Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.A life-long aficionado of carnies and freakshows, Bob Dylan might approve of the ghoulish allure that his concerts have acquired as he heads deeper into his 80s. Roll up, roll up, last chance to see the amazing songwriting marvel from Minnesota. But in actuality the 83-year-old shows no inclination to stop touring. Perhaps he can match the longevity of 91-year-old Willie Nelson, with whom he was on the road this summer. To borrow a phrase, there must be some way out of here: but not yet.His three shows at the Royal Albert Hall mark the final dates of his Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour. It began in 2021 in Milwaukee and will last 230 gigs, with only one cancellation to date. So there was an end in sight at the London venue. But it denoted the closing of a chapter, or rather an album — namely 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, a late-career landmark in which Dylan appears to take justifiable pride.The first of the Albert Hall shows began late due to a mystifyingly slow queue to enter the venue (the same happened at the tour’s first night in Milwaukee). Dylan was joined by Tony Garnier on electric and upright bass, guitarists Bob Britt and Doug Lancio, and drummer Jim Keltner, one of rock’s great session men, only a year Dylan’s junior (they first played together in 1971). The singer sported a glittery black jacket and country-and-western shirt, hair piled in a scribble on his head. He strummed an electric guitar very occasionally, sitting with his back to the auditorium, but mainly bashed at a baby grand piano and blew some vigorous harmonica solos, each one punctuated by cheers.Impressive sound quality made the amplification seem rough and rowdy in the best way, like a crack bar-room band. Dylan’s piano-playing was crude, but it made up in character what it lacked in technique. Opening track “All Along the Watchtower” was turned into a twangy Western canter, halting in a shimmer of cymbals. It was followed by another classic, “It Ain’t Me, Babe”, which swayed back and forth like a drunk in a midnight choir. “It ain’t me you’re looking for, babe” Dylan wheezed tenderly, holding the note in “for” as though it were a lamppost.Having been sitting at the piano, he stood to sing Rough and Rowdy Ways’ “I Contain Multitudes”, hands jabbing down at the keyboard. “I go right where all things lost are made good again,” he sang, a dimestore American Orpheus in a “red Cadillac and black moustache”. Then came the same album’s “False Prophet”, set to a gnarled blues groove that had eternity in its sights. To cheers, Dylan emerged from behind his piano to sing it, one hand holding the microphone, the other using the piano lid for support.“Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” framed his doggedly enduring voice with gently lapping guitars, an improvement on the inappropriately jaunty revision it had been given earlier in the tour. During the magnificently sinister “Black Rider”, there was a weird flashback to the disruptive clamour of his famous 1966 gigs at the Albert Hall, when he went electric amid jeers. A woman in the audience began shouting “I hate you!” at persons unknown. She was bundled out while Dylan, unperturbed or unnoticing, played on.Sepia lighting from stage lamps cast him and his band in an unbroken glow, like products of the age of electricity. There was no stage chat, but he seemed to be enjoying himself, mugging at the piano when 1970s pianoman Leon Russell’s name was cited in a song. The finale was “Every Grain of Sand”, from his Christian-music era in the 1980s. His harmonica solo had an elegiac quality. “Then onward in my journey I come to understand,” he sang, his voice rallying, “That every hair is numbered like every grain of sand.”What appeared to be an admission of mortality was really a sly insistence on the opposite. Woe betide the fool who tries to count the number of hairs heaped untidily on the singer’s head. The tour is ending, but the peerless Dylan roadshow will surely go on.★★★★★bobdylan.com
