Bob Dylan Makes NYC Return With ‘Rough and Rowdy’ Material at Beacon Theatre (SHOW REVIEW)

During his band introductions, Bob Dylan mentioned how nice it was to be back in the Big Apple and to see New York come back alive. The city that he fell in love with sixty years ago is slowly trying to return to normalcy while Dylan, amazingly, continues to evolve live on stage. 

Pre-Covid installments of the Never Ending Tour found Dylan and his band re-working some lesser-known tunes and classics with fantastic arraignments, but things have changed this go around as Dylan is primarily focused on promoting his newest album, Rough and Rowdy Ways. Also of note, there are new band members in the mix as guitarist Doug Lancio and drummer Charley Drayton have joined multi-instrumentalist Danny Herron, guitarist Bob Britt, and longtime Dylan bass player Tony Garnier. 

The band was really secondary on the opening Friday (November 19th) of the three nights Beacon Theater residency as Dylan took center stage singing strongly and enunciating clearly. Playing eight songs from Rough and Rowdy Ways gave added weight to Dylan’s vocals as the numbers all have sparse instrumentation. On these efforts, the band played restrained and jazz-like around the long passages of lyrics, songs like “My Own Version of You”, “Black Rider” and “False Prophet” achieved varying degrees of restrained success.  “I Contain Multitudes” was the first and most well-received of the new songs, while “ Goodbye Jimmy Reed” provided the most energy. 

The pacing of mostly alternating new efforts with re-workings of older, deeper cuts made for a stop-start night overall as the long drawn out “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” was sleepy with an accordion before the roadhouse revving of “Gotta Serve Somebody” pumped things up, only to retreat to the more mundane “I Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You”. 

The highlight efforts arrived when the band went in a country direction as “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and “To Be Alone With You” both had a loose, easy gate about them, accented by excellent fiddle from Herron and the acoustic strumming of Lancio and Britt. Dylan saved his best piano work for the show-closing “Every Grain of Sand” which was deliberate and beautiful as Herron’s steel guitar wept along with the poignant lyrics. 

There was no encore after the hour and a half show, and while some in attendance were disappointed, the fact that Dylan continues to deliver such high level, challenging music at eighty years old is a joy in and of itself.