‘Never-ending’ tour brings Bob Dylan back to Las Vegas

The first songwriter to be bestowed the Nobel Prize in Literature did it his way, defying expectations, just as he has so many times in a six-decade career as rock’s premier poet.

Bob Dylan’s first public appearance following the award announcement last October occurred not at a press conference where he graciously accepted, but on a stage in Las Vegas where he stuck to what was on the setlist.

Dylan later said he would attend the Nobel ceremony “if I can” and ultimately picked up his prize three months after the gala when his tour took him to Stockholm.

Since the late 1980s, the 76-year-old Dylan has maintained a near-constant show schedule, dubbed by some the Never Ending Tour.

This year’s slate brings him back to The Chelsea at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas on Saturday. Tickets range from $59-$149 for the 8 p.m. show.

What keeps Dylan on the road for a hundred dates a year? (Hint: It’s not exchanging pleasantries with the crowd, something he avoids like phone calls from the Nobel Prize committee.)

The simple answer is, it’s just what he does. You don’t ask a bluebird, no matter how raspy-throated, why he sings, do you?

But, for all of his travels, Dylan’s clearly not interested in going back in time, and those who attend a Dylan show seeking a nostalgia trip will be sorely disappointed. The old songs typically bear little resemblance to their famed recordings.

Dylan reinterprets them freely like an artist covering over an old canvas, haunted by a Mona Lisa smile, trying to paint his elusive masterpiece.

Never mind that he has already penned enough masterpieces to fill a wing of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The same restless, hungry spirit that keeps him on the road, keeps him tinkering with the music.

Dylan, of course, has made a career out of reinventing himself: troubadour kid; folk-singing voice of a generation; Beat poet; thin, wild, mercurial rock star; Nashville cat; dark-eyed gypsy; world-weary bluesman; gleam-in-his-eye riverboat gambler; crooner of traditional-pop standards. Just a few of the stage personas he’s worn.

They’re all merely a variation on his greatest creation: Bob Dylan, the rock-and-roll identity assumed by Bobby Zimmerman, the boy from the North Country, a nod to poet Dylan Thomas or maybe, more likely, Marshal Matt Dillon.

His grandmother told him, Dylan writes in his memoir “Chronicles: Volume One,” that happiness isn’t on the road to anything; happiness is the road.

His longest break from the touring during his Never Ending run coincided with a life-threatening illness in 1997 and was followed by the release of “Time Out of Mind,” the Grammy-winning album that began a late-career renaissance.

Since his last album of original songs, 2012’s “Tempest,” Dylan has turned out three records of Great American Songbook standards such as “That Old Black Magic,” “Stormy Weather” and “All the Way.” Over the past few years, he’s mixed a handful of these chestnuts into his shows.

Clearly, he’s not Sinatra, but Dylan has proven himself a capable and captivating interpreter of these golden-era tunes. Aside from the material, it doesn’t represent much of a departure from what Dylan has been doing for years, reshaping his own songs as if they were written by someone else.

He may not play the hits quite like you remember them, but continuing on this way has kept one of the greatest songwriters of all time excited about making music and touring as he nears 80.

For that, Dylan fans should feel like they just won a prize.

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