A slightly different setting has him on a checkerboard linoleum, adding to the “Twin Peaks” nightclub vibe.
Not a live event, the 50-minute, 12-song presentation is more like an extended black and white video. There are no songs from “Rough and Rowdy Ways” (whose cover suggested a similar fantasy juke joint), and nothing in fact from the past 30 years of the Dylan songbook.
At the outset, the special is subtitled “The Early Songs of Bob Dylan” and it includes a number of choice selections he hadn’t been putting in his concerts for a while.
Backed by a masked, entirely new, mostly acoustic band of guitars, accordion and standup bass (no drums and only later electric guitar), there is also a mandolin in the opening “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” a performance made notable because Dylan seems to be strumming his own guitar, an instrument that he had largely abandoned on stage for the past decade or so for no stated reason.
It’s all part of the stagecraft, it turns out: You can’t hear what he’s playing and he stops altogether at one point to pop his lapels or make a point. He does play some harmonica here and there, however.
With her long blonde hair wagging, standup bassist Janie Cowan makes her presence known in the band that also includes guitarist Buck Meek of Big Thief and Shahzad Ismally, who has backed Elvis Costello, Will Oldham and Laurie Anderson. Rounding out the tasteful, laid back band: Joshua Crumbly and Alex Burke. An ancient clavichord seems to be played during “Forever Young.”
Being off the road so long has lent a new clarity to Dylan’s voice; its cragginess is gone. The selections are generally slowed down; some, like “Tom Thumb’s Blues,” approach spoken word.
There’s an amusing moment as he sings “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” lodged between two women, all coiffed, made-up and dressed up for the occasion (and one of them takes time to wipe dust from Dylan’s shoulder).
He sits to ask “What Was It You Wanted?” the song from 1989’s “Oh Mercy” that is the most recent thing included, as if inquiring to those who ponied up the $25 and fees whether he was delivering.
As if to get his smoking bar patrons to get up and dance, he delivers “Pledging My Time” as a blues and does “The Wicked Messenger” the way the Faces did it in 1970.
There’s a full blown dance party going on for his statement of purpose “Watching the River Flow,” and a woman stands among the band on stage, sneering, as if to illustrate it.
He bids farewell in the concluding “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” misidentified in the overly large captions as just “Baby Blue.” Likewise, “Queen Jane Approximately” was titled merely “Queen Jane” as if to indicated all approximations are over and he’s fully landed it.
More likely, these songs will change more once Dylan gets back on the road. And is there any doubt that, at 75, he’ll be back out soon? (His last show before a paying audience, incidentally, was December, 2019 at the Anthem in Washington, D.C.).
When he does, “Shadow Kingdom” will stand not among the streaming performances scores of other musicians played during the pandemic, but as another engrossing incarnation of one of America’s most creative artists, like his 1994 “MTV Unplugged,” or 2019’s revisionist “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese.”
People will seek out bootlegs or tapes of it in years to come, and Dylan will have moved on.
The setlist for “Bob Dylan: Shadow Kingdom” was:
- “When I Paint My Masterpiece”
- “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)”
- “Queen Jane Approximately”
- “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”
- “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”
- “Tombstone Blues”
- “To Be Alone with You”
- “What Was it You Wanted?”
- “Forever Young”
- “Pledging My Time”
- “The Wicked Messenger”
- “Watching the River Flow”
- “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”