A while ago, I had a question: What’s the best song Bob Dylan has never played live?

Attempting to answer that question quickly steers you into a semantic roadblock though: How you define “best”? While I’ve been known to throw the word around in various lists, we all understand “best” is being used loosely. To paraphrase Tom Friend, that’s just, like, my opinion, man.

But I wanted an answer a little more definitive than just my personal favorite he’s never played live (though I’ll get to that too). What would be the consensus pick for his best song he’s never played live?

To figure that out, I looked at Rate Your Music. This long-running site lets users do just that: rate music. Thousands of people have rated every single Bob Dylan, and all those thousands of ratings have been averaged on a five star scale. This was as good a place as I could find to get a consensus read on what the world at large considers the “best’ Bob Dylan songs. Reassuringly, the top few songs look like you’d expect among the general populace: “Like a Rolling Stone” #1, “Hurricane” #2, “Tangled Up in Blue” #3, etc.

Those top ones have all been played live though. I had to dig deeper. So I went through all the top 100 Dylan songs there. Amazingly, Dylan has played the overwhelming majority of them live. 96 out of 100, to be exact. For all the grief he gets for not playing the hits…he’s played almost all of the hits!

Only four songs on this top-100 list have never played live. Here they are, in reverse order, leading up to the best “official” designation I can think of for The Best Song Bob Dylan Never Played Live (as determined by these thousands of Rate Your Music voters, at least).

#4. Black Diamond Bay

As noted in the recent Rolling Thunder 1976 series, there was one report he did play this at the lost Salt Lake City Show. But, for various reasons you can read about here if you’re curious, that intel is highly suspect. So, at #4, the one Desire song he never played live. Probably.

#3. John Wesley Harding

You can see why many Desire songs either never got played live or, if they did, never outlived their era. The sound was very specific to that album and that band. But John Wesley Harding’s title track is an odd choice to never play. That album’s spare folk-rock seems more adaptable to different eras. Indeed, many songs from that album he’s played for decades. But never this, or “I Am a Lonesome Hobo” (#194 on the Rate Your Music list) either. Understandably, but unfortunately, a lot of the songs he’s never played live come from that post-motorcycle crash period when he wasn’t touring.

#2. Murder Most Foul

No secret why he’s never played this live—it’s long as hell! Also I imagine the vibe would be near-impossible to maintain in concert. (He’s struggled at times with “Key West,” and that’s half the length.) Every time the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour played Dallas, people wondered, was tonight the night? It never was.

And The Best Song Bob Dylan Never Played Live is…

#1. Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands

Again: A long song! Then again, he did play “Highlands” a few times, not to mention he’s played “Desolation Row” (which is two seconds longer on the record) a ton. Kinda surprising he never at least gave “Sad-Eyed Lady” a shot in the past 60 years. It was rehearsed for Rolling Thunder at least, so he apparently considered it. Renaldo and Clara include a short snippet of that rehearsal, which you can hear here (the talking over part of it is because this audio comes from the movie):

So there you have it, the best song Bob Dylan has never played live is officially “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” It lands at #16 on that Rate Your Music list, but he’s played all the Top 15, so it’s #1 for us.

But “Sad-Eyed Lady” is not my Best Song Bob Dylan Has Never Played Live. (Though, to be clear, I would hardly object to hearing any of those this summer!). So that’s the second half, after the jump. What’s the song am I personally most upset he’s never played live?

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Recently, inspired by some discussion in our paid-subscribers Discord, the essential Bob Dylan setlist site Bobserve added a cool new feature. It’s called “Recurring Samesets” and it shows every concert where Bob Dylan repeated a setlist.

Many years, this happened a lot. 1966 is a big one. The gospel era too. More recently, the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour. In recent years repeated setlists have become the norm. You’re more likely to get a setlist he’s played many other times than you are a unique one-night-only grouping of songs.

In the Never Ending Tour, though, it was generally the opposite. Up until “The Set” entered in 2013—that was the fan term for when he suddenly stopped changing things every night—he varied things a lot. And I mean, a lot. Here’s a crazy statistic I gleaned from the Bobserve data:

That’s it! Eight times out of 2,475 concerts from 1988 until 2013. Other than those 16 shows (two per repeated setlist), every other setlist was completely unique*. And no setlist did he play more than twice.

* Note: The Bobserve data considers song order too. So if he played the same songs but in a different order, the setlist would still count as unique.

So what were those eight times he repeated a setlist during the (pre-Set) Never Ending Tour? And what were the eight setlists so damn good he just had to play them again?

An investigation:

Repeat #1: 1989 — July 9 in Cuyahoga Falls, OH & July 11 in Harrisburg, PA

1. Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)

2. Forever Young

3. All Along The Watchtower

4. Gotta Serve Somebody

5. I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight

6. Ballad Of A Thin Man

7. Love Minus Zero/No Limit

8. Boots Of Spanish Leather

9. Mr. Tambourine Man

10. Silvio

11. I Shall Be Released

12. Like A Rolling Stone

13. The Times They Are A-Changin’

14. Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door

15. Maggie’s Farm

The first, and maybe the least interesting of the bunch, came one year into the Never Ending Tour. He played this two consecutive nights. It’s an extremely chalk, greatest hits-y sort of setlist. The only surprise is he didn’t play it more often.

Repeat #2: 1990 — October 18 in New York, NY & October 21 in Richmond, VA

1. Dixie

2. Subterranean Homesick Blues

3. I’ll Remember You

4. Ballad Of A Thin Man

5. Gotta Serve Somebody

6. Masters Of War

7. Joey

8. Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right

9. Gates Of Eden

10. Desolation Row

11. It Ain’t Me, Babe

12. Wiggle Wiggle

13. Shooting Star

14. All Along The Watchtower

15. I Believe In You

16. Like A Rolling Stone

17. The Times They Are A-Changin’

18. Highway 61 Revisited

This 1990 one is more interesting. In the first place, it’s just a more unusual setlist: “I’ll Remember You,” “Joey,” “Gates of Eden,” “I Believe in You,” plus a few choice cuts from his then-new albums Oh Mercy and Under the Red Sky. Not to mention the instrumental “Dixie” opening number:

But even stranger, there was a show in between these two. And that in-between show, his final night at the Beacon, featured a very different setlist (“Tight Connection”! “TV Talkin’ Song”! “Dark as a Dungeon!”). Then, when he left the Beacon for Virginia, he suddenly reverted to the exact same setlist as he’d played three nights prior.

That repeated Beacon show even featured four tour debuts, none of which would go on to become setlist regulars. It was an unusual setlist for the tour, and remained so—except for the one night in Richmond he repeated it verbatim. Did a stagehand put the wrong cue sheet onstage or something?

Setlist aside, Beacon Night 4 and Richmond were not entirely the same show. The Beacon show featured about-to-depart guitarist G.E. Smith. The following night was his final show; Richmond was the first G.E.-less show of the Never Ending Tour. Also at the Beacon, opener Lenny Kravitz’s sax player Karl Denson sat in on a few songs. (I’ve interviewed both of them about these shows, by the way. G.E. is here and Karl is in the book.)

Repeat #3: 1992 — May 7 & 8 in Berkeley, CA

1. Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35

2. If Not For You

3. Union Sundown

4. Just Like A Woman

5. Drifter’s Escape

6. I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)

7. Tangled Up In Blue

8. Love Minus Zero/No Limit

9. Little Moses (Traditional)

10. Visions Of Johanna

11. Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right

12. Cat’s In The Well

13. Idiot Wind

14. The Times They Are A-Changin’

15. Like A Rolling Stone

16. Absolutely Sweet Marie

17. All Along The Watchtower

18. Blowin’ In The Wind

Two consecutive nights again, and, more importantly, two consecutive nights at the same venue. This is the only repeat of the same set in the same place. Were fans who attended both shows annoyed getting the same thing twice?

Their annoyance might have been overshadowed by the bigger news: This week, for the first time, Dylan played “Drifter’s Escape” live! Berkeley saw the song’s second and third performances ever.

Why now, in Spring 1992, after 25 years of not playing it? Dylan, of course, didn’t say. But many made the connection to the Rodney King verdict. On April 29, 1992, a predominantly white jury acquitted LA police officers of charges related to the videotaped beating of King. The jury’s verdict led to citywide riots. The very next day, in Eugene Oregon, Dylan played “Drifter’s Escape” for the first time ever. “Oh, stop that cursed jury.”

(At that same Eugene show the day after the verdict where he busted out “Drifter’s,” he played “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” for the first time that tour, further underlining the connection. “Now is the time for your tears…”)

Five more after the jump…

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Last night, Bob Dylan brought the Long Hot Summer Tour to Richmond, Virginia. Scholar and writer Anne Margaret Daniel was on hand to tell us about the show, and about the city’s importance in Dylan’s—and the country’s—history. Here’s Anne Margaret Daniel reporting in from Richmond:

Among its other names, they call my hometown of Richmond, Virginia the River City—or to be more accurate, Rivah City, since that’s how we say it. Richmond was named for Richmond upon Thames, since the aspect of it from the bluffs on the north side of town overlooking the James River is similar. It has other nicknames, many based on its time as the capital of the Confederacy from 1861 to 1865. In 2021, Richmond was in the news as protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis resulted in the removal at last of a row of Confederate generals along Monument Avenue, installed there from the 1890s and long towering over the broad street with its parklike mall down the center. The statues and their plinths are gone now, with the space where they stood either paved, or occupied by grass and flowers. But the names on the land remain, all over Richmond’s history and all over town: Davis, Stuart, Jackson, Lee, Maury… Faulkner knew it all too well, and had a character say it in Requiem for a Nun (1919): “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Bob Dylan, not a mere Civil War buff but, as we know from Chronicles and from many interviews and songs, a scholar of America’s darkest war, has made the city a regular stop on his tours since 1966.

Back then, my parents went to hear him and his traveling band at the old Mosque, now called the Altria Theater, though no one in Richmond calls it anything but the Mosque. It looks like one, with its domes and minarets, and Jazz-Age gorgeousness and superb construction (the Mosque was finished in 1927, just before the crash). When I took Mother and Papa to hear him and Willie Nelson at our local minor league ballpark in 2004, there was a little rain delay. During it, they entertained surrounding fans with stories of that earlier gig. Papa: “he sounded all right at first, when he was on his own. I couldn’t hear much but noise later.” Mother: “What nice looking young men they all were! I liked the bass player. And very enthusiastic about playing. Noisy, yes.” We danced together that night to the umpteenth time I’d heard “Like A Rolling Stone.” Papa’s favorite song of the night was “Blind Willie McTell,” and Mother’s was “Country Pie.”

When I heard Dylan play the Mosque in 1990, he and the band started off with “Dixie.” Not so at the Allianz, which is literally built on the bones of war. This new outdoor venue, just open for a year, abuts the ruins of the 19th-century Tredegar Iron Works, and the American Civil War Museum. Tredegar made most of the Confederacy’s cannon and other arms during the Civil War, and was destroyed when the Union army captured, or liberated, Richmond in the spring of 1865. “May the tenth, Richmond had fell / It’s a time I remember oh so well” is how Levon sang it, though the town burned in early April. President Abraham Lincoln visited Richmond on April 4-5, and his son Tad brought home to Washington a Confederate battle flag now in the museum.

Before the show, many fans—and, according to the museum’s employees, musicians and road crew members—walked through the well organized and moving exhibitions commemorating those who fought, those who were enslaved, those who died, and those who survived. May our country never know another civil war, I thought, as I walked along the second story above the now-preserved crumbling brick walls of old Tredegar. When I left the museum, I paused to sit for a moment in the anchor of the CSS Virginia, formerly the Merrimack, known for its celebrated “ironclads” battle against the Monitor in the Chesapeake Bay at Hampton Roads on March 9, 1862. Over my shoulder, twin streamlined black-and-brown buses I recognized were parked side by side in the upper parking lot, snug among the ruins.

