51 “ C Dm C C#o Dm G F G
52 : . . . : . . . : . . . : . . .
53 |-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|
58 |-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|</pre>
60 Why is he moving his finger up and down like that? Odd. Bob seems to like it,
61 though. Well, it sounds just like Bob too – jeez, I thought we would be spared
62 that ploink ploink when he decided to buy this toy piano (how long will we
63 have to tour before he can afford a music stand too? I want my steel guitar
64 back), and then he brings in a guitarist who plays in the same way ...
65 </p>
66 <p class="quote">OK, my turn again, I have to play some notes. Don't I have just the perfect lick for this
67 particular situation? Let's see: key of A, going to Bm, square time, tempo 124
70 brain transcripts, but they are accurate. An important point is that they were
71 made in Stockholm. Karlstad was a completely different thing, for several
72 reasons. Strangely enough (given my assessment above), the show was superior to
73 Stockholm on all or most songs, but Koella could hardly be heard, owing to a bad
74 mix and him taking only a few solos. I can't judge quite how bad the mix was,
75 because I was standing up front, right in front of Larry – and Larry's monitors,
76 which was all I heard during the second half of the show. This of course made
77 the musical experience (as opposed to the concert experience) slightly odd, but
78 I must admit that it was fascinating to hear exactly what Larry did all the
79 time. Tweedly Dum, for example – he's really at work throughout the whole song,
80 and the way he keeps the riff going, while at the same time playing solos –
81 impressive. It was also interesting to hear how many different things he does
82 during Watchtower, not in his solos, but in his rhythm playing.</p>
86 Karlstad show, guitarwise (even though the greatness of the show did not lie in
87 the guitar playing). Oslo was something else again. Significantly enough, the
88 three string-players wore identical suits, and it's hard to tell which of the
90 been mistranslated as a concourse, a competition, while the real meaning is more
91 in the direction of concord, playing togehter, and that's what they did in Oslo.
92 (I sadly had to skip Gothenburg, but according to reports, the interplay
93 between Freddie and Larry was the special thing about that show.) </p>
94 <p>The special occasion in Oslo was that
95 during the darkness before the encore, somehow a third guitar player had
96 materialized on stage – a long, blond, slightly nervous-looking character, who
97 turned out to be Mason Ruffner who plays on some tracks on Oh Mercy. I wouldn't
98 say that his playing made whole lot of a difference, but his presence did.
99 Whether it was, as has been suggested, that Koella's ego made him step forth
100 just a little bit more frequently (and just happened to be stopping right in
101 front of Ruffner, not taking the extra step towards centre stage that he usually
102 does), or that the presence of another music maker on stage sharpened everyone's
103 attention and concentration, or simply that the extra sound source called for a
104 different approach (I personally like the idea that the reason Tony changed from
105 upright to electric bass during Summer Days, was musical – because the way the
106 music developed called for a more forceful bass sound – and not something as
107 trivial as a broken string). Be that as it may, it was the best encore set I've
108 witnessed, for these reasons. </p>
111 tonight's show too. I must admit it is slightly difficult, since I've been
112 having Desolation Row from Karlstad on auto-repeat, so that my face occasionally
113 contracts into what feels like what I used to do when I was four and ran
114 barefoot through grass that was greener (and warmer – this was in the
115 summertime) than anything I've seen ever since; or my stomach feels like a stone
116 that reminds me of a cat that has curled up like a stone, just as weightless and
117 deprieved (liberated) of meaning as a stone. That kind of a stone. </p>
118 <p>Copenhagen, as I was about to say, was
119 for me the best show so far. Thereby, I intend to say that there was not a
120 single low point, all the way through it was wonderful, in the same way as in
121 Beethoven's first string quartet (I'm sorry, I don't have anything better to
122 compare with, and this is a compliment both to Dylan and Mr. Beety), where the
123 tension that is generated from the first motif, keeps one floating/airborne
124 right through the half (or two) hour(s) the quartet (or the show) lasts.
125 </p>
126 <p>I don't know how the rest of you feel,
127 but me myself, I have to confess to often thinking, when the intro to Forever
128 Young or LARS is intoned, that, shit, I could do without this – if I exchange
129 the $5 that these minutes have cost me, I might afford one of those fast-forward
130 buttons.</p>
132 <p>Every minute mattered. Even during LARS
133 (or, as a matter of fact, especially during LARS, which was treated by Koella
134 just like a 40-years-old antique should be treated: hard and lovingly), I had no
135 other thought than that this could go on forever. </p>
136 <p>And yet, lo and behold, never have I
137 welcom'd more / the cut of one encore. (neat shakespearian internal rhyme, eh?)
138 than when I heard the Highlander-intro to AATW, where Forever Young would have
139 ruined everything, but where Watchtower was perfect as a Beethovenian final
140 theme. Sometimes it's right to descend into the quiet compound right before the
141 end – sometimes it's not. Tonight it was not, and Dylan did the right thing. So
142 it goes.</p>
143 <p>I haven't mentioned any highlights yet.
144 I could do that, of course. HWY61. AATW. Love-0 was wonderfully slow. Summer
145 Days was as good as I ever heard it. Even Memphis Blues, which I otherwise can
146 hardly stand, was extremely enjoyable, almost incredibly good.</p>
147 <p>I could go on, but that would just ruin
148 my point (which I've already indicated): that it was a brilliant CONCERT. Fair
149 enough, we didn't get any D-Row, and I can't really point to places where Dylan
150 proved himself to be the demi-god, the descendant of Orpheus and Terpsichore, of
151 Jubal and Erato, of Zeus and some cow in Gallup, New Mexico that he certainly
152 is, and where he, by way of a phrase or a plonk from his divine piano, turned it
153 into an unforgettable evening; that it still turned out that way, was a happy
154 coincidence involving a highly human icon (who had one too many harmonicas to
155 keep track of), two guitar players who just keep on exciting with their
156 differences; a rhythm section who somehow uphold both tact and tone; a
160 *</p>
163 what I've written or not, is that I enjoy Koella tremendously – in Stockholm he
165 there's got to be some spit in a kiss, in order for the beauty of it to work.</p>
167 <p class="first"> Postscript: This is probably not a concert review; I haven't listed all the song
168 and the solos and the lyric variations, or the instruments (heck, there were
169 instruments there that I don't even know the name of; there was a huge pile of
170 things that looked like kettles and pots, with a guy with a funny hat beating on
171 them like they were a beast, CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT?!? – and another huge wooden
172 construction with some kind of metal cords attached to it, which this other
173 strange guy kept PLUCKING in a strange way; – hey, it was a genuine wax
174 cabinet, man) – so it can't be a concert review. Take it for what it is,
175 whatever that is.</p>
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