Bob Dylan in Helsinki

A Wil Reidie Review

Hi to you all.

Last Thursday (October 16) I went down to Helsinki to watch Bob Dylan play live.

This is what I wrote on the train back home.

Love,

Wil

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I’ve been playing games in the Legend of Zelda series since 1998 when an entry called The Ocarina of Time was released. I was 12 years old. It’s not lost on me that people subscribed to what often looks like a food newsletter might not know what the hell Zelda or time ocarinas are but, being something I love dearly, perhaps you’ll let me introduce you.

The Legend of Zelda is a series of adventure computer games made by a Japanese company called Nintendo. Since its 2D beginnings in 1986 to the most recent edition released in 2023, the game always features a young elf-like hero called Link who lives in a magical fantasy world called Hyrule who is tasked with saving a princess, the titular Zelda, from the hands of a red-haired super-baddy named Ganon.

Helping Link along the way to save Zelda, and in turn Hyrule itself, are various friendly peoples such as the rock-eating Gorons, reptilian Zora, and the human equivalent in the Zelda universe, the Hylians. And, being a fantasy adventure with lots of very PG-13, bloodless violence, there are plenty of exotic weapons for Link to avail himself of as well.

I grew up with these games, and it gives me no end of pleasure that, just as I start to introduce such things to my own son, the Zelda games are more popular than ever.

Nintendo’s hugely popular Switch console launched in 2017 with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. And, though it featured many of the elements you’d expect from a Zelda game, it brought the series into riotously contemporary style with a beautifully polished and accessible open-world setting. Along with its direct sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, they are by far the biggest-selling Zelda games ever released.

That’s not to say a vocal band of online joystick fingerers didn’t find something to be upset by in these attempts to modernise the decades-old franchise. With a new open-world structure, for example, the game and its challenges could be played in any order. Some players found this undermined the story. It made the narrative too confusing and unfamiliar.

Another issue surrounded those weapons of Link’s. The game designers had decided that any weapon you pick up would have a built-in life-span. It could only ever be used to bludgeon a goblin or hack away at a weird flying lizard thing so much until it, eventually, broke.

A Zelda game had never had such a feature before.

Maybe I’m a hopeless Nintendo fanboy, but these things just didn’t bother me. Just hearing that delicate orchestral music at the title screen or riding my horse across the open fields of Hyrule, different as the realistic fields look now to the polygonal ones I knew back in 1998, is happiness to me.

And besides, when those weapons ever do eventually break, something really rather fun happens. Instead of going out with a whimper, the final stroke of the departing blade or club or axe, like a dying sun gone supernova, unleashes a final explosion of power greater than any number of individual blows the weapon could have effected previously. It doesn’t make for a precise final blow. It isn’t accurate and any nearby enemies are liable to receive damage as well, but it’s very satisfying. It leaves you thinking that the weapon’s true power had always been held in reserve for that one final blow at the end of things.

It’s precisely this explosive release of unrefined but brutally efficient and joyous power that I thought of when listening to Bob Dylan sing live a few nights ago at the Veikkaus Arena in Helsinki.

Though I’m “only” 39, I’ve been watching Bob Dylan play live for 25 years now. The first of his gigs I went to was at Wembley Arena in 2000. If we disregard my attendance at a 1998 Spice Girls concert (which I’d never admit to here anyway) that Dylan gig was the first one I ever went to.

I’ve seen him live seven times as of Thursday night. Though I may have missed his zeitgeist-defining 60s, the Christian Evangelical/sock in mouth 70s, and his mediocre 80s journey to the end of the 90s that saw him find form again with 1997’s Time Out of Mind, I do feel confident discussing his post-Millennium, living-legend era.

I’ve stopped short of calling myself an expert though; that wouldn’t describe it at all. Bob has existed for me in less clinical ways than this would allow. I think he occupies the space in my life that a cuddly toy might in a normal person’s, or maybe the old apple tree that stands in the front garden of the house you grew up in and never moved away from. He’s simply always been there for me. A source of comfort.

It started the same day I discovered music itself. I was 14 and thought I’d have a go at my sister’s cheap nylon string guitar that she never used. The “10 Songs to Learn” book that came with it began with a number called “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”.

That first gig at Wembley followed about six months later. Five years after that I took my new uni buddies along when he was playing at Brixton Academy. They all hated it for reasons that will become clear shortly. A few more gigs in England would follow before I saw him in Finland in 2014 at the Pori Jazz Festival with a Finnish girl I’d met the year before. 12 months later she would agree to be my wife and, by the time we were married and living in Stockholm together in 2019, we took his playing at a local stadium as the first opportunity for a night away from our then six month old son. The six years between then and seeing him on Thursday has been the longest I’ve left it since I was 14 years old.