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Last night, Bob Dylan played Forest Hills Stadium in Queens. Forest Hills was the site of his first electric concert after Newport ’65. Furious fans famously rushed the stage at that show, causing a small riot.

No one rushed the stage last night, but, to make up for me not delivering on my promised Gilford recap (I got sick and couldn’t go—damn), we’ve got two of our veteran correspondents to report in on this major milestone on the Long Hot Summer Tour, Lee Ranaldo and Adam Selzer.

Lee Ranaldo

Lee Ranaldo played in Sonic Youth and, in Dylan world, the Million Dollar Bashers backing band on the I’m Not There soundtrack. He was musical director last year of the Bob Dylan Center’s “Going Electric” concert in Tulsa, which I wrote about here (and there’s an extended version of my backstage conversations with Ranaldo and his Sonic Youth bandmate Steve Shelley here).

Enough preamble! First up, here’s Lee Ranaldo on last night in Forest Hills:

Some Brief Late-Night Thoughts On Bob Dylan’s Long Hot Summer Tour Stop At Forest Hills Stadium Tonight, July 21, 2026

For some strange reason I’d never been to this wonderful venue before, I don’t know how or why but what a gem it is. If one has to see Bob in an outdoor setting, never my favorite situation, then the hell with all the sheds, this is definitely the place. I had a good seat on the floor but I’d bet there is not really a bad seat in the house, and the venue feels quite intimate for a place that can hold 13,000 people. The excitement in the air after Lucinda’s set was palpable. There were flood warnings and a tornado watch in our area all day and evening today, and most folks, including me, had packed their rain gear and were simply hoping the show wasn’t going to get cancelled due to weather or lightning. But aside from a very quick sprinkling just as Lucinda quit the stage, it was a perfect night. Balmy winds blowing, the humidity chased away, the sky slowly going from overcast to dark during the first half of Bob’s set.

The band walked out with no introduction or fanfare, just mosey’d out onto the stage and took their places. I’ve been excited and intrigued by the ‘story of the guitarists’ on this tour, and was anxious to see who we’d get. It turned out to be Jad Tariq on stage right with Tony to his left, Bob center stage at the electric piano (white hoodie tonight), Anton Fig to Bob’s left and Joel Paterson stage left. Both men were playing big bodied jazz-boxes, hollow or semi-hollow, semi-acoustic instruments. Both guitarists come to the stage with deep experience in American roots music, pre-rocknroll and rhythm and blues. I have highly enjoyed the team of Doug Lancio and Bob Britt, and the interplay they established playing with Bob all through the R&RW period, but, with setlists staying relatively static, it was a kind of revelation to hear a new sense of attack from the guitars. It seemed to reshape the music and breathe new life into the songs.

The first thing I noticed was the reduced volume all around. When I hung out with Tony Garnier before and after one of Bob’s first post-Covid Beacon gigs, he told me how they’d been trying to reduce the volume onstage, to give Bob’s voice more room to be nuanced and not have to fight over the rock volume of, say, the great era of Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell. And I watched and listened over these last years as the volume has slowly, incrementally, been coming down. Now the process is basically complete, at least until we get Bob’s solo piano tour (a fella can dream, no?). Compared to Lucinda and her band, and Jimmie Vaughan before her, Bob’s headlining set was the quietest of the evening. In all good ways.

Both Joel and Jad were playing out of relatively small, classic amps, but that doesn’t mean they were not heard. Both guitars were up in the mix, and the piano, which has been so revelatory over the past few years – I LOVE Bob’s piano playing, was deep in the mix, often almost inaudible, certainly not the featured centerpiece of the last few tours. The guitarists were to the fore, carrying the show. Not flashy and sometimes not so boldly, but completely. Guitar solos are back! How much fun is that? To my ears Joel took a larger share of the solos, including some tasty slide guitar work, and seemed completely at home inside the music, with quiet authority and a reserved force, never timid or unsure. Jad seemed to be doing more of the chord comping, but also let loose regularly with some tasty runs and embellishments. I absolutely loved hearing both of them and what they were bringing to Bob’s songs. The setlist may not be changing, but there was a whole new energy to the music, that had been missing for a while, although we didn’t know it till we heard it again.

Of course Tony Garnier is the backbone of the band and it’s always a pleasure to hear and see him at Bob’s side. He occasionally gave visible cues to the new guys, but didn’t have to do so very often. Anton Fig on drums was – and I mean this in the very best way – fairly unnoticeable all night. By that I mean that his playing was just right – a softer force – always right on the beat and where he needed to be. The band is a joy to hear – Bob sure knows how to pick ‘em. I don’t think I’ll get a chance to hear Julian Lage on this run, which I’d very much love to, to compare his contribution to what we heard tonight.

The mystery of what brought the Lancio/Britt era to a close is ongoing! How I’d love to know the mechanics of their leaving and even moreso HOW these three new faces emerged onto the scene and onto these stages. Who came up with these guys? None of them obvious choices. Will we ever know? I’ve no idea, but I remain incredibly curious. The music was quiet, the amps were small, the drums were a bit softer (even when playing hard), but none of that diminished the impact of the set.

Another aspect that was, to me at least, something new were the quick segues between numbers. The band left almost no space between songs. It was almost like a Ramones concert! The minute a song was done the next one started immediately, no gaps, tuning up or anything, just rolling one into the next. Not in a rushed way but rather in a way that kept the energy and momentum going.

The stage was quite dark, with just a few simple, old fashioned visible-filament yellow-cast lightbulbs on stands providing just enough light to create a comfortable haze around the band. As the sky turned dark, and no bright spotlights came up, the band and the music, indeed the stage and the whole intimate arena, seemed to merge with the night and the sweet breezes blowing through. It was easy to concentrate on the music, and it felt even more intimate, a dim-lit stage glowing in the dark overcast summer evening.

Bob was singing in fine voice, as has been repeatedly reported along this tour. I’d dare to say that at 85 he’s singing as good as he ever has done. What a stylist and yes – down with the naysayers who may disagree – what a fabulous singer he is and has always been! I did wish quite a few times that his voice was just a bit higher in the mix. I don’t think it would have diminished the music, and who amongst us would not admit that we are there to hear him sing?? I was trying to picture Mick Jagger, or Springsteen, or Madonna or whomever you might pull up as a reference, performing with their voice as deep in the mix as Bob’s is. No f*&#ing way! I don’t know if this decision is coming down from on high or what, but to whoever is mixing these shows – please, Mr. or Ms. FOH, just a BIT more Bob in the PA, please!

What a great night in Forest Hills. Each Dylan show is a special event, not to be missed and not to be matched or even really compared, one to the next. To be in his company is a privilege and I never forget it. The fact that after all this time, this is where he wants to be (and Europe shows for the fall recently announced indicate no let-up), a traveling troubadour as of old, bringing his sound and vision to the people, is just astounding. I had my middle son with me tonight – his 3^rd Dylan show – and was pleased to see so many friends and acquaintances turned out among the crowd. Every one of them so happy to share a beautiful, breezy New York evening with the master. What a great night in Forest Hills.

Adam Selzer

Adam Selzer is a Chicago-based historian, author, and tour guide who’s a regular in these pages. He runs the Substack adamchicago and you can find him at adamchicago.com. Here’s Adam:

As much as I insist that these shows are not for nostalgia, there are some venues I can’t resist for a Dylan show, just because of the historic value. Seeing him at Royal Albert Hall a couple of years ago, for instance. And Forest Hills ’65 is my favorite Dylan tape (as I wrote about yesterday). Not only the first full electric show, but the first electric show for which we have an audience tape to hear exactly how the crowd was responding. And by the time he got to Forest Hills, three weeks and some change after Newport, everyone had gotten the message: if Bob plays electric, you’re supposed to boo. The tape is just wild, not to mention hearing them crack up as they hear the dark humor of “Desolation Row” and “Ballad of a Thin Man” for the first time.

I’ve played that tape so many times that just seeing the venue was something I wanted to do, whether Bob was playing there or not.

And there’s something about seeing him there on a year when you keep getting reports of angry fans walking out, too. When I went back and found all the reports from after 1965, it was the same stuff the social media algorithms are pointing me towards today: “He won’t be getting my money anymore, I’ll be content just to listen to his records.” Facebook has decided that all I want to see is people complaining about these shows: he doesn’t play the hits, he doesn’t look 23, he doesn’t talk, he wears a hoodie, he won’t let you just vibe on your phone all night. I also get the occasional press review where they explain that Bob has always just done what he wants and changed styles as the mood fit him, and if people came at it with an open mind they’d see it was great; you can find the exact same lines in 1965 reviews.

I’ve never seen a complaint from 1965 that he wasn’t playing the old hits, though. The controversy was all that he was playing electric, even though he totally was not playing the hits. The acoustic set had just one song, “To Ramona,” that had been out more than a few months, and that was barely a year old. Nothing from his first three albums. And the electric set was mostly songs no one had heard yet, except for “It Ain’t Me Babe” and “Like a Rolling Stone.”

But most of the reactions on the tape are from fans charging the stage and playing “keystone cops” with the police as they run around the ground section, which for some reason didn’t have seats in 1965. There was nowhere to run tonight.

The day began with all due drama; a couple of days ago I started getting texts that the show would probably be cancelled due to storms. My flight made it out, but I was hearing from people who had later flights that they’d be cancelled. I flew out fully expecting to just try to get a get-together going. And, indeed, when I left my hotel room, the sky opened up.

But by the time the F train got me out to Forest Hills, a charming little cottagecore neighborhood of Queens, it had mostly stopped, and my poncho went unused. The venue was absolutely charming; some effort has been put in to make it seem like it hasn’t changed a bit since 1965, with its mid-century marquee and graphics. It looks just like it did in those 1965 pictures.

Jimmie Vaughan played some music that would go great in a hamburger commercial, and Lucinda Williams played her great set. Patti Smith was seen in the wings. It was cool to see her, but it sort of brought the curse that comes with these historic venues: you start to wonder if something will happen. Will Bob mention the history of the place? Will Patti come out and do “Dark Eyes?” Even knowing full well that the answer to both is a “no,” it can distract you.

Bob and the band (Jad is back on rhythm guitar) strolled out at 7:57, with no introduction, no opening music, no dimming of the lights. The sky wasn’t dark yet, and wouldn’t be for some time. You couldn’t get further from 1965, where Murray the K came out and said “It’s not rock, it’s not folk, it’s a new thing called Dylan….and Dylan is definitely…what’s happenin’ baby!” to louder boos than Dylan himself got the rest of the night.

Jad was more comfortable onstage tonight than in Cincinnati. He was fine there, but tonight he was striking poses that, with his mustache, made him look like a snooping butler who is up to no good.

Bob was all smiles tonight, singing “Man in the Long Black Coat” like he was very excitedly telling kids a ghost story. It’s almost odd: here he’s got this set with both “Man in the Long Black Coat” and “Black Rider,” and all these strange songs about traveling men doing terrifying things (plus some 1950s dance tunes), and he’s just grinning the whole time!

“It Ain’t Me Babe” was the lone hold-over from the 1965 set, and, in fact, the only song in the set that he’d written by August of 1965.

“Black Rider” sounded like friendly advice that you give to a guy you know you’re going to kill one of these days, and got a great reaction from the crowd (including a couple of shrieks that made me wonder if that mystery person who kept shrieking and freaking out at this song at the Royal Albert Hall was back—curse of the historic venue?)

“When I Paint My Masterpiece” opened with a lyric flub; the first line was “Oh the hours I spent…are filled with rubble.” But Bob carried on without missing a beat and turned in a great version; the two jazz guitars are really doing wonders for this song, and it didn’t need any more wonders than it already has, really.

The biggest reaction of the night, strangely enough, was when he started “Crossing the Rubicon.” Lots of audience response to the individual lines.

