Recommendations of the Editorial team
Six years ago, towards the end of a concert in Austria, Bob Dylan got into rage over fans who took photos and made videos that he broke the set, almost fell and the audience blamed unusually sharply. “Take photos or don’t take photos,” he hissed. “We can either play or pose. Ok?”
Dylan in the smartphone sea
In recent years, fans have remained no choice at his headliner shows because cell phones were prohibited. Folders patrolled the gears with flashlights. And threatened to throw everyone out that did not stick to the rule. The result was a refreshingly old -fashioned concert experience in which people actually watched the stage. And lived at the moment. Hardly against audio recordings were ran and brilliant recordings were circulating. But video documentaries remained rare and often unusable, since the control breakers filmed from a long distance and under difficult angles.
Last summer, however, Dylan entered Willie Nelson at the Outlaw Music Festival. A large tour of amphitheater with up to 20,000 seats. A mobile phone ban was simply not enforceable there. There was no chance to control all of these seats. For the first time in years, Dylan played again in front of a sea of iPhones. Advantage: If something special happened-like the return of “Mr. Tambourine Man” after 15 years or a surprising pogues cover-everyone could see it the next morning on YouTube. Disadvantage: Dylan may have annoyed the whole thoroughly.
When the tour continued after a four -week break on Friday in Bangor, Maine, Dylan used drastic means to become practically invisible on stage. He sat behind a wing, put the note of the music up, let himself be surrounded by four bright headlights and pulled the hood deep into the face. According to fan reports, even the first rows could hardly see more than the tip of his hood. For the rest he was only a shadowy stain behind the piano – if at all.
Frustration in the audience
“I have never experienced anything like this in my 20 years at Dylan shows,” wrote Dylan superfan Ray Padgett in his newsletter “Flagging Down the Double Es”. “The bigger problem was not that I personally saw bad-Boo-Hoo, my bad luck!-but that this resulted in the worst mood that I ever experienced at an outlaw concert. People were angry.”
He drastically described the dissatisfaction of the audience. “A woman next to me spent the first half of complaining loudly and offering everyone her binoculars to prove that they do nothing,” wrote Padgett. “Another who probably cooked silently all the time, finally roared ‘What the Fuck!’ While ‘blind Willie McTell’, the crowd pushed and left the space.
Annoyed by cell phone culture
Of course it is not a doppelganger. It is Bob Dylan himself – he is only finally annoyed by the fact that people prefer to look at the concert through their cell phones than with their own eyes. And who wants to blame him? Cell phones often make concerts unbearable. (I wrote about it in detail in 2013-and since then it has only gotten worse.) At the recently in Pasadena, many hardly stared at the stage. Instead, they made selfies, filmed song excerpts and immediately loaded them up to social media. The rest of us was blinded by the screens and degraded to extras in foreign photo shoots.
The core of a concert
The meaning of a concert is to experience something special live and directly. What does it bring to go if you only hang on your cell phone all the time? The pictures look miserable, and thousands of other films anyway. If you want to see this again, you can find it on YouTube the next day. You don’t have to turn the video yourself.
As George Costanza said so aptly: “We live in a society.” If we don’t finally behave that way, Bob Dylan may become even more invisible on the stage – or he sings right away from the wardrobe. Until then: put the damned cell phones away. Bob has enough.