The Big Read: Rock 'n' rolling back the years

14 October 2016 - 10:52 By Darrel Bristow-Bovey

I'm surprised Bob Dylan isn't French, or a cat. For a creature neither French nor a cat, Bob Dylan sure is a master of disdain. Imagine 75000 people have all gathered in one place to see you. The day has been hot and bright and yellow but now it's cooling to pink and tangerine and the sun is setting behind blue mountains, casting a long warm shadow that is purple, flecked with gold.All these people are thrumming like strings pulled taut, they're smiling and jostling and thrilled to be here, tonight, right now. In all the world, in all of time, there's nowhere else anyone would rather be. Everyone is glitteringly, radiantly present.They've all driven at least two hours into the desert from Los Angeles, but a good many have come from far further off - from London and Australia, from Mumbai and Germany and Dubai, and at least one of them has flown for nearly two full days on three British Airways flights from Cape Town, compulsively collecting sleep masks as though he's quartermaster for a gang of bandits, slathering himself in the swanky moisturiser you are given in ClubWorld, feeling like some perfumed prince of Versailles.The occasion is Desert Trip, a three-day super-concert earlier this week in the beautiful bone-clean desert 30 minutes outside the low-rise dry-heat oasis of Palm Springs where Frank Sinatra once kept his holiday home.Tonight is the first night and the Stones will play later, each with hips so narrow you could easily use a Rolling Stone to snake a drain. After a certain point you have to choose between your face and your figure, and the Stones have been unequivocal in their choice. At least one person in the front row of the crowd feels the urge to throw handfuls of ClubWorld moisturiser on-stage during Sympathy for the Devil.But before the Stones, it's your turn, and you're Bob Dylan, and when you walk out in the violet dusk in your wide-brimmed white hat the air shimmers with heat waves of concentrated love.And what do you do? Do you greet them with a shy smile and a cheery wave? Do you say hello, or howdy, or anything at all? Do you so much as allow the cameras to project your image onto the vast screens behind you, so the poor schmucks at the very back can even be sure you're really there? No, you don't.You stand in one place in front of weird back-projected images of pigeons and railway tracks, you play songs for two hours and then turn on your heel and walk off like a man who has politely been enduring a conversation with his neighbour but has just remembered that he left the water running in his bath.But does the crowd turn on you and hiss and shuffle its feet? Do people grumble and boo? They do not. They love you for being so very Bob Dylan. In fact, later in the week, they will give you the Nobel prize for literature.In the Diamond Lounge I met an English woman of mysteriously undisclosed profession who lives in Abu Dhabi and flew in because the concert lineup was like polar sea-ice or giant pandas or the snows of Kilimanjaro: this might be the last chance to see them all in the wild. "It's a massive extinction event!" she said, her eyes glittering. Then she recognised Benicio del Toro and wandered off to say hello.She was partially right: death was present on the stage. It was there when Paul's voice quavered as he spoke about John Lennon, and when Roger Waters played The Wall and I thought about my old friend E. who loved Pink Floyd and how I wished he was here; it was there when Mick jumped and pirouetted at the end of Jumpin' Jack Flash and landed with a little uncontrolled grimace which he turned his head to try conceal. Death was there, death is everywhere, but mostly there was life."It's good to be here," said Keith Richards, halfway through. "It's good to be anywhere."And it's true. I thought of all the kids who bought the old line about living fast and dying young, those poor unlucky kids who never grew up to be old men, proud of what they've done, still giving and taking pleasure, feeling the warm night on their faces.I thought how beautiful it is to be alive, to be part of a sea of faces upturned in joy beneath a dark desert sky, all of us, fans and bands, here together for as long as it lasts, sticking together beneath the merciless waiting stars.At the end of Neil Young's set he said: "Look after the one beside you." Yes. Please do. And look after yourself too...

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