At this point, the show had really improved. It started out fine, but I felt like something was missing since the Cincinnati show. It might have just been darkness. The sun had finally set. And everyone knows that music sounds different in the dark.

“Soon After Midnight” is a song that I wasn’t wild about at first, and often feel that I’ve seen more than enough, but lately I’ve come around back on it, and was thrilled to see it; Joel played a terrific solo.

But Joel’s real time to shine came next, when he broke out the slide guitar for “Under the Red Sky,” which gave the song a sort of a tropical feel (which is amusing itself, since Bob told Don Was that the song was about his home town—not a place known for being tropical). It might have been the strongest version of the song I’ve ever seen, with some great vocals and an awesome harmonica solo.

“I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” was another that I sometimes think I’ve heard enough, but sounded fresh tonight. All of a sudden tonight, the line “Take me out travelin’ you’re a travelin’ man” struck me as odd; is he singing to a man, here? A couple of lines later he’s going far away with “her.” I love how seeing shows brings up these little observations.

“Goodbye Jimmy Reed” has come back to life with the new guitars, and the closing “I Shall Be Released” was one for the ages. Aren’t they all one for the ages lately when he does that song? He’s been singing the shit out of it, in that “repeat the line” technique in Bette Midler’s version.

I didn’t see anyone walk out, and there were no boos that I heard. In a year marked by angry fans just like the first time he played here (or, anyway, that’s what social media seems to want to show me), the Long Hot Summer 2026 show went down like gold. I didn’t even realize that he’d skipped “Trying to Get to Heaven.”

Thanks Lee and Adam! And thanks to the taper Ezzy and remasterer Bennyboy for getting us a tape so fast.

2026-07-21, Forest Hills Stadium, New York, NY

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Five years ago today, Bob Dylan released his performance film Shadow Kingdom. Last year, I spoke to one of the onscreen musicians (plus one of the offscreen guitarists who recorded the music). Today, I speak to two of the cast members who appear in the film audience—smoking, drinking, dancing, and generally helping give the film its noir-roadhouse vibe: King Orba and Craig Stark.

King Orba

King Orba is an actor and musician from Oklahoma City. His extensive filmography includes The Cleaner and Stargirl. His latest album is 2025’s Soft Wax. You can find him on Instagram.

How did you get involved in Shadow Kingdom?

This came about because I have a good friend who’s an actor in Hollywood, a guy named Craig Stark. We did a Western together in 2017 and just stayed in touch.

I remember the day. I was at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I’d just had a late breakfast downstairs. I got into my car, I was about to head back to the west side in Santa Monica. The phone rang, and it’s Craig. He’s like, “Hey, man, what are you doing tomorrow? There’s this thing. Can you send in some [head]shots? I’m trying to find some older-looking, interesting people for my friend Alma Har’el, this director.”

I didn’t have anything on my phone at the time. I said, “Let me get home to my computer. What is it?” He says, “Music videos with Bob Dylan.” I said, “Say no more” and I raced home.

I found some good headshots showing me showing my age. Alma saw my photos, and that was it.

So the following day, that Monday on the west side in Santa Monica, this restaurant that we turned into a set—this was exactly one week before his eightieth birthday, I believe. It was a mixture of men and women. Maybe twenty of us. Then, of course, there was the band.

We’d do at least two songs a day. We’d come in in the morning and spend the morning doing one song, and then another song [in the afternoon]. They started stacking it where the last couple of days they’d squeeze in a third. On a few of them, Bob had just a few of the girls. On some of them, you had everybody, in this set that they built like an old music tavern out in the swamps.

I remember Bob being very engaged. The very first day, he had one of his day-to-day guys—guy about my age, maybe late 50s, 60—who came and gave us a little speech before right before we started. He kind of looked like a cowboy. He might have even had a cowboy hat. He gave a speech basically, in so many words: Just be respectful and don’t approach Bob. That kind of thing.

So I was half expecting Bob to just show up and do it and then leave. It was the absolute opposite. He was having so much fun. As they were setting these shots up, he was there with Alma and walking around. He’d see one of the cast members, a very striking woman, and say, “Maybe she’s over here.” He was like a kid in a candy store.

We all got made up in the morning. We would hit the makeup chair and all go through. It wouldn’t take long. Then Bob would go into the same place that we did. You know, it wasn’t like he was secluded somewhere else.

You’ll notice in the film that the cast are essentially in the same wardrobe throughout. Minus maybe a few added flairs with role cast, we all wore our own personal wardrobe everyday. I had a three-piece suit where I could change up the look by taking my jacket off, roll up the sleeves, take the tie off, etc. Every night I would go home, dust off my suit, launder my undergarments and dress shirt. The next day, I wore the same thing, including the same pair of socks. Now I’m not much of a superstitious man, but for whatever reason, this particular pair of socks have become my lucky Bob Dylan socks. I still take them everywhere I go. They’ve seen better days, but I never travel without them.

There were some funny things that happened. There was this one time that Bob came out—and Alma, she would pronounce his name “Boob.”

Because of her accent, you mean?

Yeah. She was a great director, but she pronounced his name “Boob.” So he came out and she says, “Hey, Boob, we’re almost ready. We’re just getting everything perfect.” He looked at her and he said, “Perfect? What’s perfect?”

Another time, he came on the set and he was kind of laughing to himself. Alma goes, “Boob, what’s so funny?” All he said was, “Crazy… Crazy…” I thought, “Man, this is priceless.”

That week, he hired an extra security guy. I remember when he got there, Bob took him on a tour of this restaurant that we’d turned into a set. He was giving him the nickel tour. He was really having a blast.

Did you have much or any direct interaction yourself?

Not much. I mean, we were all in very close proximity.

I do remember that they added a day, and I had to go to East Texas to do a film. I’d already called production and pushed it a couple days because I wasn’t about to miss this work with Dylan. But the very last day, they added a day, and I wasn’t able to go.

So Alma says, “Hey, let’s take a crew photo.” Bob says, “Well, we got one more day.” Alma says, “Boob, we added the day, so a few of the people here can’t be here.” He’s like, “Who?” “Well, King Orba here has to go.”

He’s like, “Oh, you can’t be here tomorrow man? Where are you off to?” I said, and I remember the exact words, “I got a gig in East Texas.” I didn’t realize I sounded maybe like a musician, when all I’m doing is this little short film. He’s like, “All right, man.” Then he put his fist up and he fist-bumped me.

For me, at the very end, that was great. That interaction at the end was worth it all.

During the shoot, he was just around. He wasn’t shooting the shit with people or chatting it up, but he was there. He was very present, and to be around him in such a good mood was a special thing.

This is still COVID times. Did that play a role in people socializing?

Not necessarily. We did have COVID protocol during the shoot. In holding, we had our masks and stuff. But when we went on set, those came off.

Bob, I don’t think I ever saw him with the mask on. We went through the protocol of what was required through production, but it wasn’t so strict to where it dampened the creative thing that was going on.

Another logistics question. This is not music being performed live. So are they blasting the recording through monitors in the room?

Yes, they had a PA system for playback. It would be at a good volume, not blasted, but like a live-venue sort of volume. They’d play that every time, and we’d go through it. Each one of the songs, we would listen to numerous times until we finished the spot.

Are you getting explicit instruction from Alma or anyone else, other than just seating you where you’re going to sit? “Do this, don’t do this, have this look on your face?”

Just basic. I mean, it might just be you sitting there with a drink. Nothing was too overthought. They might want you at a table with someone just smoking, watching the show.

There’s one song where you’re on screen the whole time, because it’s mostly one camera angle.

I’m smoking a cigarette. I’m in the back, and it cross-dissolves from me to Bob. I did get specific instructions from Alma because the camera starts on me, if I remember right. They did this camera move, but I noticed when they cut it together, they did a cross-dissolve.

It wasn’t like a free-for-all. “Hey, let me go out and start dancing.” We knew like, okay, I’m going to smoke this cigarette, and then I know the camera is then going to be off of me.

Real cigarette or prop?

They were these godawful prop cigarettes that honestly smell worse than a real cigarette.

There were a couple of songs where some people are dancing. I don’t know if that’s the whole cast or just certain people. Were you in those ones?

I was in one where they were dancing. I don’t think I ever danced. I want to say out of all the songs, I’m maybe in five of them. I know there’s a couple where it was just him and the band. Then there’s one where there’s him, the band, and two of the female cast. They did some things sans audience.

How much does a gig like this pay?

Oh, not much at all, Ray. Not much at all. As actors, we were paid a hundred bucks a day or something.

Listen, I would have paid them. It certainly wasn’t about the money.

Any other stories or memories that come to mind from the shoot?

Two years before this, I did a film called Twelve Mighty Orphans in Fort Worth, Texas. It’s a true story about an orphanage that started a football team. Long story short, one of the actors was Levi Dylan, Bob’s grandson. Levi and I became very close during the movie. It’s nice to be able to work with Levi, then get to work with his granddad.

Did you text Levi?

Of course I did. I said, “I’m working with your grandad. It’s really special.”

Craig Stark

Craig Stark is an actor from Louisiana. His filmography includes the Quentin Tarantino films Django Unchained, The Hateful Eight, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Find him on Instagram.

Orba mentioned you knew Alma. Was that your connection to this thing?

Alma is an old friend. Alma was casting [her 2019 movie] Honeyboy. I asked her, or she may have asked me, if I could read opposite the people coming in. It was pre-COVID; people were still coming in live. From that job, they just made up that role in Honeyboy, where I’m in an AA meeting with Shia [LaBeouf].

So you weren’t even auditioning to be in the movie?

No, I was just the reader helping out. I wanted to keep my chops up because, you know, it’s an up and down career, acting. For me it’s been.

I’ll tell you that story in a nutshell. It started in the eighties with Marlon Brando. At the time, someone had crashed the gate at Marlon’s house and was on the loose. I had just turned 18 and gotten a job with Bel Air Patrol. What they would do is they would send you to a house, and they wouldn’t let you know who the client is. But when I got there, I soon found out it was Marlon. He walked down and greeted me. His neighbor was Jack Nicholson. I went to work for Jack and Helena Kallianiotes. I helped build a private club for them.

So you do this Honeyboy thing, you’re friends with Alma. How do you get the Dylan gig?

She called me up and asked me if I knew any real-looking people. So I sent her King Orba and my friend Raul [Cardona]. He had done La Bamba on stage. I met him on Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. They were two real-looking guys. Alma loved them, and we were off the next week.

So then—you don’t want to ask me the inevitable question?

What’s the inevitable question?

Were we told not to look him in the eyes?

Were you?

They didn’t even need to tell me that, because you should never stare at a genius. Ever.

That’s why you can stare at politicians all day long. They gotta get elected. But Dylan’s real, you know? As real as real could get. I didn’t look him in the eye ever.

So what do you remember about the shoot?

It was great blowing smoke rings. Dylan walked by me once and, under his breath, I think he went, “Hey…Mr. Smoke Ring…”

But I could have been hallucinating because, when I did that, I was trying to get sober. When you’re trying to get sober, those cigarettes just blow your brain.

Where did you learn to blow smoke rings like that?

That’d be in the bathroom in DeQuincy Junior High School. I don’t remember the year. I’m not disclosing my age, because I’m in an age-discriminative business.

How much instruction were you given by Alma or anyone else as to what to do?

I remember like just being lost in [what we were doing]. It’s the pandemic, the world’s ending, and I get eight jobs with Bob Dylan. Man, they could have bought me outside and beat me up and pissed on me and put me on fire. I was like in a trance the whole time. Because trying to get sober is just as bad as being fucked up. This is right out of the shotgun.

With Dylan, it’s like being caught up in something that is bigger than you, you know? My parents liked Dylan, and I got introduced to Dylan through the trip that I took on in the ’80s driving out here. Somebody had given me some Dylan cassettes. So that at the beginning, and this at the end.

