On Friday night (July 8) my pal Dave Jensen and I saw Bob Dylan and his Band at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium. It was a treat to see the maestro, still a tremendous artist at 75. On an almost perfect evening, a vibrant, vigorous Mavis Staples opening the show (below right), and it was a treat to hear her power through `Slippery 
People’ and `For What It’s Worth’ and finally `I’ll Take You There’. Most excellent. Bob favored a broad brimmed hat, and moved about the stage in with a gait that seemed part shuffle, part skip. Dylan has been excavating the American songbook for the last year or so, and I can’t say it’s always been to my taste; it’s rather like visiting an extremely intelligent friend whom, you find, is currently immersed in the art of baking biscuits. Nothing wrong with that; it’s just that we’ve got a lot of biscuit bakers. There is still only one Bob. But this excursion seems to have done wonders for Dylan’s singing; it’s more ambitious, more expressive; he’s giving a broader vocal performance than I remember. This really paid off in the second part of the show, where he began singing about getting old. He played “Spirit on the Water’ (`You think I’m over the hill/ You think I’m past my prime/ Let me see what you got/ We can have a whoppin’ good time’); `Scarlet Town’ (`In Scarlet Town, the end is near’); “These Long and Wasted Years” (“We cried on a cold and frosty morn/ We cried because our souls were torn/ So much for tears/ So much for these long and wasted years”); and finally “Autumn Leaves” (`I miss you most of all my darling/ When autumn leaves start to fall’), written by Joseph Kosma and Jacques Prevert, with English lyrics by Johnny Mercer. Then, for his first encore, Dylan played “Blowing’ in the Wind.” I have never been a huge fan of the song, with its wise-beyond-its-years lyrics, but this was special. Singing with great expressivity in his old man’s croak, performing in this terrible week, Dylan brought a perplexed weariness to the song. I found it unbelievably moving.
