At Leader Bank Pavilion, Bob Dylan proves he’s still painting his masterpiece
The first real revelation during Bob Dylan’s latest foray into Boston came midway through his Leader Bank Pavilion show on Thursday. Letting his two guitarists tease out a Cuban rhythm on a song Dylan wrote as a kind of exercise in red-dirt Americana more than 50 years ago, the 85-year-old enigma toyed with his lyrics: “Everything gonna be beautiful,” he warbled, “when I paint my masterpiece.”
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That song, “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” first recorded in 1971 by The Band, has become a staple of Dylan’s ever-changing setlists in recent years. It’s an acknowledgment that, for him, it’s not about the achievements of the past, but the constant striving for an illuminating moment that has yet to reveal itself. You could call it trusting the process.
By the end of the evening, those two guitarists who helped Dylan with his brush strokes would prove to be consummate fellow travelers. Chicago-based Joel Paterson, who joined Dylan’s rotating band lineup in June, played a vintage Gibson hollow body to perfection, segueing seamlessly from jazz to blues and Western swing.
The former child prodigy Julian Lage, who has played just a handful of dates with Dylan, is mainly identified with jazz. But he’s an acknowledged acolyte of Jerry Garcia, and his electric solos burbled with his late idol’s signature sound. Near the end of Dylan’s tidy, 80-minute headlining set, Lage took off on an impressionistic blues excursion on “Goodbye Jimmy Reed.”
That song was one of several from Dylan’s 2020 studio album, “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” which lent his ongoing world tour its name. (This year’s North American leg is called the “Long Hot Summer Tour.”) Five of those songs, including the quiet blues “False Prophet” and the martial antiquity of “Crossing the Rubicon,” made up more than a quarter of the setlist.
After brief opening sets from Nashville songwriter Brittney Spencer (who covered the Beatles’ “Blackbird” and Dylan’s “Make You Feel My Love”) and the Texas bluesman Jimmie Vaughan, Dylan’s band opened with another resurrected nugget of his from the early 1970s, “Watching the River Flow.” It was nearly unrecognizable.
Shrouded in a hood, Dylan remained at center stage for the duration of the show, never straying from behind the electric keyboard that he has made his main instrument in recent years. Longtime touring partners Anton Fig on drums and Tony Garnier on electric and standup bass rounded out the lineup.
Against a looming curtain the color of milk chocolate, the stage was lit by just a few bare-bulb lampposts. For the opening acts, close-up camera footage appeared on the twin screens flanking the stage. For Dylan, the screens went dark.
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An attentive crowd perked up during his third song, a version of one of his best-known kiss-offs from the 1960s, “It Ain’t Me Babe,” reworked as a kind of breezy California soft-rock track. For years, Dylan’s shows have been light on the greatest hits catalog; on the Boston waterfront, longtime fanatics and first-time initiates alike seemed willing to go wherever he wanted to take them.
The band had fun on a cover of Bo Diddley’s 1962 R&B stroll “I Can Tell,” playing up the chicken-scratch guitar. “I know you don’t love me no more,” Dylan croaked.
Attempting to make amends would eventually emerge as one of the night’s themes. Later in the set Dylan trotted out “I’ll Make It All Up to You,” another cover of a song from his formative years, this one from the heyday of Sun Records (written by Charlie Rich and first recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis).
But a greater love was on his mind for the finale, his gospel-influenced 1967 classic “I Shall Be Released.” The crowd delighted in the familiar wheezing of his harmonica.
When he first recorded it, the song seemed like a response to the cage Dylan felt he’d been locked in artistically after his rise to fame.
Six decades later — “any day now” — that song, like so many of Dylan’s songs, has taken on another meaning.
BOB DYLAN
With Brittney Spencer and Jimmie Vaughan. At Leader Bank Pavilion, Thursday
James Sullivan can be reached at [email protected].
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