I mean, you want to go up and say this to him, but I think that’s why the people that got hired got hired. They’re really pros. You don’t have to tell us twice. So you fight against it. Your body wants to do it.

Did you ever interact with him or talk with him at all?

I may have. I kind of blacked out with joy. There was one time he asked for a harmonica, and I almost jumped up like a little schoolgirl. Because I had one in my car. Maybe I said that, maybe I didn’t. I’m not sure.

This whole thing sounds like it was a surreal experience for you.

Right after that, both my parents passed.

It played recently in Santa Monica. I went to see it.

What struck you watching it again in Santa Monica recently?

How that was the last of my really care-free days, and I got to spend it with Bob Dylan and some good friends. These moments are what I’ll remember when I go teeter-tottering into antiquity.

Everybody was grateful because of what was happening in the world too, which was nice. I’m sure, like any set, maybe they had their problems behind the scenes, but to me, it flowed like melted butter on some beer onions.

The first guy who told me about you was one of the musicians, Alex, who played the accordion. He was like, “That’s Craig Stark, he’s in all these Quentin Tarantino movies.”

That’s my lifeline to inspiration—Quentin Tarantino, man.

How did you get connected with him?

I auditioned for Reservoir Dogs. I didn’t get the Tim Roth role. I auditioned for the guy jumping into the room and missing them in Pulp Fiction. Then I didn’t see Quentin for a long time. I get burnt out and I go out to the desert. I’m out there for a while, over a decade. Then I come back, and I think I’m going to try acting again.

The first film back was a film called Strutter. Quentin saw that film. I’m in Django, and then I’m in The Hateful Eight.

A pretty memorable scene in The Hateful Eight, too. [Samuel L. Jackson’s character makes him strip naked then eventually kills him. That YouTube link is censored but even the dialog is very NSFW]

I get a lot of mileage out of that. A lot of jokes down in the south, where I’m from, when I go back. If people here find out, they keep it to themselves here. Down in the south, they’ll let me have it.

Any other memories that jump out?

Alma had a New Year’s Eve party. She called me to the back room. She opened up the album that corresponds with the videos. She goes, “You made the Bob Dylan cover!”

And I am. I’m there. But it’s the back of my head.

I’ve done a lot of small roles. Every one of them is a blessing though. Getting to be able to do this for a living, I’ll never complain about it.

You know, I worked for Brando. There’s not too many people that capture his essence. Bob Dylan was the only guy that I’ve run into my whole life that’s got that kind of—it’s more than charisma. It’s a lack of bullshit. I think Marlon and Bob Dylan got little time for petty woes. Their heart has been open enough for the camera, or how they record music. They’ve given parts of their soul to us.

Thanks to King Orba and Craig Stark for taking the time to talk! For more Shadow Kingdom behind-the-scenes, check out my interviews with onscreen accordion player Alexander Burke and offscreen guitarist Ira Ingber.

The Long Hot Summer Tour has been a strange one to follow remotely, full of whiplash shifts in vibe, fan excitement, and, notably, the band lineup.

Opening night led to initial disappointment, as the first reports indicated a much less exciting setlist than the previous two (Outlaw) summer openers. But by morning, the vi…

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When subscriber Josh requested this show, he noted that he saw 42 shows in 1996 (damn!) and that the “unexpected European highlight” that year was Magdeburg. High praise indeed from someone who saw so many shows.

It’s not a particularly well-known show. I’ve never heard of it. Hell, I’ve never even heard of the city he’s playing in…

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Another show, another surprise new guitarist. Last night in Cincinnati, Jad Tariq made his Long Hot Summer debut. He’s the fifth guitarist Dylan has played with in the past month!

Here to tell us about it is local music journalist and high school librarian Nat Tracey-Miller. Nat has a long history covering the local music scene for various regional publications and recently returned to promoting experimental music events after a long hiatus. A musician himself, he is working to debut his current project Stagnant Pattern later this fall. Over to Nat…

Catch up on all our next-day dispatches from this tour here:

Last Night In archives

For the first half hour of Bob Dylan’s Friday night set in Cincinnati, there were fireflies flitting between the band members and around the stage. Glowing bright against the dim backdrop, they added a strange and wondrous fairytale element. The spell was broken when the heavens opened, thrashing trees and sending a cool river breeze through the pavilion. I don’t think I’ve seen another Bob show where the environment played such a significant factor in the experience; it was unforgettable.

But the biggest takeaway from last night’s show? The surprise debut performance of Memphis guitarist Jad Tariq. His instant chemistry with his new bandmates rendered a familiar setlist into something novel and exhilarating. It was easily one of the best Dylan shows I’ve seen over the last 20 years, and certainly the most fun. Bob was dancing, Tony was laughing, and after the chaos and headlines of June’s lineup changes, it seemed that all is right in this world. For now, at least.

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When I interviewed Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch, he recalled a specific song he played just one time with Dylan. Here’s what he told me:

We’re playing a big gig. [At one point], Bob turns to me he says, ‘’Hey, Stan, what do you want to play tonight?” I’m thinking, “Uh, loaded question?” But I took it right at face value and, I went, “Well, how about …

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Last night, the Long Hot Summer Tour touched down in Chicago. Since our last dispatch, jazz favorite Julian Lage has returned to the band, now sharing guitar duties with local Chicago boy Joel Paterson. But Lage has European dates this coming weekend, so presumably he’ll be gone again by Cincinnati tomorrow night. We’ll have a dispatch from there, but first, to report on the goings on from the new two-guitarists lineup, is Steven Rings.

Last fall, Rings, a musicologist at the University of Chicago, published the truly excellent book What Did You Hear? The Music of Bob Dylan. You can read an excerpt from it here. Today, he tells us what did he hear, last night at a former airport in Chicago. Here’s Steven Rings:

Next weekend I’ll finally be reporting myself, from Boston and Gilford! Hope to see some you there. We’ll have one or two more guest dispatches before then. As always, subscribe to get them sent to you:

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Mention Northerly Island to any Chicagoan of a certain age, and you’ll likely hear about Meigs Field. In the 1990s, mayor Richard M. Daley wanted Meigs—a little airport—gone. Its heyday of heavy prop-plane traffic was in the past, and Daley wanted to raze it and turn Northerly into a park. Negotiations stalled and Daley got impatient. So around midnight on March 30/31, 2003*, he sent city bulldozers onto Northerly to destroy the runways by carving large Xs onto them. Chicago residents—and the rest of the world—wouldn’t find out until the sun came up. That, friends, is Chicago politics.

[* Ray note: I was in high school in Chicago in 2003 and I remember this. It was a huge deal! Still can’t believe that happened.]

But last night it was hard not to be grateful for Daley’s audacity when strolling through Northerly on the way to the show. It’s a gorgeous park. The vibe was festive and the weather was perfect: blue sky, 70s, low humidity. As Adam Selzer put it when we were chatting before Lucinda Williams’s set, the whole scene had the relaxed, happy feel of a state fair, a welcome contrast to corporate arenas. The route to the performance venue was lined with pedicabs blasting Dylan and musicians playing the same, cases open. Dylan was in the air everywhere you pointed your ears—harmonicas, guitars, greatest hits. The venue itself looks toward Chicago’s downtown (the Loop, to locals), which was at its most fetching, its lights shining brighter as the sky dimmed. Pretty magical.

I missed the John Doe Folk Trio, but was there for all of Lucinda Williams, who sang a powerful, mesmerizing set. She has to be helped to the mic these days, but she stood to sing all eight songs. Dressed entirely in black, which set off her trademark shock of blonde hair, she was an almost spectral presence, standing still to sing. But her voice has aged little and was instantly recognizable. She sang with intensity and focus throughout, bringing a grizzled pathos to Skip James’ “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” and roaring through Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” to close the set, getting a large chunk of the audience to its feet, fists pumping. But her originals really carried the night, from the weary-but-anthemic “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” to the lowdown threats of “Joy.” And threaded throughout was a message. Before the defiant “You Can’t Rule Me” she mentioned Trump—on the nose but potent. And after her Neil Young cover: “Don’t give up the fight.”

Dylan’s set was a revelation—with just one disappointment. The revelation was the two-guitar lineup with Julian Lage and Joel Paterson. Lage had joined the Paterson lineup for the first time in Shakopee, MN two nights prior; this was their second show together. Paterson was on the right of the stage, playing a Gibson archtop, while Lage was to our left, with a Telecaster. They were a study in contrasts. Lage, one of the hottest jazz players in the world right now, tended toward the abstract and the cerebral, but with impeccable taste. The chordal passages in his solos—played with pick and fingers of his right hand—were butter, with just the right amount of “out” playing to call to mind luminaries like Bill Frisell and John Scofield. (Jazzers talk about playing “out” when they stray from the key, playing strategically sour notes.) Paterson, by contrast, brought the Chicago blues. His pinched leads often bore an uncanny resemblance to Buddy Guy or Hubert Sumlin.

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Forty years ago today, Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead completed their first short tour together. A test-run, of sorts, for when they’d team up properly the next summer. Dylan was still backed by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, but once again sat in for a few songs with the Dead.

All week, writer Jesse Jarnow has been exploring these Dylan & The Dead ’86 shows in a short mini-series, and he completes his look back today covering the two final shows at giant RFK Stadium in Washington, DC.

Catch up on Jarnow’s full four-part Dylan & The Dead ’86 series, plus my earlier entries on the first Dylan/Heartbreakers tour, right here.

Dylan and the Dead ‘86: R.F.K. Stadium, July 6th & 7th

by Jesse Jarnow

July 6th

It’s brutally hot and hotter still in D.C., another afternoon show with a 2pm ticket time. Once again, Dylan, his leather pants, and the Heartbreakers are up first. There’ll be plenty of Beltway print coverage of this particular Big Deal—or the first day’s worth of it, anyway—but all of it misses the real breaking news: that Bob Dylan invents yet another new way to get booed.

It happens late in the set, which has been, you know, fine. Dylan finds a nice melodic turn on “It Ain’t Me Babe” during the acoustic portion and the Heartbreakers do a wicked fun “I Fought the Law” during one of their segments. “Across the Borderline” hits a relaxed roll that feels new to this set of tapes.

But then comes the baffling Bob talk, as crews spray off the sweltering crowd with hoses. “Where I come from water is precious, meant to be used,” Dylan declaims. “I think that’s a waste of water.” Boos. “You like to be hot, right? I know I do.” (You and Jonathan Richman, Bob.) A sympathetic audience tape, at least, if no longer a sympathetic audience.

I’m certainly more sympathetic to the sound of ’86 than I was previously, but some of it’s difficult listening. Paul Williams, who attended most of the Dylan/Heartbreakers tour, became one of my favorite music writers because of the way he was not only able to find glorious wonders in one of Dylan’s least-revered periods, but challenged the reader to do the same, laying out a radical kind of uncritical listening.

“To be a good listener and viewer, I suggest, requires a degree of abandon,” he writes. “One must surrender judgement and other critical faculties, suspend disbelief, and be (as much as possible) completely present with the performance. This is the responsibility of the listener, and it is just as holy as the performer’s responsibility. We create this art together.” Okay, Paul, I get it, it’s my fault.

Williams doesn’t offer a show-by-show breakdown of his tour, and doesn’t talk much about the Dylan/Dead shows specifically. Still, it’s inspiring to try to hear the music through his ears. “I Want You” from July 17th, for example: “Now the muse descends in fact, and makes a mockery of all brilliant celebrations of her memory.” Aspirational.

(Accidentally anticipating Williams, Grateful Dead archivist Dick Latvala—Dick of the Picks—came to the same place sometime in the mid-1970s: “The feeling I always had about the Grateful Dead is that these guys were so special that it was on me to come to where they were to get that mind-blowing thing, and to have the attitude of ‘oh, shit, they’re going downhill’ is to miss out on the love that they’re sharing at that moment.”)