Within a few bars of the first song on Thursday, one of the few classics he played called “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”, I was reminded as to why those uni friends of mine found so little to enjoy at the show I took them to: playing live, Bob’s songs are largely unrecognisable from how he recorded them.

Songs recorded as gentle folk ballads become 50s-style pop numbers and familiar chord progressions mutate into jangly rhythm and blues guitar riffs. Even the tracks from Rough and Rowdy Ways, his latest record and just 5 years old, would often take me a full verse to recognise them.

Maybe I’m a hopeless Dylan fanboy, but this is all part of the fun for me. One comes away from his show with the feeling the setlist wasn’t that important at all. Rather, a performance of his is an hour and 45 minutes of Bob Dylan doing whatever the hell he wants on stage, the list of songs little more than a rough framework by which he can do this as opposed to a promise of what the audience can expect to get.

Take Thursday’s rendition of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, for example. Though the haunting piano he played gave the song an almost dirge-like quality compared to the percussive guitar of the original 60s recording, it was actually one of the evening’s easier to recognise songs. Then something I find really endearing happened. During the pleasingly improvised instrumental build up to the final verse, Bob appeared to happen on a run of three or four notes on his piano he clearly took a shine to. He repeated them over and over, the band improvising along with him, filling in the holes as required. And, once that final verse came along, Bob simply didn’t let them go. As his rhythm and lead guitarists kept the song moving along, Bob persevered with his new-found motif, even letting it bleed into the melody as he sang the final lines.

My uni friends went to see Bob in London with me 20 years ago on my recommendation. I’d never make that mistake again. Nobody new to Bob Dylan, who likes him on the back of a few songs or “best of” record, should go and see him play live. You just won’t hear anything the way you know and love it. You go to a Dylan gig because you want to hear a voice that, once thin and whiney on those timeless early recordings, now sounds more like an axe felling an oak. You go for the chance to hear in person the sound of that iconic harmonica, the one that sounds almost painfully shrieking on his early records but has actually ended up pretty intricate played live as an octogenarian. And, yes, you go to experience Bob Dylan, the Nobel Prize winner, figuring out a new, possibly improvised, piano riff that doesn’t quite work perfectly, and definitely doesn’t resolve that favourite song of yours the way you want it to, but, hey, it seems to make him happy. At many of his shows I’ve been to, the posters have advertised Bob as being “LIVE AND IN PERSON”. There’s nothing more live and in person than a legend like Dylan, aged 85, visiting a place as far from the world’s bright centre as Finland, trying new things and improvising new ideas just because it seems to make him happy.

And that’s OK with me because he is, after all, the guy who wrote “Not Dark Yet”.

I can’t think of many things I loved as a newly-minted teen in 2000 that still mean as much to me now as Zelda games and Bob Dylan. The books I read are different now, the films I watch, the food I enjoy most. But Bob and Zelda still remain. When I think back to playing that first Zelda game of mine, The Ocarina of Time, and the song I’d listen to on repeat the most, “Not Dark Yet”, I recognise I am doing so at the hardest time of my life¹. A time filled with the most worry and confusion and tears. Looking back to those days I’m reminded, or maybe shocked is the word, by how resilient the child can be, how much better at handling the hardships and vicissitudes of life than the adult self. Though I could just be being hard on myself when thinking this. The Ocarina of Time centres around a child hero called Link. He finds himself thrown magically into the future, and his adult body, to find the world he knew twisted by Ganon into a cold and brutal shadow of the one he remembers. The loss of a carefree past echoes across every corner of that story. “Not Dark Yet” remains the saddest song I think I’ve ever heard as well. Why, at our saddest moments, do we listen to the saddest songs and enjoy such sad stories? I wonder if it’s because doing so helps us lose touch of our own sadness for a moment, a brief, shallow, moment. As though our sadness becomes washed over and drowned out by doing so. The opposite of a laughter track on some cheesy sitcom that always seems to do the laughing for you.

Maybe it’s how much they’ve changed, Bob’s music and those Zelda games, that render them still so special to me. Familiar enough to feel like old friends, but not so identical that they remind me of sadder days.

But there you have it. Either you love a thing enough for it to change, or you don’t.

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1. Sorry for the morbidly emo-mid-noughties-Facebook-status-style lack of detail here but this will do for now, I think.