Six years ago, near the end of a show in Austria, Bob Dylan grew so enraged by fans taking photos and shooting video that he stopped the set, narrowly avoided a nasty fall, and delivered an extraordinarily rare rebuke to the audience. “Take pictures or don’t take pictures,” he snapped. “We can either play or we can pose. OK?”
In recent years, fans at his headline shows weren’t given that choice, since phones have been banned. To enforce the rule, ushers roam the aisles with flashlights and threaten to remove anyone not in compliance. The result is a refreshingly old-school concert experience where people actually watch the action on the stage and live in the moment. No real effort is made to stop audio bootleggers, and pristine tapes of these shows have emerged, but the video documentation is scattershot and borderline unwatchable since the rule-breakers are often miles from the stage and forced to film at covert angles.
Last summer, however, Dylan signed onto Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Music Festival, a big tour that exclusively hits amphitheaters that seat up upwards of 20,000 people. It’s simply not viable to ban phones at these events — no one has time to monitor that many seats — meaning that Dylan was playing to a vast sea of iPhones for the first time in years. The upside is that when setlist news happened, like the return of “Mr. Tambourine Man” after 15 years or a surprise Pogues cover, everyone got to see it on YouTube the next morning. The downside is that Dylan was likely feeling very annoyed the whole time.
When the Outlaw tour resumed Friday night in Bangor, Maine, after a four-week hiatus, Dylan took the drastic measure of making himself practically invisible onstage. He did this by sitting behind a grand piano, raising the music stand, surrounding himself with four very bright lights, and pulling a hoodie tight over his head. According to fan reports, people even in the first few rows were unable to see anything but the top of his hood. To the rest of the crowd, he was little more than a visual smudge behind the piano, presuming they were able to see any trace of him at all.
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“In my 20 years of Dylan shows, I’ve never witnessed anything like it,” Dylan superfan Ray Padgett wrote in his indispensable Flagging Down the Double E’s newsletter. “The bigger problem wasn’t that I personally had a bad view. Boo-hoo me! It was that it created the bleakest crowd energy I’ve experienced at one of these Outlaw shows. People were pissed.”
He continued to describe the crowd’s discontent in colorful terms. “One person near me spent the first half loudly complaining to anyone within earshot, aggressively offering her binoculars around to prove they don’t help anyway,” Padgett wrote. “Another person, who’d apparently been stewing quietly, finally yelled ‘What the fuck!’ during ‘Blind Willie McTell’ and started shoving people out of the way to leave. Most humorously, two others near me got into a long mid-show debate about whether that really was Dylan up there, or an imposter.”
It’s not an imposter. That’s the real Bob Dylan. He’s just really, really tired of people watching the show through their cellphones as opposed to their own eyes. And why shouldn’t he be? Phones have made concerts almost unbearable at times. (I wrote about this problem at length in 2013, and it’s only gotten worse since then.) At an Oasis show the other night in Pasadena, many people around me barely glanced at the stage. They were too busy taking photos of each other, shooting segments of songs, and then uploading the images to social-media platforms. The rest of us were blinded by those concertgoers’ screens, and mere extras in their photo shoots.
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The entire point of a concert is to experience something cool that’s happening here in the physical world, right in front of you. What’s the point of even going if you’re going to spend the whole time on your phone? The photos you’re taking look like absolute shit, and there’s 6,000 other people filming every song. If you want to see it again, go on YouTube the next day. You don’t have to make the video yourself.
As George Costanza famously said, “We are living in a society.” If we don’t start acting like it, Bob Dylan might start looking even more like the Invisible Man onstage, or maybe he’ll simply sing from his dressing room. In the meantime, put down your damn phones. Bob has had enough. (And yes, we can’t be 100 percent sure that this is why he’s done everything possible to disappear himself at recent shows. But we can’t imagine any other explanation.)
