Nothing.
Except (and this is my fatal flaw) Bob Dylan. But the Gorge was not Bob Dylan at his best. Here's why.
This is a co-headline tour with Paul Simon (the two tiniest men in showbiz rotate the closing spot). As Dylan gets older and less able to make big bucks on tour, he has chewed his way through the songwriters of the '60s and '70s for his touring partners. Now he's gotten to Paul Simon, who has no new album to promote and is therefore doing this (a) for the hell of it, or (b) to recoup the losses caused by his Broadway flop. These are marriages of convenience. Without Paul, Bob would be playing the Paramount or the Puyallup County Fair. Here, you pay three times as much to see a shorter set tailored not to the Dylan fan but to... whoever these people are (they can't be real hippies if they can afford this show).
Paul Simon is a man who will even sing with Art Garfunkel to make money. From the afro-boogie of "Bridge over Troubled Water" (don't!) onward, his show was enlivened only by his guitarist's taciturn brilliance and Paul's quasi-balletic arm movements. The band was so rehearsed they could have played in their sleep. As my friend said, "It's sad to see a plump little man swaggering so."
But a lovely surprise came at the end of his set, as on came tousle-haired beanpole Art Garfunkel, who towered above Paul. But it wasn't Art (in more ways than one). It was Bob, wearing summer fashions: silver slacks and white loafers. (Since he was back to natty black when he reappeared for his show, we can only assume that this is what he wears OFF-stage.) The duo made a sweet attempt at "The Sound of Silence," and then a ramshackle "I Walk the Line/Blue Moon of Kentucky." They finished with Eric Clapton's version of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." When the pleasant, contractually obliged duets were over, the two headed off in opposite directions.
Dylan seems to have remodeled his show to promote the '66 live album by having the show run first acoustic ("unplugged") and then electric, rather than the old way, which squeezed an acoustic segment in the middle to cleanse the palate before more "rock." Secondly, he has replaced the ugliest member of his band with a handsome man, Charlie Sexton, who makes no discernible difference to the sound. There seems to be no earthly reason for him to be there except that Bob likes to look at him.
Dylan now has more tics than a nervous breakdown. In the last two years, he has unexpectedly discovered the lower half of his body, having used it mainly as an anchor for the previous three decades. The problem now is what to do with it, and Dylan has become King Wiggle. He played with enthusiasm and kept most of the guitar solos for himself, playing over everyone else. Some of these were good, some bad (at the end of "Baby Blue," he found three wrong notes and kept playing them), and most were slightly avant-garde in an Outsider Art sort of way.
The set list veered toward the highly predictable ("Tambourine Man," "Just Like a Woman," "Blowin' in the Wind"). But far from pretending to be that other guy from the '60s, Dylan is, I think, largely embarrassed by his younger self. When he chooses to cover a song (two tonight: "Hallelujah," the "come all ye" song that began the show; and "Not Fade Away"--more of a "go away ye"), he chooses simple songs. His surrealist youth may even seem a little suspicious and weird to him now, and it is only when he sang "Not Dark Yet" and "Love Sick" from Time out of Mind that he engaged fully. These are songs of unremitting, terrifying world-weariness. They out-Cohen Leonard and un-Cave Nick. "Not Dark Yet" was the best moment of the show, a song perfectly suited to the dignified man on stage. Dylan's voice is different now, but to dislike it is to dislike the sound of age. In fact, his voice handles slow songs beautifully. And when I say that these two more recent songs were worth the price of admission alone, believe me, it means I've forgotten how expensive the tickets were.
On Time out of Mind, Dylan seemed to have forgotten the 20th century. The word "gay," for example, is used twice with no queer connotation at all. People jump trains and ride around in buggies. It's a world in which "Bob Dylan" never existed. So the Gorge show--Dylan doing "Dylan"--was not the Bob of today at his best, though he sang and played with conviction, smiled, and made a joke. Many of the things that I love about what he does (the more eccentric moments) were nowhere to be found. I'd rather see him fail magnificently and succeed unexpectedly than be "good." But this was a quality show, which was greatly enjoyed by the crowd. And I imagine that makes my complaints rather silly. We'll see him play a better show in a smaller venue sometime next year.
