The first time I saw Bob Dylan in concert was in the fall of 1978 when I was 17-years-old. I remember being really surprised that he did the whole first set solo - just him, his guitar, and his harmonica. He did a mixture of old favourites and more obscure tunes from his early albums, The Times They Are A Changing and Freewheeling Bob Dylan including "Masters Of War", "Hard Rain", and "Blowing In The Wind". In the second set he brought out his band that he was touring with at the time, and they rocked the house with stuff from his then current release, Street Legal, and various electric hits from his past.
After the immediate euphoria of being able to say I'd seen Dylan in concert had passed, I began to experience something akin to disappointment with what I had seen. It wasn't that he was bad or anything; he had performed letter perfect renditions of his material so they sounded almost exactly the way they did on his records and his band was hot. Yet the feeling of being let down persisted. More then a decade later I saw him for the second time, and this was a completely different show. He did a lot of his old material again, but this time he did versions of them that were nothing like his original recordings.
After the concert I heard people around me, including some I had come with, complaining about how they barely recognized songs and he didn't sound like he used to. It had been a difficult concert, with Dylan and his band in attack mode, mounting assaults on each number like they needed to be battered into submission. However, unlike the previous concert, which had left me feeling strangely empty, this time I found the music stayed with me and I found myself thinking about individual songs in a way that I hadn't before.
I was reminded of all this after first watching I'm Not There, the fictionalized account of Dylan's career from 1963 - 1966, and then again after watching Martin Scorsese's 2005 documentary about the same period, No Direction Home. I have to admit that having watched Todd Haynes' fictionalized account before the documentary probably affected my perception of Scorsese's work, as I spent a lot of time exclaiming over how much both Cate Blanchette and Christian Bale had been able to capture the physical characteristics of Dylan from the respective periods they portrayed, and how accurately Haynes had recreated situations and moments that showed up in the documentary.
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