I have been to four of Bob Dylan\u2019s concerts in various places around the world, and bar one where Ronnie Wood lightened the misery in Kilkenny, they were uniformly awful. He persists in reinterpreting and mangling his great songs, and hardly engages with the audience.<\/p>\n
It begs the question: why does he persist with the Never Ending Tour<\/a><\/span>? Perversity possibly? Boredom? What else can I do? I might as well stick to my guns and my art? Nothing else to do?<\/p>\n The opening paragraphs of this article are of course an irrelevance. He is not a performer in the mould of Springsteen, nor has he really ever been, apart from the tours in the 1960s, with what became The Band and a brief shine of light in the 1970s with The Rolling Thunder Review, where he had ample support. So what. It is irrelevant to his legacy. He is the greatest creative artist of the twentieth century and we are lucky to still have him with us.<\/p>\n He is also one of the great cultural commentators of our time, and has been for an unprecedented fifty years, except for a period in the 1980s when he seemed to be going to seed. But the wake up call of a near-death experience (form histoplasmosis) has led, since Time Out of Mind<\/em> in 1997, to an unprecedented bout of creativity.<\/p>\n Yet since Tempest<\/em> (2012), apart from a typically immersive and at times brilliant mining of the Great American songbook (all five albums worth) \u2013 a bit like the late Picasso turning to the great works of the high Renaissance and tearing them to figurative pieces \u2013\u00a0 there has been no sign of new material. It would seem strangely fitting if the man who, as Steve Earle<\/a><\/span> puts it, invented the job of singer-songwriter were to see out the autumn of his years crooning along to the same Brill Building standards that he had once made seem so trite.<\/p>\n Now with a unique sense of zeitgeist<\/em> opportunism, Dylan has released a new seventeen minute-long song, ostensibly about the murder of John F. Kennedy, but which is also a travelogue through American cultural history, with Prince Hamlet and the great, deranged 1960s American DJ, Wolfman Jack, as our guide.<\/p>\n