Bob Dylan and Mark Knopfler at the Fox Theater, November 13, 2012

Bob Dylan and his band.

Last night I saw Bob Dylan and Mark Knopfler play at Detroit's Fox Theater.  The concert had originally been planned for the Palace of Auburn Hills, but was moved to the Fox -- a much smaller venue that's also a far superior concert hall.

For Dylan to go on stage with a 2nd act of equal or near-equal fan popularity is nothing new; on previous tours we've seen Merle Haggard open for him, and one time out Bob himself played the opening act for Santana.  I blogged two of his previous local concerts; in 2006 at the Palace, and in 2007 at Freedom Hill. But I hadn't seen Dylan since a 2009 show at the Fox that was most memorable to me not for what happened on stage, but rather to the would-be groupie sitting next to us; she turned on, lit up, and got kicked out, all within about 3 minutes, and that kind of lent an ironic twist to Highway 61 Revisited that evening.

Mark Knopfler

Mark Knopfler and his band

Knopfler opened, with his band, right at the announced starting time of 7:30.  I've always liked Knopfler, going back to his days in Dire Straits, and have enjoyed his solo and collaborative work post-Dire Straits, such as the All The RoadRunning album that he recorded with Emmylou Harris in 2006.  But the only time I ever saw him perform live was on TV during Live Aid; I'd never seen him in person.  Most of his set was drawn from his latest album, Privateering, and was totally unfamiliar to me, and, I suspect, to most of the rest of the audience..  The combination of celtic and blues influences in the music gave plenty of space for Knopfler and the rest of his 8 piece band to shine.  For the encore, he played one song the audience was sure to know, So Far Away.

Bob Dylan at the keyboard.

After the stage changeover, Dylan came out without any fanfare, as what appeared to be instrument tuning morphed in to I'll Be Your Baby Tonight.  The band appeared to be the same line-up as at other recent Dylan shows I've seen.  All in black, and lined up along the rear of the stage.  The drums were offset from center, and the lighting was as dark as I've ever seen for a stage show; it seemed to me to be setup specifically to discourage the use of cell-phones for pictures.  To that end, there were multiple mirrors placed at the front of the stage at a slight recessive angle, whose only apparent purpose was to bounce light in to the audience while keeping the performers shrouded in darkness.  Even for Thunder On The Mountain, a song played on past go-rounds in bright white light, the stage remained dark, and when the band took its bows at the end, the lights were actually turned down.

Dylan played keyboards, piano, and occasionally harmonica last night.  His piano playing seemed more assured than at some past shows, or maybe just louder.  As for his singing, it hasn't really changed much the past half dozen years or so, but for me at least it was more intelligible last night than at some other shows.  The sound was crystal clear where I was, though others in the hall had complaints.  The setlist, unlike other shows I've seen over the past decade was drawn almost entirely from more well-known selections in his catalogue.  I've gotten to the point where I can recognize what several songs are going to be by the introductory doodling; in that respect, he's reminding me a bit of the Grateful Dead... with better material.  Also, his singing has become a bit more dramatic, where it once seemed almost presented as an audience test -- here, go recognize this!!! -- it now seems more focused on accenting musical passages.  This led to espeically nice versions of A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall and a waltzy closer of Blowin' In The Wind (both of which turned 50 years old this year).  Mark Knopfler came on after the first song, and added some guitar colorings to the next 4 songs, particularly to Tangled Up In Blue.

Dylan recently released the album Tempest, and last night marked his premiere performance of the particularly venomous Pay In Blood, in the middle of the set.  So far as I could determine, it was only the 3rd song performance of any song off the new album.  The hard core fans were no doubt rapturous, while the rest of the audience no doubt figured it to be just another song they couldn't quite identify; to Dylan's credit (I think), he made it sound more or less like every other song in the set.  Still, the song's refrain, "I pay in blood, but not my own," was hard to miss.