Garden concert

In my salad days I couldn't stand the sound of Bob Dylan, what with his wail­ing voice and whin­ing har­mon­ica and labyrinthine lyrics. Equally ir­ri­tat­ing was the hy­per­bolic as­sump­tion of just about every­one I knew even barely, that he was a bona fide ge­nius. And when he con­verted to an ex­cep­tion­ally lu­di­crous form of Chris­tian­ity just at the mo­ment when punk was blast­ing all the past di­nosaurs of rock to king­dom come, well, that was the last straw on this camel's back: I pushed Dylan out of my world with­out a sec­ond thought, like he was so much ex­pired milk. Until around about a decade ago, when Joan Reig, the drum­mer for the Cata­lan rock band Els Pets, in­sisted I lis­ten to a re­cently re­leased album of a live con­cert Dylan had given in the States, back in 1975. Reig being the un­de­ni­ably en­cy­clopaedic au­thor­ity he is on rock and pop, I thought there could be no harm in fol­low­ing his ad­vice. No sooner had I put Dylan on the ear­phones than I re­alised that this was some of the most se­ri­ous and sin­cer­est music I'd ever had the thrill of lis­ten­ing to. From then on, I started to col­lect all those Dylan al­bums I'd ig­nored so de­lib­er­ately for so many years. And just a cou­ple of months ago, I found out he was play­ing in Barcelona on the 4th of July, at the once aris­to­cratic Pe­dralbes Gar­dens. Al­though I'd heard that in re­cent years he's been giv­ing some pretty run-of-the-mill con­certs - play­ing with his back to the au­di­ence and shun­ning en­cores - I went along any­way. Right from the start of the show, when he howled 'Long And Wasted Years', the snooty, prissy am­bi­ence which usu­ally clings to the Pe­dralbes Gar­dens like a pri­cily-per­fumed fog, was swept away by an en­ergy that had us all in thrall. He ended by belt­ing out (at age 74): 'I'm sick of love; I hear the clock tick/This kind of love; I'm love sick'. By this stage, the au­di­ence was one con­certed stand­ing ova­tion. It had been so good to have heard beau­ti­fully arranged music played beau­ti­fully; to have heard can­dour turned so pre­cisely into words and chords; to have seen ge­nius at work. The next morn­ing my part­ner said: 'I've still got his voice in my head!'. Me too. And there it will stay, with luck for ever and a day, to make up for the long – even if not en­tirely wasted - years when I re­fused to lis­ten to it.