WILDEST show imaginable. I'd stay with night #2 because I was front row,
spectacular view all the time and the concert was a magnificent and
magnifying work of endless resouding emotional proportions, personal stuff
and last night's 'Desolation Row' was a perfomance I'll keep forever but
tonight, how do we start with tonight...

I was seated with my mom at the far left of row 6 so not the best view to
see everything and definitely not the keyboard, but during some points I
could clearly hear what to me was like an organ, me thinking it was some
kind of piano+guitar sound, and I've just read he was playing the F***ING
keyboard.

That keyboard has given us not only a new, extremely lullabic and
beautiful arrangement at the beginning of EGoS but also that fight with
the mic stand in 'Multitudes' that ended with the mic going off the stand
and Bob untangling on his own it WHILE singing to end up standing before
'False Prophet', going to the stand next to the piano, bending down almost
half body and untangling the best that he could while all the band looked
utterly still, guitar tech George Bade going out briefly for a couple of
seconds and then... Then it was a point of no return, maybe it is already
a point of no return.

From then on, Bob has sung all the show grabbing the mic with his left
hand, the same I could see hanging below the piano during 'Watchtower', a
DaVincian hand, grabbing the mic during almost a whole show for the first
time since when?! The show went on with Bob restlessly standing up,
sitting down, leaning HALF body over the piano, left elbow on top of it,
mic in hand, right hand playing some keys or just resting there, as if he
was a drunken cheap crooner in the wee small hours. Except he wasn't. He
only had his voice and that voice did things reserved for great actors, he
performed all the numbers, he rearranged all roles, he seemed the jester
magician and I couldn't believe my eyes, I couldn't believe I had been
fooled again and nothing would be as expected.

I expected another epic 'Desolation Row', and that was a bit wrecked with
a verse lyric flub and a too extreme slow down at the end, with Tony
prompting Keltner to sped uo big time. I expected 'Dignity' to keep
evolving and finally leave me speechless after an already super honest
take last night and that wasn't played. I expected many things, I expected
and expected and it's POINTLESS because while expecting, as the
astronomical clock of Prague reminds us every hour through its skeleton's
sand clock, we lose one hour of our lives. I've thought tonight about that
mindblowing clock quite a bit, I've thought about the drawings made by the
children deported to the Terezín concentration camp, most of which were
murdered there and specially in Auschwitz, that you can see in the Pinkas
Synagogue and that, no joke, constitute one of the best art museums I've
visited everywhere.

I have come into the show with those ideas into my head, expecting to
project them into the songs, to connect them to the songs, and the show
has gone via that wildest route and I've felt out in the wilderness, lost
at words, lost at thoughts, expecting rain maybe, a grim image that I now
associate somehow to the Holocaust, within a song I've felt for some time
that could be about that topic too. But the expected never came, I also
had to rearrange my faces, as Bob has had to rearrange his show, taking it
to the limit to do that precisely, and he has placed, by chance or not,
'Key West' after the so so 'Desolation Row'.

'Key West' has changed and specially has changed ME, after last night when
it revealed me a couple of personal things, tonight it has revealed Bob,
wether he wanted it or nor. Up and down, his hand gesturing wildly in some
moments, he has lowered his guard and, standing at his right next to the
piano, he has acted a song, conveying the plain meanings of his words:
"Hibiscus flowers, they grow everywhere here", while extending his hand
towards us. The "here" was our here, he was singing about Prague, about
tonight, about the present tense and times, but he was not over being a
singer just singing, mic in hand, carving his own times with his own
voice: "That's my story" and, after a pause that took oceans of time to
sail, the most human and honest expression you can imagine and he went
"but not where it ends". And I believed that, and at the same time it
broke my heart because there was something else in his gaze but specially
in his voice: insecurity. It tembled, or maybe I trembled but it felt one
of the most intense instants I've witnessed on stage.

