The mystique of both Bob Dylan and Jimmy Page have been about never truly stopping for a second.
Although both of them have gone through their fair share of shakeups throughout their career, it’s better for them to keep busy doing whatever next venture they’re working on rather than dwelling on whatever they had in the past. It’s easy to see both of them celebrating their own legacy in some respect, but the only way to prove that they were legends is to still deliver their material whenever they go onstage.
Then again, that’s also been more than a little bit complicated for both of them. Page does have a few moments where he looks like he’s having the time of his life playing live, but since Robert Plant wouldn’t entertain the idea of ever doing a proper Led Zeppelin reunion, it made more sense for the guitarist to get his rocks off by performing with other groups, whether that was when he started The Firm or his collaborations with Foo Fighters or The Black Crowes whenever he jumped onstage.
And with all due respect to Dylan, it’s not like his voice is the same as it used to be. He has a fantastic way of reinterpreting his songs through a modern lens, but it’s bound to be a bit of a disappointment if someone expects to hear the man who sang ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’ to take to the stage and is greeted with a bunch of songs that are either unrecognisable or instances where he avoids his older material.
After all, it was about forward motion for him half the time, but even when he was trying to capture what was happening in the here and now, it’s not like he knocked it out of the park. Dylan’s time as a glorified rock and roll preacher back in the day was bound to be hard for people to watch, but even with a few lacklustre records in his arsenal, Dylan wasn’t prepared for what happened to him when he played Live Aid.
The historic gig would have been enough for any musician’s lifetime if they played there, but by the time that Dylan took to the stage, he was less than impressed with the accommodations, saying, “They screwed around with us. We didn’t even have any (sound) monitors out there. When they threw in the grand finale at the last moment, they took all the settings off and set the stage up for the 30 people who were standing behind the curtain. We couldn’t even hear our own voices (out front), and when you can’t hear, you can’t play; you don’t have any timing.”
Granted, the whole operation was a bit of a touch-and-go operation. Not every band is used to working on the fly like that, but as much as Paul McCartney may have had his fair share of issues once he took the stage at Wembley, it’s easy to see U2 and Queen perform and have a wonderful time playing with the crowd.
For someone that had prepared a long-awaited reunion like Page did, though, he felt that the inclusion of Phil Collins behind the drumkit didn’t exactly do anything to help matters, saying, “Robert [Plant] told me Phil Collins wanted to play with us. I told him that was all right if he knows the numbers. But at the end of the day, he didn’t know anything. We played ‘Whole Lotta Love,’ and he was just there bashing away cluelessly and grinning. I thought that was really a joke.”
While you’re not going to please everybody in these situations, it’s easy to look at the concert for what it is in hindsight. Dylan and Page didn’t have the best experience playing, but this was a case of music actually bringing people together for a good cause that sought to heal the world, if only for a second.
