In October 2016, the day after the announcement that Bob Dylan had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Leonard Cohen declared that awarding him this immense distinction was equivalent to “pinning a medal on Mount Everest because it is the highest mountain. » The poet clearly had a knack for compliments.
Sunday evening, at the Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier at Place des Arts, Bob Dylan returned the favor to his late comrade by offering Montreal, at the end of the program, an inspired, not to say passionate, version of Dance Me to the End of Love.
“They are much more than songs. They’re prayers,” Dylan once said of Cohen’s work. And this observation has rarely been verified as much as on Sunday. Even though he was performing it for the first time, his band seemed to have put in the necessary number of hours of rehearsal over the past few days.
However, you will not see any images on social media of this tribute to Cohen, spectators of a Bob Dylan concert being forced to leave their phone, as soon as they pass through the doors, in a small locked pouch. Press photographers did not have access to the event either.
In voice
Before being moved by this surprise revival, the spectators, who were packed to the rafters at Wilfrid-Pelletier, were already having a blessed time. Although he has often disappointed in recent years with rearrangements that seemed more like sessions of dismemberment than updating, Dylan seemed happy to be among us, to the extent that he is capable of enthusiasm, rewarding even his audience with a “thank you very much” in French.
After a few songs during which the icon’s voice was finding its feet, the evening found the path of grace with When I Paint My Masterpiece, the fourth piece on the program, in a version started alone on the piano, before his musicians join him in country-blues mode. Almost all the songs had a layer of blues applied to them, a bit as if, as he grew older, Mr. Zimmerman was returning to the roots of the music he has been working on for over 60 years.
His extended rereading ofI’ll Be Your Baby Tonight followed a similar framework: after an almost soulful intro, the biting rock of Doug Lancio’s guitar would take over, ending in the apotheosis of a big dirty blues. At times, you had to conclude that Dylan was not only singing correctly, but that he was in voice.
Sitting behind his half-grand piano, the octogenarian extended his interpretations according to what his heart dictated to him, his five musicians, installed around him in a semi-circle, rarely taking their eyes from his hands. The conclusions, often hasty, sometimes sounded like car accidents.
Then for Black RiderDylan unfolded his body and put on his white hat, as if to better face the reaper who prowls in this journey to the end of death, taken from his most recent album Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020). The songwriter selected nine of the ten titles on Sunday, to which he combined as many songs drawn from almost everywhere in his catalog (Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine), To Be Alone With You, Gotta Serve Somebody), although few hits strictly speaking.
Unforgettable moment
His felt interpretation of Dance Me to the End of Love will nevertheless remain the most unforgettable moment of this superb evening, a moment at the end of which the entire crowd, where twenty-somethings and people of the same generation as the artist on the bill rubbed shoulders, stood up.
A Bob Dylan show is the rare event where you can bump into both the 2021 Country Album of the Year Felix winner, Alex Burger, Canada’s Minister of Transport, the Honorable Pablo Rodriguez, as well as a certain chronicler of The Press according to whom His Bobness is nothing less than God the Father.
However, this is not the first time that Dylan covered Cohen in Montreal: on July 8, 1988, he played Hallelujah at the Forum, long before John Cale and Jeff Buckley signed their respective historic versions, and long before almost all the singers on the planet took on the mission of insulting the Montrealer’s masterpiece.
He and his five musicians also have the habit, during this tour, of offering covers specific to the cities where they stop: in Saint-Louis, it was Chuck Berry, in Chicago, Muddy Watters, in Indianapolis, John Mellencamp and Cincinnati, South of Cincinnati (!) by Dwight Yoakam. At 82 years old, the man clearly still enjoys popping up where you least expect him.
Bob Dylan briefly drew his harmonica during the solemn Every Grain of Sand. It was already the end. While we applauded him, the living legend walked slowly to the edge of the stage, to hold on for a few moments to a microphone stand which seemed to have been placed there only to allow him to stand. Then all the lights went out. There would be no reminder, other than in our memory.