The Buffalo tape I found was missing the encore, so the first night at R.F.K. is the only version of “Rock ‘Em Dead” on this set of tapes, one of my single favorite pieces from the True Confessions era, a fun tune with an untidy little Dylan-shaped mystery about it. Like, it might be a cover of Warren Smith’s 1958 song “Uranium Rock” (much cooler title!) with a mostly new set of Dylan lyrics? Maybe because of the same ambiguity, it feels loose in a way that not many parts of the set do.

“Rock ‘Em Dead” [7/6/86]

The Dead have their shit together more on the inside first set songs like “Sugaree,” Johnny Cash’s “Big River,” and a multi-gear “Let It Grow.” By the second set, everything’s sounding a bit deflated, almost literally. It’s possible to hear “Stella Blue” as haunted. It’s also possible to hear it as Garcia running out of breath.

July 7th

The final Big Deal in our subset of Big Deals went a little under the radar, relatively speaking, the Monday after a holiday weekend, the second night at the same venue, and no less miserable heat-wise. The papers had better things to cover, anyway.

Dylan goes on first again, but shows up during the Dead’s set again, too, capping off the five shows with another absurdist guest appearance. And, as has been (and will again be) mentioned, Jerry Garcia will come very, very close to dying a few days later.

But the big news of the happy recap (at least over here) is that Dylan’s set connects with me, or at least enough individual songs do to make it a quorum. And it’s hard to tell at first if it’s the particular quality of the crunchy, compressed soundboard or something about the performance itself. The set adds Bobby Sharp’s “Unchain My Heart” to the tape pile, as well as Hank Snow’s “Movin’ On,” the last live version until ’93.

It could be a quality of the tape, well-balanced but also distorted enough to smear the ’80s-ness of the sound a little bit, blunting Dylan’s voice some, and putting the Queens of Rhythm also further in the background than elsewhere. But Dylan’s vocals feel like he’s right there in the Heartbreakers’ pocket for once, spitting out lyrics, inside the busy-ness instead of staying at arm’s length. It carries over to “Emotionally Yours,” too. “Shot of Love” has some wordless vocalizations during Mike Campbell’s slide guitar solo that grab my ears, as did the whole performance for that matter.

I didn’t think to check Paul Williams’ notes on the tour until after I’d already listened through the tapes, and I’m glad I waited. Of the five shows I focused on, the July 7th show is the only one that Williams calls out in Performing Artist, 1974-1986, specifically the first part of the show. He hears it taking off during “Shot of Love,” getting to it in the most Paul Williams’ manner possible.

“And then suddenly with a rush of adrenaline that can be heard surging through each musician and singer separately (and together), Dylan and crew let loose with ‘Shot of Love’ the way it’s always wanted to sound, pure unadulterated 130% take-no-prisoners raucous rock and roll.” He spends almost a full page on it. It’s pure unadulterated 130% take-no-prisoners Williams. “The first verse offers a brilliant, mystifying example of Dylan’s technique,” he asserts. Dylan misspeaks a line and then transforms it, “and instead of backing off he seizes on the power of these strange words and just lets them come through, speaking in tongues, pure spirit at the end of the third line, propelling the song forward into unknown realms, fourth line more nonsense but dummy lyric technique takes over from holy babble, maintaining momentum while holding song structure in place. Conscious/unconscious, accident/intention, skill/sloppiness/inspiration.”

I’m delighted that Paul Williams loved this part of the set, because I did, too. But I’m also delighted because it’s a passage that I failed to underline and have been trying to find again for years, only remembered in paraphrase: the part where Williams finds utter genius in the way Dylan forgets the words. And he’s not wrong.

“Shot Of Love” [7/7/86]

There are lots of other moments in the set. There are a number of funny asides to the last “Just Like A Woman” until 1988 (“oh, you oughta see the things she does” “oh, so anyway”). I’m even feeling the Heartbreakers’ “Masters of War” here, Petty and Campbell’s guitar stabs alternating like ominous machinery with Benmont Tench’s piano, giving it propulsion that’s not captured on other tapes.

“Masters of War” [7/7/86]

The magic doesn’t quite last. The crunchiness remains enjoyable, but that palpable feeling of Dylan catching a wave dissipates. At the very least, it makes me want to check out Paul Williams’ other picks. See below for the full list.

The Dead’s first set is pretty short, seemingly in a hurry to get to Dylan’s appearance. Garcia is notably out of breath on “It Must Have Been the Roses.” Dehydrated and exhausted from the miserably hot gigs, Garcia will fall into a diabetic coma three days later, after which he will have to relearn to play guitar before miraculously returning to the stage with a renewed vigor later in the year. But he’s clearly going through some shit on this tape.

The righteous Rob Mitchum wrote a perfectly titled piece about the July 7th sit-in for this newsletter a few years back, and I’m here to plus-one everything he said, but also add a little bit of love for this kind of unsettling tape.

They go right for “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” this time, but Dylan pops a string almost instantly. Weir hands him a guitar and goes off to look for another, and Dylan finally starts singing at full shout about halfway through. Which, oof. It’s not quite as musically charming as the Akron version, except as an example of Dylan and Garcia finding each other in the weird ‘80s at a time when it probably meant a lot to both. There are some uncharacteristically sweet Phil Lesh vocals for a flash at the very end, too. It’s even less of a keeper than the previous “Baby Blue,” except as a moment between Dylan and the Dead, not exactly a contact low, but not a high either. More like a contact WTF.

Considered as a final product, nothing on the tape easily suggests what made Dylan want to book a tour with them as his backing band. Clearly, the Heartbreakers were the more competent of the two bands. But, as Paul Williams astutely noted, tapes are hardly the full picture.

Playing with the Heartbreakers was probably pretty fun, no doubt, but I think playing with the Dead was probably fun, more like making music, and less like performing music. The Dead never worked with a setlist, letting the evening dictate the songs they played and calling the music from the air around them however it chose to be called that night. Dylan and the Dead would rehearse extensively in the spring of ‘87, but when they hit the stage, Dylan would still–to the Dead’s shock–start playing songs they’d never even discussed. He was ready for change. When Dylan returned to the road with the Heartbreakers in fall ’87, the stable setlist went out the window.

Finishing Dylan’s second ’86 sit-in, Bob Weir starts into “Desolation Row,” a regular song in the Dead’s rotation starting that year, but only played by Dylan twice since the ’60s, once in 1974 and once in ’84. As Garcia later recounted, “So Weir says, ‘Are you sure you’ll remember all the words.’ And Dylan says, ‘I’ll remember the important ones.’”

It’s fully ridiculous. Weir gets the words. Dylan dances between incoherence and a surprisingly nice vocal blend with Weir (“it takes one to know one she smiles”) for whole seconds a time, anyway. Once the Bobs find their space, Garcia switches into upper-register guitar squiggly mode, and the whole thing achieves at least partial lift-off (again, for a few seconds at a time, a flying saucer struggling to get off the ground). Dylan leans back and skronks. Occasionally, they trade lines. There’s laughter, too. Not that laughter always implies comfort or even fun. But I choose to think the Bobs are having fun together, even if they never tried it again like this. Why would they? They already did it.

“Desolation Row” [7/7/86 Grateful Dead with Bob Dylan]

1986-07-06, RFK Stadium, Washington, DC [Dylan set]

1986-07-06, RFK Stadium, Washington, DC [Dead set, archive.org]

1986-07-07, RFK Stadium, Washington, DC [Dylan set]

1986-07-07, RFK Stadium, Washington, DC [Dead set, archive.org]

Thanks Jesse! Jesse Jarnow co-hosts the official Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, and is the author of Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America, Wasn’t That A Time: The Weavers, the Blacklist, and the Battle For the Soul of America, and Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock. The Invisible Hit Parade: A Taper’s History of Music will be published next year. The Frow Show can be heard every Tuesday on WFMU (including Bobsday celebrations).

BONUS: A PAUL WILLIAMS SUMMER 1986 DIY MIXTAPE

Update: Download here! Thanks to George Rothe for compiling

Set 1:

• Unchain My Heart (July 9)

• All Along the Watchtower (July 19)

• Positively 4th Street (July 9)

• Clean Cut Kid (July 9)

• I’ll Remember You (July 9)

• Shot Of Love (July 7)

• We Had It All (July 7)

• Masters of War (July 7)

Set 2:

• Mr. Tambourine Man (July 17)

• One Too Many Mornings (July 17)

• A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall (July 8)

• I Want You (July 17)

• Band of the Hand (July 17)

• Union Sundown (July 13)

• When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky (July 17)

• Lonesome Town (July 17)

• Ballad of a Thin Man (July 17)

Set 3:

• Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 (July 17)

• Gotta Serve Somebody (August 5)

• Seeing the Real You At Last (July 17)

• Across the Borderline (July 17)

• I and I (July 17)

• Like A Rolling Stone (July 17)

• In the Garden (July 17)

Encore:

• Blowin’ in the Wind (July 17)

• Shake A Hand (July 17)

• House of the Risin’ Sun (July 17)

“Leaving Texas, fourth day of July”

Both Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead have iconic Fourth of July songs. No, Dylan didn’t bust out “Tears of Rage” at this Independence Day gig, but the crowd-pleasing Dead opened with “Jack Straw” (huge cheers at the key line) and encored with their other holiday song, “U.S. Blues.”

This was Dylan’s first Fourth of July show ever in America, and he played it backed by the Heartbreakers and co-headlining with the Grateful Dead. In the third installment of his Dylan & the Dead ’86 miniseries, Grateful Dead scholar Jesse Jarnow dives into the Independence Day festivities in Buffalo.

Dylan and the Dead ‘86: Rich Stadium, July 4th

by Jesse Jarnow

Also big. 70,000 people in Buffalo’s Rich Stadium. Also hot. Even hotter than Akron, really, because it’s an afternoon show, so not even the headliner (nor the audience) gets the respite of the cooler evening temperatures. Plus it’s the Fourth of July in the Reagan 1980s. Gotta be some fireworks and shit.

The Rich Stadium gig is choreographed around an event some 1,500 miles to the south—the second edition of Farm Aid and the telecast thereof. The Dead are up first, and play two sets, anyway. Dylan doesn’t play with them. They do open with “Jack Straw” (“leaving Texas, fourth day of July”), they do not play “Truckin’” (“...up to Buffalo”), they do encore with “U.S. Blues.” A thunderstorm rolls in at the start of the Dead’s second set, providing only brief relief; the Dead play with “Cold Rain and Snow,” obviously. “Fire On the Mountain” is a rare version that doesn’t come out of “Scarlet Begonias” and they seem to struggle to find its groove, lurching a bit until they make it into the jam. There are no train wrecks, but certainly some unpleasant tempos. They make it to the telecast in one piece.

“America is, in fact, an agrarian nation, let’s keep it turning,” Bob Weir declares, introducing “The Wheel” and leading off a shockingly tight three-song sequence with decent transitions into “I Need A Miracle” and the ever-popular “Uncle John’s Band.”

My scene reports for these shows are drawn from Deadhead memories posted on the Internet Archive and the band’s official website, so they’re certainly Dead-biased. Nonetheless, there are a number of fans who recall coming into these shows as Dylan fans and exiting as Dead fans. There are even more memories of people attending these gigs and becoming heads for life, a reminder that the Dead could still set off sparks in people’s imaginations, even if they weren’t at full strength themselves.

One report I quite enjoyed, from user Hazardrock: “My biggest memory occurred when Petty started to play after the Dead. This skinny deadhead, in full panic mode, scaled a very imposing chain-link fence in a matter of seconds. He couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I’m sure it was the fastest this kid ever moved in his life. I’ll never forget the look in his eye. It was the same look I saw when I side-swiped a deer. Poor creature. One minute you’re running free through the woods and the next Bam! Right out of nowhere!”

