"A Moment I'll Cherish Forever!"
Bob Dylan in Phoenix - A review by Sergi Fabregat Mata
Few seconds after Bob Dylan started playing 'Mr. Tambourine Man' in Phoenix in 2025, almost 15 years after the last time, in Carcassonne, which was just a few days after the first time I saw him in concert in Barcelona (where he didn't play the song), I realized how lucky I was and how genuinely happy it made me to be there. The same morning we where due to fly to the US, on Monday 12th of May, I almost called off the entire trip for personal and family issues going on back home and it was almost at the last minute that I decided to go, one more time. The first time Bob exhorted that "play a song for ME!", almost as if pleading it, I could see in the flesh how miserable I would've felt waking up in Barcelona to that setlist in Phoenix, I'm not joking when I say it could've had some nasty consequences in my most inner self, that's how important I realize, time after time, no matter the tally of shows or how too fast each trip seems to come after another, that these songs are for me.
'Mr. Tambourine Man' got a similar treatment to last year's Outlaw 'Hard Rain' or 'Baby Blue' since halfway through the Fall European Tour last year: stripped down, few piano inclinations here and there, and Bob's voice conveying each and every nuance it can be extracted from those wonderful and dreamy words. To me, this song has always been the ultimate one about death, and without any gloomy or sad attitude, I say that listening an almost 84yo Bob Dylan singing "My senses have been stripped, My hands can't feel to grip, My toes too numb to step, Wait only for my boot heels to be wandering, I'm ready to go anywhere, I'm ready for to fade, Into my own parade" in such a meaningful fashion for the first time is a moment I'll cherish forever. It was probably out of that feeling of luck and happiness that I resolved to take my phone out and record a video of the last verse of the song, to have a tangible remembrance of the feeling whenever I should need it and, beyond that, to share it, not to post it, with family and friends that were not in Phoenix but that definitely were on my mind.
If I had to describe the overall feeling of that first, truly surprising and too full of highlights to go song by song, I'd say it can be helpful to talk about what we did the following day, when we went to the Grand Canyon. We took a tour to the Canyon from Phoenix and our guide prepared a procedure (he called it "the reveal") so we wouldn't see anything of the Grand Canyon until he instructed us to turn around and see it in full for the first time. To say that first vista was unforgettable would be a big, huge understatement: for a good couple of minutes, my mind couldn't process what I was seeing, period. My mother lately put it amazingly, conveying the feeling better than any picture: it's as if someone had taken a mold of a huge mountain range and turned it upside down. Something is happening but you don't know what it is, indeed. Then, as when your eyes get used to darkness, you start processing the image and noticing colors, shapes, heights, distances... And yet, you go back to that first feeling of unfathomable impossibility.
With all the reasonable differences, the Phoenix show felt a bit that way, too much to process it for real at the beginning, yet you could hang on to some moments, inflections, feelings and the picture started to became clearer. Moments like that first major setlist change when, after 'I'll Be Your Baby Tonight' and 'It Ain't Me Babe' made me fear we were in for just a shortened extension of the Spring setlist, an incredible rendition, thunderously start-stopping, of 'Forgetful Heart' kicked in and opened the prospect on a new experience. Or when, just after a few chords of 'To Ramona', before Bob starting singing, I grabbed my mom's arm and excitedly told her "I know what is coming!" and then lost it quite a bit (to the surprise of people around) when "Ramona come closer" exited Bob's mouth. Or when I looked at the big screens at I realized the purpose of the little lighted Christmas tree was completely obscuring Bob's face (advice: seats closer to the stage at the far right side may be the way to go) and felt is was equally evil and funny. Or the beautiful, really beautiful repetition of the last line of 'A Rainy Night in Soho' ("the measure of my dreams") with Bob's melodic vocal abilities flying highest in a moment to truly treasure. Or that spectacular new arrangement of 'All Along the Watchtower' that proved the purposefulness and seriousness with which Bob has attacked the Outlaw first leg this time, seeming incredibly that the last 'Rough & Rowdy Ways' show was literally three weeks ago.
I loved seeing myself tilting my head at the first chords of each song trying to guess what was coming up, trying to not get stuck in each novelty and keep the pace of the amount of new things that kept popping constantly. As it also happened at the Grand Canyon the following day, a Bob Dylan show keeps changing and evolving the longer you look into it, its echoes really reaching further and running longer after he leaves the stage.
While I was recording the video of the last verse of 'Mr. Tambourine Man', Bob embarked on a really unique phrasing for a couple of lines before the last chorus, he did some kind of upping progression, word by word, during "with-all-the-memory-and-FATE, driven-deep-beneath-the-WAVES" and, later, while checking the video, I could hear myself in it whispering a "yes..." when I noticed what he was doing, only that I thought that that "yes" didn't leave my mouth, except that it did, as if another side of me was saying it too.