Page 9 - Radiodowntown online October 2021

baggy white suit -Dylan’s new look. He gazed over the assembled thousands:
“You sure look big out there.” he said.
The ‘Band’ erupted into life. Dylan hugged his guitar and snarled into the mic: She Belongs To Me; Lay, Lady, Lay; I Threw It All Away; I Dreamed I Saw Saint Augustine; To Ramona; It Aint Me. Babe; I Pity The Poor Immigrant; (a title still cuttingly resonant today). Songs from his old albums, songs from his more recent: Maggies Farm; Highway 61; Mighty Quinn; Like A Rolling Stone. Some of them in reworked versions, others nostalgically familiar: The Minstrel Boy; Rainy Day Women; Mr Tambourine Man; I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight. And a couple probably unfamiliar
to many in the audience: Who’s Gonna Throw
That Minstrel Boy A Coin? And the lovely Scottish folk song, Wild Mountain Thyme, with its plaintive, haunting plea: ‘Will ye go, lassie, go?’
It was all over within an hour. Dylan smiled at the crowd: ‘Thank you, thank you, great.’ And that was it. He had seen, he had come, and he had definitely conquered. For as long as twenty minutes after his departure from the stage, thousands of hoarse voices were still calling for more. ‘He really is gone.’ Rikki Farr reasoned with them. ‘Really, there is no more.’
Strictly speaking, this wasn’t true. Everyone knew that Bob Dylan had returned.
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Rob Atkins