Bob Dylan

Strange as it may seem, Bob Dylan knows his way around Indiana. He’s played college towns like South Bend and Fort Wayne in recent years, so it really should come as no surprise that one of the planet’s legendary poets would sometime land in Indianapolis.

But then reality strikes. Then Dylan descends on Indy in the flesh. The searing sun beats down, but you take off your shades so as to look on him with naked eyes. Could it be?

He’s not the Christ, no, but he’s all we’ve got for now.

Now if any living performer has an enviable catalogue in music today, it’s this man. With half a century’s songs under his belt, Dylan actually chose liberally from his more recent albums, 2001’s Love and Theft and last year’s Modern Times. Not a bad move when both are latter-day masterpieces. One finds it easy to forgive omissions like a trillionth take on “Like A Rolling Stone” or “Mr. Tambourine Man” with this body of work.

After the anticlimactic aural purgatory of a piped-in orchestral score (was that really the theme from The Natural?), the man appeared. And he came out blazing even as the sun expired, his still-capable guitar playing helped out by a touring band that actually provided all the parts on Modern Times. So the terrain was familiar, not to mention Dylan’s longest-standing aide, Tony Garnier, has been with him since ‘89. It shows: Garnier kept each song fresh and steady with his bass on both guitar and upright pulsing like the human heart.

And therein lies something Dylan knows a little about: the heart. Notable classic highlights on this night were the wistful anti-romantic “Tangled Up In Blue” and “It’s Alright, Ma, I’m Only Bleeding.” The latter harbors the line “He not busy being born is busy dying” from 1965, a line penned about 30 years before being co-opted by The Shawshank Redemption.

That’s another facet of Dylan’s genius: His songs translate so well to film lines or soundtracks (The Hurricane, Wonder Boys) because they’re just plain cinematic in themselves. Storytelling alone is this man’s trade. He draws word portraits and then either holds them dearly or tears them to shreds (or both). Sometimes it’s good ol’ Norman Rockwell scenes, only set at nighttime; other times it’s Norman Rockwell with fangs.

I’ve gushed here, but not all was honestly well on this evening. The closing rendition of “All Along the Watchtower” made me burn for the Jimi Hendrix take. That can be okay, as Dylan even acknowledged when Hendrix reworked it that he liked it better and starting playing it much the same way, just not as well. This reading of the song just seemed all-too-rehearsed and yet, at the same time, an afterthought.

Dylan’s voice, seemingly fragile in the whispery Modern Times recording though suited for its feel, held up remarkably on this night. Dare I say it even sounded strong? Indeed. The backing band lent steady support throughout (they’ve circled this block a couple hundred times, methinks), rolling through reworked arrangements of older tunes and newer fare alike. Their play was always sterling but never upstaged the raspy star – always important, and never more important than when rocking with a great.

Standouts from the last release included its first two tracks “Thunder on the Mountain” and “Spirit on the Water.” The second can’t help but to invoke a classic Johnny Cash line as Dylan gushes to a fair maiden that “I wanna be with you in paradise, and it seems so unfair/ I can’t go back to paradise no more/ I killed a man there.” Huh, so heaven’s been moonlighting as Reno all this time – who could have known? Last year’s “Workingman’s Blues #2″ and “Someday Baby” – like everything Dylan creates – sounded timeless even in their relative infancy.

That’s just it: Whether it’s 1967 or 2007, whether in the country market or the city downtown, the man’s stuff always sounds right. Say what you will about his gravel road of a throat, but this remains: He’s always relevant. Consider this from “It’s Alright, Ma”: “But even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.” That’s Dylan, forever prescient and frothing with perspective.

A giddy admission here: An all-time live musical moment occurred for me when I witnessed the sun’s orange-purple setting bleeding into dusk as Dylan tenderly yet emphatically sang “Nettie Moore.” “The world has gone black before my eyes,” he warbled more than twice. We believed him each time. And then it happened, just as he said.

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