Bob Dylan Heinz Hall show doesn’t deliver

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

If someone had told you the day would come when Bob Dylan would be singing Frank Sinatra standards at Heinz Hall, you would have thought they were stoned.

Actually, it may have required hallucinogens to wrap your head around that concept.

Dylan is the absolute furthest thing from a crooner, and at 76 he barely has the voice for his own songs let alone the Great American Songbook. His nasally bray has been wearing thin for decades now, but Dylan does what Dylan does — he’s earned that right — and God knows, he loves to mess with us.

The best we can say about Dylan does Frank is that there is a certain poignancy to the old fighter inching back, bending his knees and tilting his mic stand, lounge lizard-style, to sing a raspy “Why Try to Change Me Now.”

It was among five standards inserted into a 20-song set Monday night containing just six of his classics from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Those old songs are STILL being reworked, not always for the better, considering the current state of “Tangled Up in Blue.” It sounded like it almost wanted to be a Grateful Deadstyle shuffle. I’m not sure what it was, but it had the potential, like “Desolation Row,” to slip by without people recognizing it.

More true to the originals were “It Ain’t Me Babe” and “Highway 61 Revisited,” the former delivered in slow, stately fashion, and the latter being one of the punchier rock moments in the set.