Loose Leaf Notes

I stopped at a Department Store, looking for a leopard-skin pill-box hat to wear to the Bob Dylan concert in Roanoke Saturday night, but they didn’t have one, and he didn’t sing that song.  He did sing Tangled Up in Blue, Don’t Think Twice and Baby Blue.  I hardly recognized those classics at first because the arrangements were so different and the lyrics were hard to hear at times.

By the third song I was asked to leave the building.  I came down from my balcony seat and took a picture, which was against the rules.  Like the days of old selling jewelry in the Grateful Dead parking lots with cops regularly making us close up shop, I talked myself out of being thrown out. Then I sat down in an empty seat that was pretty close to the stage.

I half expected him to pull out a red cape like a matador at a bull fight. Joe thought a cane would have been a good accessory for his look.   He wore two-toned wingtip boots, a light suit with a stripe down the side and a Mississippi steam boat straw hat.

“Crooner” was the first thought that came to mind.  At times, I felt like I was watching a lounge act in a jazz club with a full moon shining through a window.  For the most part the songs were romantic.  He looked more like a boy than a 70 something year old.

He never said a word to the audience for the whole 90 minute or so show, but he did have some Bojangle moves, and he struck a pose with his hand on his hip every now and then.  Although he never verbally addressed the audience, I think he let the words of the songs fill in for that.  He made his case by closing with a Sinatra song, Why Try to Change Me Now?

I prefer the rockin’ Bob of old (or even the Dead doing Dylan), but I must admit that his arrangement of Blowin’ in the Wind was very catchy and in the spirit of his smoothly-hip 1998 Grammy-award-winning album “Time Out of Mind.”   HERE’S a short clip of just the sound.  I wasn’t about to take the chance of lifting my camera up from my lap to get the visual.

He played half the time hatless at the piano and half the time center stage with his hat on.  One time he pulled out his harmonica and some of us cheered.

Read about the John Mellencamp concert Joe and I went to last year at the same Roanoke venue (The Bergland Center) and where I was restricted from taking pictures or videos HERE.