Too Cool: Bob Dylan at The 9:30 Club
By Joe Heim
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, April 4, 2004; Page D01
Bob Dylan was as inscrutable as ever during a rare club appearance at the 9:30 Friday night. Barely acknowledging the sold-out crowd, he crouched behind his keyboards at the left side of the stage and faced his band instead of the audience. For the length of the two-hour show it was as if the exuberant fans who greeted each song with roars simply didn't exist.
And so somehow the intimate club show, which had been rumored for weeks but announced only on Wednesday, felt oddly impersonal. Dylan and his four-piece band might just as easily have been in the studio rehearsing as playing to the capacity crowd of 1,000.
The first of three sold-out Washington shows -- he performed at American University's Bender Arena last night and is at the Warner Theatre tonight -- the concert was a reminder of just how little is really known about Dylan and how little he chooses to reveal.
Wearing all black except for a white cowboy hat, the 62-year-old rock legend had the cool, detached bearing of an existential outlaw. It was a look well suited to the opening song, "Drifter's Escape," and later gems including the plaintive "Hazel," "If Dogs Run Free" and his on-death's-doorstep ballad "Not Dark Yet." And there was "Love Sick," which is used, surreally enough, in a new Victoria's Secret commercial in which Dylan appears.
Though his voice was froggier than ever, he and his band mates -- guitarists Larry Campbell and Freddy Koella, bassist Tony Garnier and drummer Richie Hayward -- compensated with sound and speed, galloping through "Highway 61 Revisited," "Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)" and a feisty, rockabilly rendition of "Summer Days."
Because Dylan says so little other than to introduce his band, his songs must speak for him. And so everything he performs is up for interpretation, including the three songs he chose for an encore: "Cat's in the Well," "Like a Rolling Stone" and "All Along the Watchtower." These are the same three that he has included in every encore of this tour.
With their lyrics of reproach and foreboding, the songs seem to speak directly to the times, particularly "Cat's in the Well," an obscure track from his 1990 album "Under the Red Sky." Dylan's intensity broke through his distant mask as he sang, "The cat's in the well and grief is showing its face / The world's being slaughtered and it's such a bloody disgrace."
Perhaps Dylan is more connected than he's letting on after all.
Maybe he's just got bigger things on his mind. A full four decades into his career and it's still impossible to know quite what to make of him.