There’s a Dylan soundboard from Buffalo, too, and (at least among this very limited set of tapes) it’s nice to have better versions of “Trust Yourself” and “Band of the Hand.” It’s the first “Emotionally Yours” of the Dylan/Dead shows, fully half of Empire Burlesque in the set for once (though never its most obviously arresting song, “Dark Eyes”). And there’s also a full pro-shot video, a remnant of the Farm Aid telecast, a decent visual representation of rock in the ’80s—band on a very high stage, rows of monochromatic empty seats in closed-off sections towering behind them, plus some excellent close-ups; including the wee revelation that it’s Heartbreakers’ bassist Howie Epstein playing mandolin on “I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know.”

Outside the covers, the “Ballad of a Thin Man” from Buffalo might be the first performance of Dylan repertoire to really grab me from these shows, finding his way into a big, fluid phrasing where he feels inside the lyrics’ rhythms, instead of just barking them out staccato. It’s a subtle shift, and perhaps totally subjective. But I like this version a lot.

1986-07-04, Rich Stadium, Buffalo, NY [Dylan set]

1986-07-04, Rich Stadium, Buffalo, NY [Dead set soundboard, archive.org link]

Jesse Jarnow co-hosts the official Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, and is the author of Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America, Wasn’t That A Time: The Weavers, the Blacklist, and the Battle For the Soul of America, and Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock. The Invisible Hit Parade: A Taper’s History of Music will be published next year. The Frow Show can be heard every Tuesday on WFMU (including Bobsday celebrations).

Today, part two of Grateful Dead scholar Jesse Jarnow’s miniseries on Dylan and the Dead 1986 (here’s the first if you missed it). The short five-show Dylan-Heartbreakers-Dead run travels to Akron, Ohio.

Notably, this is the first show ever where Dylan actually sits in with the Grateful Dead—the first time he’s playing in the band, before he will full-time the following summer. They do three songs together in Akron: “Little Red Rooster,” “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright,” and “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.”

Here’s Jesse to break it down:

Dylan and the Dead ‘86: Rubber Bowl, July 2nd

by Jesse Jarnow

No, really, these shows were Big Deals. People camped out in the parking lots to see Bob Dylan and the Heartbreakers share a bill with the Grateful Dead. Newspapers treated it as a generational soiree. The Deadheads were guaranteed to bring the party (and the acid) on an equally massive scale. The bigger venues also required promoters to sell many more tickets, which spiraled into needing to make ads like the above.

Local news not only dispatched crews to the parking lot of the Rubber Bowl for all-day coverage, but people cared enough to tape and preserve the coverage. There are several YouTube footage compilations like the one below, all with good larfs. Highlights of this reel include an interview with a young gentleman who figures it’s his last chance to see Dylan, a failed attempt to cut live to the concert from the news room, and a few minutes of Dylan and the Heartbreakers doing “Clean Cut Kid” while Dead roadie Steve Parish carries Jerry Garcia’s guitars onto the stage and glares at the crowd from just behind Tom Petty.

The two tours had briefly diverged after the Metrodome gig. Dylan and the Heartbreakers headed to Alpine Valley in Wisconsin for a Friday show, before the Dead took over the next afternoon for daylight shows at the same venue on Saturday and Sunday. They alternate headliners when the tours reconnect, and Dylan and the Heartbreakers go on first in Akron, playing to a less than sold-out crowd, but sounding fully enthusiastic. It’d been five years since Dylan toured the States, eight since a non-Christian tour, and over a decade since he’d played in the States like a normal large-venue rock act. Dylan and the Heartbreakers’ sets from Akron are only on cruddy audience tapes. Still sounds better than the Metrodome, though.

One thing the outdoor Dylan/Dead shows shared with the ‘60s festivals was that they became struggles for survival. And the heat got more intense as the tour progressed. “I hope the naked dude walking down the stairs got home OK,” reads one archive.org scene report from the Rubber Bowl. And many memories note what’s confirmed by the above video, which is that in deep summer heat, Bob Dylan takes to the stage in leather pants, fingerless gloves, a scarf, and a patchwork-adorned jacket of perhaps some genetic relation to the Hearts of Fire one. A few Deadheads posted memories about mistiming their LSD doses, thinking the Dead are playing first and finding themselves accidentally peaking as Dylan and the Heartbreakers run down “Band of the Hand” and other 1980s faves.

If I’d been hitting these five shows (and hadn’t mistimed my dose), I’d probably be excited about the half-dozen songs of turnover in Dylan’s set since Minneapolis, which is more than I’d’ve expected. There are three different covers: “Shake a Hand” (Joe Morris ala Little Richard), the final live version of “Red Cadillac and a Black Mustache” (recorded in the Never Ending era for a 2001 Sun Records tribute), and “That Lucky Old Sun” (which survived even into the standards era). The era-specific obscurities are all pretty fun. They do “Band of the Hand” (the only released Dylan/Heartbreakers studio collaboration) and add “Trust Yourself,” from Empire Burlesque. Some turnover in the Heartbreakers’ sets, too, for that matter, including “Don’t Do Me Like That.” But given the quality, it’s not a tape I’ll be going back to, honestly.

There’s a soundboard of the Dead’s sets, though. Veteran and well-informed Cleveland rock writer Jane Scott’s coverage confirms that, indeed, the two acts were running their own separate sound systems—and that the Dead’s was the winner. “The Dead’s sound system was at least 10 times better than the first one,” she concluded. One head said it was “like going from listening to music through a single-speaker AM radio to Dolby surround sound in a big movie theater!”

In one of the pre-tour interviews, a writer had asked Jerry Garcia about the possibility of playing with Dylan during the tour. “Dylan is one of those guys who I would never want to push in any direction, or even try to,” Garcia demurs. “I wouldn’t presume on him like that... He knows what his relationship with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers is. They’re a good band, they work well with him and it might not be politic, you know, to play with us, too.”

But Dylan plays with the Dead tonight—for the first time ever—and, man, it’s pretty absurd.

Reported Mark Faris of the Akron Beacon Journal, “The three-tune set was arranged and rehearsed beneath the southwest grandstand during an 80-minute intermission following Dylan’s 150-minute show-opening set with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and, for the most part, sounded like it.” It is a fair, sober assessment: “the results were more emotional than artistic.”

But emotional can be an achievement, too. In deference to Paul Williams and/or not having video of the whole appearance, it’s hard to know wtf’s going when Dylan joins the Dead for “Little Red Rooster,” jamming along semi-audibly, another layer in the Dead mix. Not really a keeper.

On “Don’t Think Twice,” Dylan’s voice is slathered in echo and his guitar sounds pretty fuckin’ ugly. Until reading the Beacon Journal coverage of the rehearsals, based on the tape alone, I assumed it was the sound of the Dead learning “Don’t Think Twice” onstage, having never played the song, nor even thought of playing the song. The mix is weird, too, and what I think is distortion at first turns out to be Dylan’s guitar. Where the Heartbreakers are slick and sturdy behind Dylan, the Dead sound like they might collapse next to him (though not in any kind of sync with one another). Also not really a keeper.

But then Garcia leads the band confidently into “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” a song the Dead have played many times (86 through this show, according to JerryBase’s latest count). The Dead play it, basically, as if Dylan wasn’t there, and he joins with Garcia on the vocals when he remembers the words. It’s Dylan’s first time doing it in almost two years. Garcia’s singing is notably out of breath but fully present and lovely (if you think Garcia’s voice is lovely). How you feel about the thundering double-drums and synth might be another question. There are parts where Dylan lays out, maybe just hanging back listening to Garcia, and then blasting back in to almost comic impact (but also sometimes adding very sweetly and almost inaudibly, unless my headphones are deceiving me). One remarkable thing is Garcia’s utter unflappability, continuing to sing gently as Dylan barrels across the song. It’s not a keeper in the sense that I’d ever inflict it on non-Deadheads, nor even on a room of the most sympathetic Dead freaks. But it’s charming to hear it unfold, knowing that Garcia and Dylan would only grow closer in the next few years, and thinking of it as documenting an act of friendship, rather than a public performance in a stadium with a large audience.

“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” [Grateful Dead with Bob Dylan, 7/2/86]

There’s about two minutes of video, too, shot from the side of the stage by, I believe, Justin Kreutzmann, son of Dead drummer Billy Kreutzmann—the very end of “Little Red Rooster,” and tiny bits of “Don’t Think Twice” and “Baby Blue.” And, frankly, I think it’s darling, and adds a tiny bit of visual context. Garcia’s beaming at full wattage throughout. There’s a bit during the “Don’t Think Twice” solo when Dylan watches him for a moment and then just grins big.

It’s a lot to read into a little, but a real moment in both Dylan and the Dead’s entwined timelines. The rest of the Dead show is once again decent for the era, highlighted for me by a punchy bass-forward “China Cat Sunflower”/“I Know You Rider,” recommended if you’re in the mood for some rainbow 6-string low-end by Phil Lesh. After “Playing in the Band,” Bob Weir starts up the Dead’s own version of “Desolation Row,” and Garcia bails from the stage. It’s less a comment on Weir than a sign of the bad things to come. According to Blair Jackson’s Garcia biography, the guitarist had an infected tooth, given emergency codeine by a local dentist. They play “Desolation Row” well enough without him. When the parking lot is clearing out, it finally rains.

“Desolation Row” [Grateful Dead, 7/2/86]

1986-07-02, Rubber Bowl, Akron, OH [Dylan set]

1986-07-02, Rubber Bowl, Akron, OH [Dead set partial soundboard, archive.org link]

Jesse Jarnow co-hosts the official Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, and is the author of Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America, Wasn’t That A Time: The Weavers, the Blacklist, and the Battle For the Soul of America, and Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock. The Invisible Hit Parade: A Taper’s History of Music will be published next year. The Frow Show can be heard every Tuesday on WFMU (including Bobsday celebrations).

Last night, Bob Dylan’s Long Hot Summer Tour came to New Braunfels, Texas, outside San Antonio. This was the second show after Austin’s dramatic lineup shakeup. New guitarist Joel Paterson returned, though now standing on the other side of the stage. Bob Britt, Doug Lancio, and Julian Lage remain absent.

Here to tell us what went down is Jon Lasser. Lasser is a psychology professor at Texas State University who teaches a class called “The Art of Bob Dylan.” He’s spent time researching in the Bob Dylan Archive and is currently working on a project about Sam Shepard and Dylan’s collaborations. But today he’s our man in New Braunfels reporting in on Bob’s second show with his new band lineup!

When asked to report on a Dylan show, that old, familiar “book report due tomorrow feeling” resurfaced, but this time the book was a concert and I was prepared to take really good notes. In my role at the university, I’m the one who gives assignments to students, so Ray’s request turned this self-ordained professor into a student.

First, some context. I’ve been fortunate enough to see Dylan three times this year: Tyler, TX (April 29), Austin, TX (June 29), and New Braunfels, TX (June 30). That’s one Rough and Rowdy show followed by two Long Hot Summer shows back-to-back. Doug Lancio and Bob Britt were there in April, and Joel Paterson played his first two shows with Dylan in June.

April’s show was indoors at a university performance hall with a seated, listening room vibe (and Yondr pouches), whereas the June shows were outdoors (hot in Texas!), Yondr-free but still a no-phone policy* and a mixture of GA lawn/dirt and some reserved seats. I thought the Austin show was weird, with too much bass in the mix and buried vocals, and perhaps an off vibe on stage.

* Weird thing about phones at this show: security staff were armed with (possibly seizure-inducing) strobe flashlights that were directed at anyone taking pictures, which was a bit of a distraction during the show.

