Bob Dylan: Almost on fire

A Review by Stewart Oksenhorn
The Aspen Times~Aspen, CO Colorado

http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20080901/NEWS/809019992/1060/rss

ASPEN — For a guy who has stripped away his old forms of expression — joking with the audience, playing guitar, offering up new songs that challenge our ways of thinking — Bob Dylan still has a way of communicating that his spirits are high, and that he can revel in being Bob Dylan.

Saturday night at the Jazz Aspen Snowmass Labor Day Festival, Dylan bobbed his head, flashed the occasional grin and, at the end of the show, came to center stage and did a quizzical little motion — palms down, shoulders scrunched; I half-expected him to dance a jig. Specifically what the gesture was meant to indicate, I haven’t a clue, but the huge crowd was much appreciative of Dylan’s openness.

His band was so loose and was allowed to have such fun onstage. The band — drummer George Recile, bassist Tony Garnier, guitarists Stu Kimball and Denny Freeman, and Donnie Herron, who plays a variety of string instruments — has been intact for several years now, long enough to develop their dynamic. Certainly long enough to have gotten over whatever awe comes with playing behind the most influential musician of the rock era. And possibly even long enough to adapt to the quirks of playing with a singer, musician and personality like Dylan.

The set kicked off with a most familiar, descending guitar riff; even without the trombone, whistles and shouts, and before the signature refrain of “Everybody must get stoned,” it was clearly “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.” Even the subtler “Simple Twist of Fate” was immediately identifiable by its lovely chord progression. The only tune that left me puzzled was the set-closing “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).”

Songs “Summer Days.” The band switched over to acoustic instruments for “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” (“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” the encores “Like a Rolling Stone” and “All Along the Watchtower”) and recent and less familiar (“Under the Red Sky,” “Cry A While”). “Visions of Johanna”