As convivial the atmosphere, and starry the guestlist – that was Jimmy Page, but was that Patti Smith, or Polly Harvey’s mum? – and incredible the music, the defining moment from Bob Dylan’s four night stand at London Palladium in October last year was ultimately a visual one. After playing several songs at the piano, Dylan – now 81 – stepped away from the instrument and into the centre of the stage, and jauntily placed a hand on his hip to receive some of his acclaim. Yes, he seemed to be saying, this is it: as Bob Dylan as it gets.
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In this magazine we’re striking a pose of a similar nature. This is our first 172-page Definitive edition, and in it we review each of Dylan’s albums from the eponymous debut to the newly-released Shadow Kingdom, and reprise his most interesting encounters with the British press. We’ve also included a special eight-page fold-out chronology, taking a sideways look at the six ages of Dylan.
It should go without saying that on these pages we honour Dylan’s many indispensable past recordings, his influence on 20th Century culture and thought. But we’re also celebrating the beguiling work in his present, where he has not been idle. Since we last published something like this magazine in 2016 there has been a new, mildly demented Dylan film, a book, and five new volumes of the Bootleg series, in which we’re invited to walk with Dylan not only down the roads he took, but examine alongside him a map showing many of the routes he considered – and enter with him an entire alternative landscape of choice and song.
In that time we have also enjoyed Triplicate, the third instalment of Dylan’s exploration of the Great American Songbook. Then in early 2020, there arrived the event that we had been hoping for: Rough And Rowdy Ways, a double studio album of new Dylan compositions in which everything – ambition, music, and lyrics seemed to be stretching out for the horizon, rolling in rhythm and blues playing that was learned, gutsy and entertaining as the man himself.
At the Palladium and on the Rough And Rowdy tour, Dylan’s and his band seemed to have reached a point where it magnificently all came together: the continuity of the playing joining the music of his present and his past with the currents of older American song. The keyboard playing touched on blues and boogie-woogie. The guitar playing was as fiery as any on a Sun Session. The reinvention and re-arrangement of his own 1960s classics (“Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine” for example) uncovering new ways of hearing them.
As Dylan placed his hand on hip and the applause mounted in an evening of wry, entertaining and self-referencing music, you could possibly delude yourself that this was Dylan in plain sight, finally revealing his masterplan. As we write, though, and he releases an album of “early songs”, re-interpreted in his riverboat deluxe style, and we attempt to unravel the details of who is playing on the record, never mind why – to pick the lock of the Shadow Kingdom in fact – it’s clear he’s evaded capture once again.
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