And you thought he was unintelligible 30 years ago....

Last weekend we went to the wedding of a friend of mine in DC (great party and bitchin' guests -- more on that later), and the night before we went to see Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello at Merriweather Post Pavilion, in suburban Maryland. While I would rather face the fires of Hell than spend time in suburban Maryland, for Dylan and Costello, I made an exception.

My love for Elvis Costello is deep, abiding, and undiminished by the years -- constant since I discovered him in high school (I was kind of late bloomer). He is a genius -- spectacular songwriter, endlessly creative and damn near fearless with the stuff he'll try musically. I have recovered from my mourning period after he married Diana Krall (though it gave me hope that finding happiness and bursting forth with a couple of kids relatively late in life is possible -- plus they seem to be having a nice time), and on Friday night he delivered an excellent (though for my taste, too short) acoustic set that made the drive and the traffic and suburban Maryland worth it.

Dylan, on the other hand...


I've always liked Bob Dylan and respected his genius, his conscience, and poetry and craft that he's brought to everything he's done. I've been a proponent of his new renaissance. I've seen him play an excellent concert, and I've seen him play a set that sucked so loudly that it left the entire crowd's collective jaw dropping to the floor. You never quite know what you're going to get.

The good news: His band ROCKED. Bluesy, hipster, extremely tight, obviously very talented, and clearly jazzed to be playing with a legend. And Dylan's harmonica and organ playing were fantastic.

The bad news: I understood less than 50 words total of his 90-minute set. I wasn't looking for any song to be a replica of the recordings; in fact I'd have loathed that. But it would've been great to get what the crowd of die-hards was cheering about every time he started a song. I'm grateful to know I wasn't the only one with this problem. I started replaying last week's Grey's Anatomy in my head just to stay alert.

The mumbling. The muddy delivery. Good God, the mumbling. In the past I've chalked up Dylan's weird on-stage behavior to being the singing equivalent of Miles Davis playing with his back to the audience. Now I think it's the musical equivalent of those computer-generated pictures where you can see the spaceship if you unfocus your eyes. Or a foreign-language immersion program -- eventually you start to understand French if you're surrounded by people who are speaking it. With Dylan, I started to get scared that I'd lose my ability to understand English if I could make out what he was saying for a sustained period of time. Oui.

The weird news: As Rick and I strained to understand what the hell was going on, he noticed something sitting near Dylan on a cabinet onstage. Is ... that... really? Could that really be the Oscar he won for Best Original Song (on the Wonder Boys soundtrack)? Rick borrowed a fellow concert goer's binoculars to get a better look, and unless we had a simultaneous hallucination, it was either the statuette or a replica. Who does that? I mean really. On the other hand, it's damn near the funniest thing I've ever seen on a stage.

For a long time now, I've been mocking the Rolling Stones for touring -- again and again and again. I wouldn't have wanted to see them on any tour after Tattoo You in 1982. But at least their frontman can still sing. Mick, I promise to (almost) never make fun of you again.