Let’s focus on New Braunfels, which was my current assignment. New Braunfels was course correction, and all seemed well again. The venue (Whitewater Amphitheater) is a permanent venue that has a temporary feel to it. Parking is a nightmare, with basically one entrance to a lot on a busy road with a long car queue, traffic cops with very little patience for the flow of pedestrians and cars, and a patchwork of what seemed to be official, unofficial, and questionable parking options. Also, lots of modular railings set up to partition the cars, pedicabs, and foot traffic. All of this meant too much time arriving and resulted in us missing a good part of John Doe’s set. Once we were in, the stage was at the bottom of a gentle hill that allowed for the big GA section to work well with unobstructed views of the relatively small stage, even with those tall fans wearing cowboy hats.

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It has been a dramatic few weeks for Bob Dylan and his band. To catch up anyone who needs it, here’s the timeline:

• June 4: The summer tour begins in Troutdale, Oregon (here’s a review by Death Cab for Cutie’s Dave Depper). The band lineup at this point is the same he’s had for several years now, featuring Doug Lancio and Bob Britt on guitars. They play the first six shows together although, by the end, Bob Britt is not entering until a few songs into the set. Foreshadowing!

• June 17: With no announcement or explanation, Doug Lancio is gone after five years. Appearing onstage in his place that night is Julian Lage, one of the most famous jazz guitarists working today. Fans wonder if Lancio will return, but he doesn’t. Lage remains for seven shows, playing guitar alongside Britt, but anyone looking at his website can see he has other commitments beginning June 29 (last night).

• June 27: Bob Britt announces on Facebook that he has quit. He has been with Dylan for seven years. The next show on the calendar, two days later in Austin, Lage will not be able to play either. He’s got an event in New York. In the span of 10 days, Dylan has gone from two guitarists, both of whom have been with him for years, to zero.

Which brings us to last night. The Dylan-nerd corners of the internet were abuzz with curiosity. Not about the setlist, but about who would play guitar in Dylan’s band. Who could—or, given the murky circumstances surrounding two dramatic mid-tour departures, would—jump in on extremely short notice?

Luckily, we had a man on the ground to report in and tell us what went down. Danny Golden is an Austin-based musician who just released his new album The Big Blue last week. The album was inspired by a pilgrimage he took to Leonard Cohen’s house in Greece. He’s a Dylan and Cohen superfan, and posts hilarious Reels on Instagram about both artists. This one’s maybe my favorite (it happened to me recently listening to John Wesley Harding):

But today, Danny Golden wears another hat: our dedicated Austin-show correspondent. Take it away Danny! (Bonus: There’s already a beautiful-sounding tape too, link at the bottom.)

The addition of jazz virtuoso Julian Lage to Bob Dylan’s touring band came as a surprise not only to me and the rest of Dylan fandom, but also possibly to the current members of his band. I, for one, was beyond excited at the prospect that my favorite jazz guitarist, who until about a week ago had no connection to my greatest hero, Bob Dylan, might be appearing on stage with him in my city of Austin, Texas, on June 29th. The show I was already planning to see had suddenly become elevated to mythical proportions.

Well, it wouldn’t play out that way. Julian Lage had a prior engagement in New York City that night. Okay, so I’m going to see Bob with his usual band, that’s great too! Not so fast… Two days before the show, Dylan’s longtime guitarist Bob Britt posted a Facebook status update traveling from Austin back to Nashville with a simple two-word caption: “Sayonara Bobby.”

Suddenly, there was no guitar player in Bob Dylan’s band. Bob world was now atwitter with talk of who would play guitar for the Austin show. Maybe Austin’s own Charlie Sexton would make a return, or perhaps Jimmie Vaughan would fill in. The guitarist question was on everyone’s mind as the Monday night show approached.

I filed in toward the main entrance to the Moody Amphitheater through one of the longest lines I’ve ever stood in, catching several songs from the John Doe Folk Trio as I shuffled along the queue, including a surprising and heartwarming rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” By the time I made it into the venue, Lucinda Williams was on stage with her band of badass players, dropping into the opening riff of “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road”.

The chaos of the discursive queue was contrasted by an air of civility once inside the venue. The crowd was respectful, organized, and well-behaved. There was very little security presence. We were essentially policing ourselves, which gave me a feeling of hope in a society that seems to be falling more and more into disrepair by the day. It felt less like a rock show atmosphere and more like Shakespeare in the park.

Lucinda’s set included many highlights. “Drunken Angel,” a nod to Austin’s Blaze Foley, was an early crowd favorite. “Low Life,” a brand new tune, won the crowd over quickly with images of hurricanes (the drink, Lucinda clarified before the song) in a dark New Orleans bar. “Joy” erupted into an Allman Brothers-esque two-guitar solo with a Led Zeppelin tease worked into it. Between songs, Lucinda graciously thanked her crew as well as Bob Dylan for having her, while also noting the similarity between the title of her newest album, World’s Gone Wrong, and Dylan’s 1993 album World Gone Wrong. “Any time I try to write anything, he’s already been there, he’s already grabbed it, dammit!”

She addressed the current president and the state of the world a few times and finished out her set with a sing-along cover of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” inspiring an otherwise sedate audience to pump their fists and sing despite the 95-degree heat. Lucinda’s closing remarks to the audience were: “Thank you for singing with me. We have to stick together. Music is our best weapon against all this evil and madness.”

During the changeover between sets, I thought about how I was about to occupy the same physical space as the artist Leonard Cohen had once called “God’s puppet.” I thought about Bob Dylan, the man, and Bob Dylan, The Myth. I don’t think it’s possible to dive down the rabbit hole of becoming a fan without buying into the hero worship at some point: the poetic giant, the elusive artist, the pioneering musician, the Homer of our time. There is no denying that Dylan is a once-in-a-many-generation genius.

But at the same time, he is a real person, and a flawed one at that. A person who is probably hard to work for, and who is probably not easy to socialize with. I’ve never heard a normal-sounding story about the guy. The same genius that has attracted some of the greatest talent in the world also likely played a role in Bob Britt leaving his band, and now the genius needed a new guitar player.

The lights went down and four figures dressed in black marched onto the stage. Tonight’s mystery guitarist was tall and slender like Charlie Sexton, but that was not Charlie. It was Chicago-based jazz guitarist Joel Paterson!

The band opened with “Watching the River Flow,” which would be the most recognizable tune of the night, relative to its original version. Bob’s endless rearrangement of songs, maligned by many, I believe serves to expand the meaning of the songs. It pulls the audience further into the world of the song and shows us things in a different light. It lets us into his creative process. Anyone can go take a look at Guernica, but not many get to say they watched Picasso paint.

The jumbo screens to either side of the stage, which had projected giant simulcast images of Lucinda Williams and John Doe during their respective sets, were noticeably turned off for Dylan’s. The audience was left with just the music, four small dark figures on a black billowy-curtained stage, and our own imaginations.

“Man in the Long Black Coat” followed, drawing an obvious connection to Dylan’s black North Face, hood up always, which has become a new signature on-stage look. This song makes me think about how its album Oh Mercy is the only album he talks about in any depth in his Chronicles: Volume One autobiography. Always leave them wanting more, Bob.

Next up was a Motown-feeling groove that, after a few lines of lyrics, became discernible as Dylan’s timeless early anthem “It Ain’t Me Babe.” This rendition came to life and gave us Joel Paterson’s first guitar solo of the night. He found some really nice lines with a flurry of hammer-ons and pull-offs that juxtaposed a Blonde on Blonde-era feel atop the, let’s say, non-blonde on non-blonde arrangement.

Dylan then dipped into Time Out of Mind material for a well-received “Trying to Get to Heaven” before wrestling with his own myth in “False Prophet,” which included some devilish-sounding key modulations for Paterson to solo over.

Bob couldn’t resist a Bo Diddley moment and followed that up with his spin on Diddley’s “I Can Tell.” “Black Rider” came next as a breeze picked up and the night finally began to cool down, at least a little bit. Then it was back to cover territory with “Share Your Love With Me,” a song that has been done beautifully by Aretha Franklin, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and The Band. Unlike these graceful versions, Bob’s rendition tonight felt more evocative of wistfulness and regret from the singer. It’s moments like these that I am reminded of Bob Dylan, the man, and the cost that his myth has had over his ability to live any normal kind of life.

The most unrecognizable song of the night award goes to “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” which was delivered in a minor key with a Latin twist. A few lyrics were changed from the recording that I recall (including no mention of a popular American soda beverage). The minor key adaptation placed the song in a macabre world. Whereas the original version feels fun and hopeful, the subtext of this version seemed to be that this titular masterpiece ain’t ever getting painted, or maybe it was painted and she broke her promise about being there with him when it happened. I started to imagine Bob holed up in the Venetian mansion where he appeared in a 2004 Victoria’s Secret ad, scowling at a lingerie-clad Adriana Lima. There is something so misanthropic about octogenarian Bob Dylan, and during this rendition of the song I felt it.

Then it was back for another hit of remorse with a cover of Jerry Lee Lewis’s “I’ll Make It All Up to You,” before a particularly engaging “Crossing the Rubicon” that incorporated full-band swells and brought us even further into the palm of Bob’s hand. “Soon After Midnight” from Tempest came next, timing the rise of tonight’s full moon perfectly opposite the stage with Bob’s delivery of the lyric, “It’s soon after midnight, and the moon is in my eye.”

“Under the Red Sky” gave us the first harmonica solo of the night, which was everything you could want in a Bob Dylan harmonica solo: shrill, beautiful, impatient, and clumsily cuing the band that it was time to end the song.

In this fan’s opinion, there is a major difference between a sitting Dylan concert and a standing one. The standing show involves a more active listening experience and seems to produce the most engaged crowds. The sitting show becomes passive, and especially on a hot Texas evening in June, can result in a noticeably enervated crowd, particularly after two opening bands and a run of a few deep cuts. Hence, the minor exodus that began around this time of people ready to beat the traffic on the way home.

“I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” was next, a song I’ve always seen as a statement of Dylan’s commitment to his highest purpose: sharing his gift with the world. The song included some beautiful chord inversions in Paterson’s comping, adding a wonderful warmth to the already sweet song.

One final Rough and Rowdy Ways pit stop with “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” led us to the final song of the night, “Every Grain of Sand,” sending us off with some overt spiritual wisdom and a final harmonica solo.

Exiting the amphitheater under the full moon, dawdling among the genteel crowd, I began to reflect on the arc of the setlist. With Bob at 85, the shows have a tangible arc through artistic eras, stations of love and loss, optimism and despair, life and death. Bob, the man, has moved in and out of these things like any human does, searching for what is real and meaningful. Bob, The Myth, has, like Odysseus, retained the gifts of each of these adventures and continues to share them with us in the way he feels called to transmit. He is a man who has moved in and out of styles, philosophies, and religions searching for something that we are all looking for, and he has found more than most, and his genius (God only knows where it came from) has allowed him to communicate it to us for over half a century. He’s been expanding minds and alienating friends and audiences since the mid-1960s with the double-edged sword of his artistic vision.

Bob Dylan, The Myth, has never stopped affecting the world with his work and by being unapologetically himself. Bob Dylan, the man, has won and lost again and again and ruffled a lot of feathers in that pursuit. You don’t get one without the other.

Sayonara, Bobby.

2026-06-29, Moody Amphitheater, Austin, TX

Thanks Danny! Stream his new album The Big Blue below or wherever you listen to music, and pick up a signed vinyl copy here.

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“Dylan & The Dead” is a phrase that causes shudders up the spine of many Dylan fans and Deadheads alike. But the Dylan & The Dead that skeptics are referring to is typically Summer 1987. That’s when the Dead served as Dylan’s backing band, and it’s when the widely-derided live album came from.

But there was an earlier Dylan & The Dead: Summer 1986, 40 years ago this week. They toured together that year, but the Dead did not serve as Dylan’s backing band. He was still playing with Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, bringing the True Confessions tour I wrote about earlier this year to the United States. For five of those shows, Dylan co-headlined with the Dead. He sat in with the band a couple times too.

