Forest Hills Stadium
1 Tennis Pl., Forest Hills
Friday, July 8, $50-$365, 7:00
www.foresthillsstadium.com
On August 28, 1965, a twenty-four-year-old Bob Dylan took the stage in Forest Hills Stadium and played two sets, the first acoustic, the second electric, a combined fifteen songs, nearly every one destined to become a classic if it wasn’t already. Dylan’s Never Ending Tour returns to Forest Hills on July 8, with a seventy-five-year-old Dylan and his band, including Charlie Sexton, Stu Kimball, and Donnie Herron on guitars, Tony Garnier on bass, and George Recile on drums, ready to perform two sets that total twenty-one songs, only one of which was played back in ’65, and seven of which are Tin Pan Alley covers. After years of changing up his setlist night after night, switching among tunes from throughout his storied career, the man formerly known as Robert Zimmerman has been playing the same twenty-one songs at every show going back nearly two years now, and he’s been performing fewer of his own songs — and he lets you know it from the opening number, the Oscar-winning “Things Have Changed,” in which he declares, “Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose / Any minute now I’m expecting all hell to break loose.” If you’re going to the show expecting to hear Dylan’s greatest hits, well, you’re not going to; he does play a few, but in such different arrangements that many people in the audience might not even recognize them. But Dylan has always done things his way, over the course of more than fifty years and thirty-seven albums, and that hasn’t changed, especially if you’ve been paying attention. His last two albums consist only of standards; Shadows in the Night features ten songs previously covered by Frank Sinatra, and the new Fallen Angels boasts a dozen old-timers, kicking off with “Young at Heart,” a bit of sly Dylan humor.
Both albums are surprisingly good; Dylan’s craggier-than-ever voice still knows its way around a tune, his phrasing impeccable. You should also know that he doesn’t play guitar anymore, for health reasons, so instead he stands at a concert grand. Thus, when you arrive at Forest Hills Stadium, if you are expecting to see a restaging of his 1965 show, with Dylan plucking the six-string and singing earth-shaking folk songs and rock and roll, you’re at the wrong place. But if you go with an open mind, letting Bob be Bob — or, in this case, Frank — you’re in for a treat. The legendary R&B and gospel singer and civil rights activist Mavis Staples, a member of the Staples Singers as well as a solo artist in her own right, opens the show. Staples, whose soaring voice is quite an alternative to Dylan’s, has several connections with Bob; her family covered “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” way back when, and Dylan once told Pops Staples that he was going to marry Mavis. “I often think about what would have happened if I’d married Bobby, though,” she told the Guardian this past February. “If we’d had some little plum-crushers, how our lives would be. The kids would be singing now, and Bobby and I would be holding each other up.” They’ll be holding each other up in a different way on July 8, when their tour pulls into Forest Hills Stadium.
