Cut to the chase: he played only one hit song by his “other” band, the Wallflowers: “Three Marlenas,” which fit in swimmingly with the rest of his set list, drawn entirely from Jakob Dylan’s two recent solo albums, 2008’s Seeing Things and this year’s Women + Country.
And no, for those who still expect it, he did not play any songs by nor acknowledge his relationship to his father. Duh. Why should he?
Then again, he doesn’t need to, because as Dylan matures – he turned 40 last December – he looks remarkably more like his father every day (check out the photos accompanying this review).
But what Jakob Dylan did offer was an intense, if somewhat monochromatic, 90-minute run-through of his more recent roots-rock. He played the entire Women + Country program and most of Seeing Things, and made it all sound of a piece, backed by the ensemble named Three Legs for this tour, but typically working as singer Neko Case’s backup band.
Case, along with Kelly Hogan, were on hand to lend backup vocals, harmonies, and occasional duets, and those were some of the highlights of Dylan’s show.
If not voluble, Dylan is certainly a more genial frontman than his enigmatic father, but he’s learned some lessons well, including how to stand motionless at a microphone to intone his haunting ballads and mid-tempo country-rockers about, well, women and country for the most part.
There’s been a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking going on surrounding Bob Dylan’s performance last night at the White House Civil Rights concert, with one English critic calling it the “worst” of the evening.
