Bob Dylan’s Devil Complex and Mysterious Stage Pose

What is the Pantone of Hell? Whatever color code you might apply to that wicked strain of red – that’s what shade the curtains surrounding the enormous stage at Bass Concert Hall are lit for Bob Dylan and his band in tailored black suits.

“I'll sell you down the river/ I’ll put a price on your head/ What more can I tell you? I sleep with life and death in the same bed,” the 80-year-old sings decisively on “I Contain Multitudes” – the third song of Wednesday’s set and first inclusion from his 2020 LP, Rough and Rowdy Ways. That fan-pleasing record’s replete with first-person declarations that defy, and sometimes intertwine, concepts of virtue and evil. Being everything – it’s the Devil’s defense.

Or so says my mind, with wheels turning intensely from the experience of seeing the great poet of popular music over the last 60 years. The sentiment doubles with “False Prophet” from the same album.

“You don't know me, darlin’/ You never would guess/ I'm nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest/ I ain't no false prophet/ I just said what I said/ I’m just here to bring vengeance on somebody's head.”

With the calculated, enigmatic nature of Dylan, I’m always wondering – in terms of song sequence and delivery – what ideas he’s trying to slip across the table. And early in the Austin performance of his R&RW tour, I believe he’s constructing an image of Lucifer on the 88 keys.

A view from the audience of Bob Dylan performing at Bass Concert Hall on Wednesday night. (Photo by Kevin Curtin)

He then pulls back into the night’s first classic, 1971 composition “When I Paint my Masterpiece.” For the preceding three songs, the onetime guitar strummer’s piano playing has been mightier than perhaps expected, but a group-effort solo section becomes unpredictable due to the unchanging will of his lead piano line.

A ticket-holder behind me, somehow unaware of Dylan’s longstanding penchant for significantly altering the phrasing of his recorded material, registers disappointment to his partner: “I was expecting him to be at the front – with a guitar and a harmonica.” Not long after, that audience member’s nodding off, though he might still agree, by the end of the hour and 45-minute show, that what’s being presented on this tour is both fascinating and really quite satisfying.

After a spacious rendition of the coyly introspective “Black Rider,” Dylan leaves the piano he’s been standing behind all night, walks to the center of stage, momentarily strikes a pose holding his front of his suit coat to standing ovation, steadies himself on a microphone stand… and just returns to the piano. He’ll repeat this puzzling process – where he essentially fakes out the audience thinking he’s about to inhabit a lead singer role – four more times throughout the night. Curiously, a Vox AC30 amp and extra microphone at the front of the stage never gets used. An option foregone? Props deliberately placed to misdirect us? An old trick to milk applause? We’ll never know.

Later, “Crossing the Rubicon” resounds with extra potent dynamics and interplay – giving the impression that Dylan’s band, now including lively drummer Charley Drayton and electric guitarist Doug Lancio (whose replaced Austin's Charlie Sexton), plays their best blues with room to move. Also in the superior-to-the-album-version category: a turbo groove on “Gotta Serve Somebody,” in which Lancio and fellow six-stringer Bob Britt come together on a surfy guitar line that jumps from the speakers.

In between: an unusually sunny deviation on “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” arrived with such affection that it felt like a poetic travel brochure for the United States’ southernmost outpost.

After taking a stand once again at center stage, Dylan slyly grinned as he posed a rhetorical linked to local music history: “Are they still around? Willie and Waylon and the boys?”

The talk around the exit doors, minutes later, will be how purposeful, unwavering, and generally pleasing Dylan’s singing had been, but only after an invisible halo glows above his head on spiritual omega moment “Grain of Sand.”

“I'm hanging in the balance of the reality of man/ Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.”