Bob Dylan’s return to “The Late Show with David Letterman” Tuesday for its penultimate broadcast was, like the rest of the show and the one Monday too a little wandering.
The final Letterman shows may have reached their peak last week, when big stars like Al Pacino walked in to read Top 10 lists unannounced, where George Clooney handcuffed himself to Dave to keep him from going (a gag that lasted two nights, since the Thursday and Friday editions are taped the same night); when Tom Waits unveiled a new song and Norm MacDonald had a funny and heartfelt tribute to the host.
This week, Tom Hanks and Eddie Vedder Monday spoke to an earlier, not so special episode. Bill Murray, for his part Tuesday, broke through in a cake and got frosting all over. Then he seemed pretty wiped out and Letterman tried to pry “Caddyshack” details out of him.
This made Dylan have more life by comparison and he was the oldest guy on the show. He turns 74 Sunday; Letterman is 68; Murray, 64.
Introduced as the greatest songwriter of modern times, he nonetheless chose to play a composition of somebody else, as he did the first time he was on Letterman’s show in 1984, confounding audiences at the time with a Sony Boy Williamson cover.
Here, his choice of “The Night We Called It a Day,” a haunting reading of the old Sinatra song, written in 1941 by Matt Dennis and Tom Adair, is one of a dozen on his latest album “Shadows in the Night,” but obviously a good choice for the occasion.
It was not, however, a song he’d been playing on his recent tour, where just one or two songs from the new album have appeared. But it was the one for which he created a sort of disturbing video that reimagined him as a film noir figure (seen below).
What may have surprised former Dylan fans who have written him off because of his froggy voice in recent years was how smooth his delivery was; how on key it was and how effective it was in expressing the song, with all of its hearing and world-weariness.
With his road band barely perceptible behind him, the presentation was exactly in the manner of recent shows, though: with golden but rather dim direct lighting and crooning before a microphone (though two were set up). What was most unusual is that it was a single shot, straight on, with no cuts, as if Dylan had directed the segment himself instead of the guys in the booth, who’d normally be cutting in, swooping down and switching angles.
This left Dylan in kind of a box, so when there was an instrumental break, he’d start pacing back and forth, maybe to let off some nervous energy, but he couldn’t go far. He was kind of trapped, which might have been a secondary metaphor for the Letterman situation.