Concert review: Jakob Dylan shines at Thursday at the Square
Text-messagers aside, show was mesmerizing
Jakob Dylan outran his father’s shadow on Thursday night, while looking eerily like that father in the process. Dressed in a nifty black suit and flat-brimmed hat that couldn’t help but suggest to the assembled the sort of ascetic country priest look Bob Dylan assumed for the “Nashville Skyline” and “John Wesley Harding” album covers, the younger Dylan offered a packed Thursday at the Square crowd a stirring run through his first solo album, “Seeing Things.”
REVIEW
WHO: Jakob Dylan and the Gold Mountain Rebels
WHEN: Thursday night
WHERE: Lafayette Square
That the motel tan and Quaker garb made Jakob look like Bob was being discussed throughout the show, up near the front of the stage where I stood. It shouldn’t have been; Jakob Dylan has been his own man, musically, for more than a decade.
“Seeing Things” is a stripped-down album of acoustic, folk-based numbers, but in concert, Dylan and the Gold Mountain Rebels brought this material to a much bigger and broader life. Not a tune missed its mark. It’s a shame more folks weren’t paying attention.
It ain’t my job to review the crowd at a show, but I’ll make an exception this time around to comment on the behavior of a bunch of folks who attended the concert. Walking around the front-portion of Lafayette Square, I became increasingly depressed. Cell phones out, conversations in full-on, scream-level flow, and much general activity that had zero relation to the music emanating from the band on stage was the order of the day.
A question, then. Why’d you come? Instead of hanging
out in public to text the person less than 10 feet away from you, why not grab that person and head somewhere else, where you wouldn’t find the music to be a distraction from your hang? Y’all could’ve saved some minutes that way.
You missed a deeply moving performance if you weren’t paying attention.
“Seeing Things” is not the sort of album that offers instant and easy gratification. But in concert, the songs aimed straight for the heart, Dylan’s lovely rasp intoning his own brand of poetry to often sublime effect.
“All Day and All Night” opened, and led directly into the winsome, whistling-past-the-graveyard number, “Something Good This Way Comes.” By that point, Dylan’s acoustic guitar (finger-picked with abundant skill) had meshed beautifully with Audley Freed’s country-inflected melodic lines and deep-fried licks, while Wallflowers drummer Fred Eltringham and bassist George Reiff locked into a deeply felt groove.
“Everybody Pays As They Go” refrained Springsteen’s take on “Pay Me My Money Down” with world-weary aplomb, while “Here Comes Now” — dedicated by Dylan to “Everyone who has been paying attention” — celebrated the pop-inflected roots rock Dylan nailed with the Wallflowers.
The hurricane’s eye of the evening, though, was “War Is Kind,” probably Dylan’s greatest lyric to date, and certainly one of the finest songs on “Seeing Things.”
When the man offered the line “Daughter you wear my name/Those are my eyes, keep ’em raised,” the hair on my arms stood straight up.
When poetry, melody, and topicality meet, all is right in the universe.
All you text-messagers and cell-phone chatterers notwithstanding.
jmiers@buffnews.com For more on Jakob Dylan, see the Cover Story on Page 18.
