Bob Dylan opened his three-night stand Tuesday at the Hollywood Palladium, essentially in the backyard of his Malibu residence, on the same day his latest studio album was released. How many songs did he play from the new collection for the hometown crowd? Zip. Nada. Zilch.
That's not a huge surprise given that the album happens to be Christmas in the Heart, his first holiday collection. Mid-October feels a little early to be dipping into the seasonal songbook -- even assuming Dylan would ever offer up “Must Be Santa," “Here Comes Santa Claus" or other chestnuts from the Christmas set in his live act.
The fact is, he's bypassed other new albums in concert before. Two decades ago he came through town just after “Oh Mercy" was released, but you never would have known it from his concert set list. The salient point being that the word “promotion" seems to be the one entry in the English language missing from his otherwise unabridged dictionary.
Instead, Dylan seems to treat the song selection at each night's performance as something of cabalistic ritual, a mystical exercise in which something transcendent might emerge from the proper sequence and combination of thoughts, sounds, notes and rhythms on a given evening.
On a new tour swing that opened last week in Seattle, several cornerstone numbers have appeared nearly every night. From the early years, he's relying regularly on “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)," “Highway 61 Revisited," “Ballad of a Thin Man," “Like a Rolling Stone" and “All Along the Watchtower." Then there are linchpin songs from his most recent studio releases, including “Cold Irons Bound," “Beyond Here Lies Nothin'," “My Wife's Home Town," “High Water (for Charley Patton)," “Thunder on the Mountain" and “Jolene."
Together, those songs constitute about two-thirds of the show, the other third consisting of wild cards that shift dramatically from night to night.
It might well be Dylan's way of emphasizing who he is right now -- the face the artist always had been most interested in sharing -- while offering enough of a reminder of who he used to be to keep hits-conscious fans from staging an uprising.
