Let's cut to the chase.
Yes, Bob Dylan skipped a lot of his signature songs during his two-hour show Wednesday at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, as usual. No, you couldn't always immediately discern the melodies or lyrics of those he did play, especially early on before the sound mix clicked into focus, as usual. Yes, he dispensed with such rock-star pleasantries as "Hello, California!" and pretty much all between-song chatter, and yes, he concentrated as much on what he's done in the last 10 years as what he did in the first 10. As usual.
And yes, all that added up to an unusually compelling night of music -- as usual.
How does he do it?
By treating his astonishingly deep catalog like a painter's palette. He starts each night with the same array of colors at his disposal, but applies and combines them with inspiration of the moment and lets the emerging moods and images guide each creation to its unique conclusion.
The 67-year-old erstwhile spokesman for a generation -- the voice-over preceding his arrival noted that factoid in a witty, 30-second summation of a 46-year recording career -- has been starting his shows lately with two or three songs from the '60s. He stuck to that blueprint in Santa Monica, opening with a driving "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35," whose singalong-ready refrain ("Everybody must get stoned") was taken literally by a smattering of concertgoers.
As he did during much of the evening, Dylan zeroed in on a single-note reduction of his original melody -- just as Louis Armstrong's solos became outwardly less complex later in his life as he searched to find one perfect note rather than settling for dozens of less-than-ideal ones.
He moved on to a pulsing R&B treatment of "It Ain't Me Babe." The newly sensualized rhythms flummoxed fans' attempts to shift into autopilot while chanting the rigid old folkified version.
Jerry Wexler, the late Atlantic Records exec who produced the "Slow Train Coming" album in 1979, recalled Dylan telling him at the time: "I've done the word trip. Now I want to do the music trip." With mighty backing from his blues- and R&B-savvy five-man band, Dylan continues to revel in "the music trip," dispatching lyrics in bloody chunks like CNN news-crawl bulletins.
