Recap Bob Dylan at Riverside Theater

No matter how many times you’ve seen Bob Dylan, you want this time to be different. You want him to acknowledge you, damn it, even if it’s the phony, “We love you, [insert you city here]!” sort of attention you get from every other artist. But that’s not Dylan’s way, as he proved again Thursday to a sold-out house at Riverside Theater. Dylan does not talk to you. These days, he doesn’t even look at you. And this makes you crave acknowledgement even more.

(In Dylan’s defense, you wouldn’t want to talk to this audience, either, which is loaded with homemade shirt-wearing burnouts and pony-tailed Baby Boomers. If you had to suffer these people for nearly 50 years, you’d become a recluse, too. This is your future, Barack Obama.)

Because Dylan is so aloof—or bored, or shy—there was an undeniable jolt every time he swung his right leg slightly to the left while plunking on his organ over the roaring white-boy blues of his five-piece band. This—this—was proof that he was enjoying himself and our company, that this night was different from the million other nights he’s played over the course of his “never-ending tour” in the latter part of his illustrious career. Dylan really did seem to be having a ball early on leading his band through “Lonesome Day Blues,” a stand out track from 2001’s Love & Theft that has become a reliable concert standard in recent years. Crouching down low while staring down his twin guitar players—dressed, like the rest of his band, in black leather suits borrowed from Flight Of The Conchords—Dylan bashed away like a guy who dreamed of joining Little Richard’s band when he was a kid.

Then again, Dylan might have been swinging his right leg to keep it from falling asleep. You never can tell, which makes him fascinating and frustrating in equal measure. Bob Dylan—duh!—is not a crowd pleaser. That he goes out of his way to not to please the audience should be thunderously obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention since 1965 or so. But we set ourselves up for disappointment by always expecting too much and too little from Dylan—we want him to keep pushing the envelope while playing his old stuff the same way, over and over again. The confusion was palpable when he radically re-made “Tangled Up In Blue” as a slinky shuffle or brought “Blowin’ In The Wind” back home as a churchy soul number. On “Just Like A Woman,” the audience went so far as to sing the chorus exactly like Dylan did on Blonde On Blonde while the man himself mumbled his own peculiar cadence. As for the newer songs, the funniest take came via a text message from a friend during “Lonesome Day Blues,” which complained that Dylan’s band sounded like something you’d hear at “at noon on a Sunday at the Miller Oasis Stage during Summerfest.”

Upon the death of Elvis Presley, Lester Bangs wrote that “we will never agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis.” One of the great things about Dylan—and there are still a lot of great things about Dylan, as his recent outtakes collection Tell Tale Signs attests—is that he can still get people arguing, even devotees who might prefer one Dylan period over another, or one particular version of a song over another. In concert, Bangs said The King gave him “an erection of the heart.” Dylan gives you blue balls. But you always come crawling back for more.