The voice felt personal, it looked personal with Bob moving around and
fixing his eyes on some persons upfront, as if an actor breaking the
fourth wall, confrontating them, asking them, demanding them, and it just
went REALLY better. I've cried out of joy before seeing Bob (Rome's 'Only
a River'), I've acted like a bolted child here and there, I lost my shit
in quite some Outlaw shows, but the shot of what I assume it was dopamine
straight to my brain during an UTTERLY inspired/inspirational 'Baby Blue',
I can't explain that. I've felt it, the happiness, the physical happiness,
unadulterated happiness, IN me, not because of specific words, not because
of anything specific, but just because, that sound spoke in tongues to me,
I've maybe felt happier than ever before in my life, content and nothing
else than content, and during that process Bob has embarked in a harp
solo, me nodding and dancing in my seat, and suddenly I've opened my eyes
and he was giving his back to us while still playing harp, and it has been
a sight, an image that has topped everything, his shiny jacket, his hair,
my eyes two pieces of broken glass, him outside in the distance. No
kidding, I repeat that I've felt what I still guess it has been literal
dopamine in my brain.

From then on, as I've commented totally elated to a good, great friend
afterwards, the highs of tonight's show are possibly the highest I've
peeked. I just can describe them as that, as an experience of pure power,
that man perpetually glued to a piano that kept coming out, wrenching the
mic like a tool, breaking down each and every distance, yes, between right
or wrong. A process, for his life, and nothing more. I could cry just
remembering or envisioning what and how much this means to me, to be shown
once again that hope, in change, hope in not surrendering to indignity,
hope being born, and I thank Bob for all this, for gifting us all with his
will to play. To play.

'Made Up My Mind', 'Rubicon', 'Jimmy Reed', you name the song and we could
all point out incredible glimpses of beauty, of disbelief at Bob singing
his newest songs as if he was in a 50s club, a has been failed promise of
song. R&RW has been vinticated for good and forever, and I can't wait to
see what comes next.

I'll end with, again, those keyboard notes at the beginning of 'Every
Grain of Sand'. Maybe we'll get a new arrangement following those few
notes, maybe not, it's not really that important. Because when Bob was
singing a song that seems alien in this defiled world, he has sung in the
most beautiful of manners "on the violence of a summer's dream". And then
it has clicked on me: there was a drawing in the Pinkas Synagogue made by
a 11yo-12yo child Štěpán Pollak, who was murdered in Terezín, that
depicted a theatrical representation of Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's
Dream' done by imprisoned Jews in the concentration camp. The scene
depicted is when the lovers Pyramus and Thisbe can only communicate each
other though a crack in the wall that separates them. I think you could
know what I mean, the echos of it all. Those drawings are the broken
mirror of innocence.

I came into the show with the prospect of the songs mirroring me and no,
no, no, no, the songs are not there to mirror anything. The songs have
ways, they are rivers, they are indomit, but eventually they arrive
somewhere, and if you, as Bob has done spectacularly tonight, trust them,
you'll make it too.

"Something happened to me yesterday..."
This is not a concert review as usual. It is a pathetic review and not a
musical one! I'm currently still trying to put into words my impressions
of yesterday's concert (Prague 3), knowing full well that it's almost
impossible to even begin to describe what I saw, heard, felt. Already at
the first two concerts you could see that Dylan used his piano playing
less often, sometimes he sat on his chair and you could see that one -
sometimes both - hands were resting on his knees. But the third concert
turns everything we've seen so far on its head! Before "I Contain
Multitudes" he took the microphone out of the holder and kept it in one
hand until the end of the concert (with a few exceptions, where he placed
it on the piano with a clearly audible bang and played with both hands).
The piano playing was completely missing from this song! Dylan sang at
times in a sitting position on his piano stool. For me personally, a very
touching sight. I was also in Prague for the first concert of the spring
tour in March 1995. At that time he also played - with one hand waving
free - at times without an instrument, holding the microphone in one hand,
and sat on the drum podium, visibly weakened by the flu. The evening
became even more extraordinary when, during "Black Rider," he stood
up, leaned forward and, both elbows on the piano, delivered an incredible
vocal masterpiece. His eyes partially closed, he held his microphone in
one hand and emphasized every syllable, every single word, with truly
magical power. Maybe his voice shows its age, but when have we ever gone
to Bob because of his beautiful voice? I am still completely under the
spell of this extraordinary performance. If his vocal cords have
scratches, he wears them with the same dignity as wrinkles. You get a
sense of mortality and eternity at the same time when he sings "I'm
travelin' light and I'm slowly coming home". Blessed whoever was at
this concert yesterday!

Rechi van Lehen