Bob Dylan

The Zimmerman Circus is back in town. Come, ladies and gentlemen, and marvel at the troubadour-cowboy who outlived rock history itself. Does anyone still have the nerve to expect surprises from the old minstrel forever on the road and his trusty pards?

He'll deliver a sardonic "Like A Rolling Stone" as though it were a tune learned by heart as a kid. He'll let the guitars blaze on "All Along The Watchtower" as though he were performing a cover of Hendrix. He'll rattle off "Highway 61 Revisited" as though it were a blues standard.

And yet.

And yet, when his gaze darts through the darkness wrapped in a beam of copper-coloured light, winding through postcards of the hanged man and the tanned passports of Desolation Row, you'd swear that something is truly happening here and now. Then the whirlwind of verses carries him far away again, into a scene where the words of another time seem like nothing more than a hoarse flatus vocis. But you can't deny that, at least for an instant, Bob Dylan appeared to you stripped of his mask, his voice nailing you once more to a truth that seemed forgotten. And then you suddenly understand why you insisted on coming back, once again, to witness his endless travelling minstrel show.

Announced by the usual self-mocking fanfare, Dylan takes the stage in his dark suit like an old Western squire, a thin moustache and a white hat pulled low over his head. This isn't simply an affectation with anachronistic overtones, but at bottom the desire to embody the memory of a time that no longer exists: not the America of the present, nor even that of Woodstock, but that of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Joad.

This time, though, there's something new: Dylan picks up a guitar again, after being forced by the aches of age to set it aside in recent years in favour of keyboards. He'll play it for the first five songs of the concert, before hunching back over his keyboard for the rest of the evening.

The apocalyptic nursery rhyme of "Cat's In The Well" warms, with its stomping boogie, the atmosphere of a Forum di Assago far from sold out, despite the usual rivers of ink that have preceded Dylan's landing in Italy. His voice is like a razor blade, ready to plunge into the scarlet reflections of a craggy "It Ain't Me, Babe" and the pronounced blues accents of a mischievous "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues". He seems to savour every word as he chases the powerful electric rendering of "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)". He seems to smile under his moustache as he turns "To Ramona" into a folk waltz and "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" into a joyous singalong, picturing himself as the musician at a village fair.

The setlist holds no surprises, a sign of a repertoire that has increasingly hardened around the Sixties classics: Fernanda Pivano, reclining in the VIP box like a vestal virgin of utopias worn down by time, will probably be delighted, but the restless personality of a man like Dylan seems to be struggling inside a gilded cage. And let's do away, once and for all, with the cliché that Dylan always makes his songs unrecognisable: for quite some time now, Mr. Zimmerman has seemed all too willing to indulge the expectations of those who come to listen to him with their heads full of stereotypes.

The band runs on mechanisms too well-oiled to surprise, weaving with Denny Freeman a web of redundant solos along the familiar paths of songs like "Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again" and "Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)". Dylan's voice, for its part, alternates rasps and growls with its magnetic harshness, but while in the studio he manages to capture the nuances of a captivating croon, on stage he tends at times to give in to excessive emphasis.

On the dancing rhythms of "Spirit On The Water" and "When The Deal Goes Down", Dylan unleashes flashes of harmonica and carousel-organ swirls, drawing the audience into his crooked Chaplin-esque moves to the beat of "Thunder On The Mountain". And when the sharp, twilight shadow of "Nettie Moore" arrives, the melancholy tremor of Donnie Herron's violin pierces the heart with an ancestral yearning. It seems to emerge from the distant voice of a folksinger leaning against a shack on a cotton field, that story of regret, wandering roads and sins to atone for: the ghosts of Lost John and Nettie Moore lend Dylan their tears to carry him far from the madness of modern times.

It's no coincidence that the most intense moment of the evening comes from the pages of "Modern Times". Surely everyone in the audience carries in their head the image of their own Dylan. An image always at odds with reality, an image impossible to satisfy: monotonous to the devoted, enigmatic to the uninitiated. "No, I'm not the one you're looking for," Dylan repeats for the umpteenth time. As he recently stated, for him the relationship between artist and audience is not one between friends, it's more like stopping to admire a Van Gogh painting. Dylan is never what we would like him to be. But isn't that exactly why it's still worth showing up before this dapper cowboy with a face etched by wrinkles?

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