Bob Dylan – The 30th Anniversary Review

Few careers are worth celebrating with a star-studded guest list. Nowadays, the thought would not cross the mind of anyone. An anniversary is not a reason to put on a tribute concert. In the 1990s, though, it was the perfect way to reintroduce an audience to a hitmaker who had lost his way, hence The 30th Anniversary album. Why listen to the originals when you can hear John Mellencamp cover Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone with the atmosphere sucked from it? Such is the case for many of these tribute concerts, the George Harrison one excluded. From a ridiculously overperformed vocal offering for Like a Rolling Stone to the relatively strange but show-defining performances from Lou Reed and Tracy Chapman, The 30th Anniversary album is a mess. An interesting mess, at least, like when you drop fragments of potassium into a beaker of acid. It fizzles out all the same.  

Mellencamp covering Like a Rolling Stone and Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat with the same rock and roll swagger Dylan had deconstructed and rebuilt through the 1970s is as agonising as it gets. A ten-minute slog, which is put in its place by a staggering Stevie Wonder performance of Blowin’ in the Wind. Not even an energetic crowd can save parts of this set. Wonder highlights what would become a constant issue for this set. Overproduction. Each song has that drab ’90s feel to it, that overblown style which would sink any chance of subtlety in pop music. Reed’s version of Foot of Pride is the first great moment of the show because it goes against that flat and overproduced style. Dylan was a voice for counterculture and soon found himself away from a positive reception in the 1980s. To hear a voice like Reed’s dig deep into his discography and find a lot to love is a wonderful moment, one of the few on this anniversary package. Chapman is an example of how little needs to be changed to make for an invigorating performance.  

They are the early highlights in a show which also features an inevitably countrified version of It Ain’t Me, Babe from Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, as well as a Willie Nelson feature. You can find a miserable version of Highway 61 Revisited from Johnny Winter, and so the slog continues. Ronnie Wood is a surprise, though, with his cover of Seven Days sounding like a shade of modern Dylan. It is a nice build towards the heavy-hitting names like Young, Clapton, and The Band. Richie Havens offers a delightful version of Just Like a Woman, an underrated and stripped-back effort which does well to kick against the overwhelmed instrumental style of the songs before it. You can get into the groove of each artist by the time Young comes on stage. Everyone, aside from Reed and Chapman, is too rigid to make their sound suit the song, rather than the song suit their sound.  

This inevitably means some lengthy guitar solo work from Young and Clapton, while Harrison offers a stereotypical yet essential cover of Absolutely Sweet Marie. Around the end, aside from an impromptu and nearly complete reunion of The Traveling Wilburys, comes Dylan himself. Girl from the North Country seems an odd choice for the end, but at least it is the end. A sloppy and bloated collection of covers which does very little, if any, justice to the original works. The O’Jays fall foul of that inability to work the song into a worthy rendition. But what else can you expect from such a mixed bag of performers? An interesting listen in parts, but each moment, bar the Reed performance, is marked by the desire to listen to the original song.