In a special four-part Independence Day miniseries, journalist Jesse Jarnow is going to break down each of those stops: Minneapolis, Akron, Buffalo, and, finally, the two shows at RFK Stadium in Washington DC that almost killed Jerry Garcia.

You may know Jarnow as one of our regular Bob-show correspondents here (here’s him writing about Jones Beach last summer). He’s also a major Grateful Dead journalist, co-hosting the official podcast Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, writing various liner notes for the band, and doing deep dives into their past shows on Mastodon. He’s also the author of Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America, Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock, and Wasn’t That a Time: The Weavers, the Blacklist, and the Battle For the Soul of America—plus an upcoming book on the history of fan taping I’m very excited for.

So there’s nowhere better qualified to take us deep into what was happening with Bob Dylan & The Grateful Dead in 1986. Take it away Jesse.

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Dylan and the Dead ‘86: Metrodome, June 26th

by Jesse Jarnow

Please don’t ask me to rank anything. I hate it, thanks. But, probably, if I had to pick, or make a chart, summer 1986 would be close to the entwined nadir in my own personal tastes in the music of Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, two of my otherwise all-time favorite acts. There are periods of their careers that engage me less, but they all lead towards summer ’86, which is also perhaps why I find it so fascinating that their first five-show intersection occurred at that precise moment, and why I felt compelled to visit the tapes (plus surrounding news coverage and scene reports).

By almost any definition, Dylan’s two July ’86 sit-ins with the Dead, in Akron and D.C., are terrible. And yet, more recently, I’ve also learned to love both (though still won’t argue either of them are any good). What’s more, they apparently meant enough to Dylan himself that he chose to play with the Dead as his backing band the following summer and continued the musical friendship for decades, later crediting the Dead with the reinvigoration that sparked the Never Ending Tour.

A Contact Low

“I had no connection to any kind of inspiration,” Dylan wrote infamously in Chronicles of his tours with the Heartbreakers, not that he’s often been a reliable narrator. “Tom was at the top of his game and I was at the bottom of mine.” Usually, when people caricature Dylan’s voice, it sounds to me like the ’86 version (or maybe Tour ’74)—schnoz to the max.

The Dead were in a different kind of not-great way in the summer of ’86, and mainly lead guitarist Jerry Garcia. “You’re getting a contact low,” Dead drummer Mickey Hart told Joan Baez when she stopped by a 1984 studio session for the Dead’s album in progress, and that’s a feeling I sometimes get with tapes of both acts in the middle ’80s.

Though Garcia worked to clean up from hard drugs following his January 1985 bust in Golden Gate Park (on the way to rehab), and was growing audibly more present at Dead shows, his body was en route to collapse. Just days after the last of the Dylan/Dead dates, Garcia lapsed into a diabetic coma. So one of the larger surprises in my ongoing show-by-show Dead listening project was to discover that the first part of 1986 actually contains some great Dead performances, a good case for highlights-oriented releases (as opposed to complete gigs), including Garcia’s stunning live debut of “Visions of Johanna,” which promptly disappeared again until 1995. Bob Weir brought out his own “Desolation Row” during these same shows, too.

Just before the Dead left for their spring ’86 shows, Dylan had called Garcia from Australia as tour negotiations got underway. “This was all building up, but what it really wanted was some legitimacy,” Garcia told the Buffalo News. “He wanted to believe it was us on the other end and we wanted to believe it was him.”

Dylan and the Dead ’66

In 2018, I put together an essay and accompanying mixes for Tyler Wilcox’s Doom and Gloom From the Tomb, The Ballad of Spike and Jerry: The Frequently Secret and Always Misbegotten Adventures of Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, 1971-2003. In part, I wanted to clarify the timeline of the Dylan/Dead relationship. But, since then, the starting point has re-blurred itself.

The earliest place Bob Dylan and Jerry Garcia are documented crossing paths is April 1971 at the Fillmore East, when Dylan was living nearby (and Yippies were rifling through his trash). Rolling Stone reported on Dylan’s presence on the same night the Beach Boys sat in with the Dead, April 27th. Venue crew member (and future Rock ‘n’ Roll High School director) Allan Arkush has since confirmed that Dylan planned to play with the Dead that night, but stalked out after Arkush accidentally flashed his name on the light-show screen before he was ready.

But when I spoke with Dead family member (and Phil Lesh’s then-girlfriend) Rosie McGee, she spoke of a “slim and shady” memory of the Dead and Dylan briefly crossing paths when the Dead were living in Los Angeles in spring 1966. At the time, Dylan was in residence between tour legs at The Castle, Tom and Lisa Law’s mansion/crashpad-to-the-stars in Los Feliz. It’s blurry.

“I can’t say for sure what happened except there was awkwardness,” she says. She was pals with “Eve of Destruction” singer Barry McGuire, then in residence at The Castle, who visited the Dead’s house a few times and danced in the living room while they practiced. She wonders if maybe McGuire brought Dylan with him once, and Dylan didn’t like the vibe and split quickly. (There’s another story by Hettie McGee—no relation—of when the Dead’s LSD chemist, sound engineer, and patron Owsley Stanley stormed The Castle to introduce himself to Dylan.)

In looking through local news coverage for the summer 1986 tour, though, I came across a preview interview with Garcia in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, where it notes (in a paraphrase), “They had known each other since 1967, and sharing a bill had been ‘an old dream’ according to Garcia.” And since Dylan didn’t visit San Francisco in ’67 and the Dead didn’t visit Woodstock, I wonder if Garcia’s mostly-reliable memory was calling from the same blurry source material as Rosie.

According to Levon Helm’s memoir, Dylan told him on New Year’s 1971 that he was thinking of touring with the Dead. The Village Voice spotted him at a Roosevelt Stadium show in Jersey City the following summer. Though Garcia sat in for much of a set at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater in 1980, it remained mostly an offstage bromance.

Summer ’86

The Dead hit the road in the summer of ’86, just like they always did, playing amphitheaters and arenas despite not having released a new studio album since 1980.

Bob Dylan hit the road in the summer of ’86 in a manner he’d never previously done. It was his first American tour in a half-decade, and much hyped—in part due to being backed by the Heartbreakers, in part due to the surprise success of Biograph (sadly not because of either his own new studio albums), in part due to the gigs with the Dead. It was also his first pass through the circuit of concert sheds that he’d make his summer home over the next four decades—and where you can find him right this very second, should you be reading this close to publication date.

Between June 26th and July 7th, Dylan’s tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers linked up with the Dead for five co-headlining stadium bills in Minneapolis, Akron, Buffalo, and Washington, D.C. They also played a handful of shows without one another. Though heads could see the tours on successive nights at Alpine Valley, they were also in competition on other dates. Assuming I had my spring copies of The Telegraph or Wicked Messenger in hand with the set lists from Australia (and my copies of The Golden Road with the Dead’s wild set lists from the spring), if I’d had to choose, I’d have gone with the Dead. But I’m not sure either was the better choice.

One person who followed almost the entirety of Dylan/Heartbreakers tour that summer was the late, great Paul Williams, writing about it in the concluding chapter of his 1992 book, Bob Dylan: Performing Artist, 1974-1986, The Middle Years, “the one tour I’ve followed coast to coast -- twelve and a half thousand miles in my wife’s Toyota, 29 shows in a row (I skipped 11 of the last 12).”

Williams describes Dylan’s shows on terms that will probably sound familiar to anyone who’s been keeping up with the Rough and Rowdy/Outlaw coverage in this newsletter: “For Dylan a tour is a construct, a composition to be performed,” Williams writes. “The set list is the score; as we know, Dylan most years likes to stick with his set list (with variations and evolutions). The score is arranged for certain instruments (this year piano/organ, three guitars, four female voices, bass, drums, very occasionally harmonica, and a touch of slide guitar or mandolin); these arrangements take place not on paper but in the act, usually in rehearsals, and often are not verbalized—they exist in the leader’s mind, and no one else can be sure he or she knows what the songs should sound like.”

The summer of 1986 would prove to be the end of this approach for more than 25 years. Not coincidentally, the Heartbreakers tours were also the last time where Dylan’s ‘60s songs (“Like A Rolling Stone,” “Positively 4th Street,” and others) were virtually guaranteed to sound at least a little like the original arrangements, due in no small part to Benmont Tench’s always-tasty/tasteful B3 and keyboards.

In his chapter on this tour, Williams also tries to come to grips with “the acceptability of recordings as representations or accurate archives of the artist’s work.” He took the “performing artist” part of his argument seriously, arguing that tapes were a “crutch” when trying to describe a concert. He writes, “unless one has an extraordinary memory, the sort that can replay events accurately in the mind’s eye and ear, is to risk not having been present at the performance in the first place.”

In deference to Dylan, the Dead suspended their usual taping section for these shows. Not that it stopped anybody from taping. One enjoyable part of summer ’86, for that matter, is the amount of crispy well-mixed soundboards that sound probably nothing at all like it was to experience the music in the cavernous stadiums where they played. Sorry, Paul.

Nonetheless, having listened to the tapes of the five shows where Dylan and the Dead shared the bill, I think it’s possible to hear why Bob Dylan was ready for something different.

Metrodome: June 26th

All of the Dylan and Dead shows were Big Deals. The governor of Minnesota attended the show at the Metrodome. So did Dylan’s mother. And around 50,000 others. It was the first ever full-scale concert in the stadium, and Dylan’s first hometown appearance since Halloween ’78. Most of what people remember is that it sounded bloomin’ awful.

The Grateful Dead are rightly known for their obsession with high-quality live audio, such as the infamous Wall of Sound they toured with in 1974, but the June 26th, 1986 show at the Metrodome is often remembered as the single worst-sounding Dead show in history, and getting even worse when Dylan hit the stage. It’s forefront in nearly all memories, and was an Associated Press story on its own. In 2011, Minneapolis Post writer Jeff Severns Guntzel was researching the Metrodome and uncovered (and scanned) a whole folder on the sound issues in the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission at the Minnesota Historical Society.

Probably, it was partly the Dead’s fault, though reports from later in the tour indicate that the Dead and Dylan were using their own separate systems, which seems impractical, but also a condition that never stopped Dylan or the Dead. The audience tapes bear out people’s acoustic nightmares, though there are decent soundboards of both Dylan and the Dead’s sets.

The Dead play first in Minneapolis, condensing their usual two-sets-no-setlist format into an unexceptional two-hour one, the shorter songs in the front and then pivoting to longer jams and their infamous “Drums”/“Space” segment. (They’ll play two sets at all the other Dylan/Dead gigs, though the performances will still amount to about two hours of music.) The Minneapolis tape is unexceptional, highlighted for me by an assured version of Bob Weir’s new-ish “My Brother Esau” and a bouncing “Tennessee Jed.” By the time it reaches “Drums” and “Space,” the segments often enhanced by engineer Dan Healy’s flowering stereo mixes, the soundboard tape runs out, though, and “Space” all but evaporates into the Metrodome’s rafters.

Dylan and the Heartbreakers are in full marathon mode: three Dylan sets punctuated by two Petty mini-sets over two-and-a-half hours. There’s about half of Empire Burlesque, nothing from the forthcoming Knocked Out Loaded, a few greatest hits, a few gospel tunes, and six of the almost four-dozen covers they rolled out over the course of the year. The covers are the standouts for me on this first tape, especially Weldon Rogers’ “So Long, Goodbye and Good Luck” (an inspired opener), Ricky Nelson’s “Lonesome Town” (an obscure crossover between the Dylan and Garcia songbooks), and “Let the Good Times Roll” (the Shirley and Lee version, not the Louis Jordan song the Dead debuted later). Dylan and Petty’s acoustic duet on “I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know” is great, too, a high point of nearly every show, with a premonition of tough guy angels to come.

“Across the Borderline” will thankfully survive into the Never Ending Tour years, but it captures what feels off in this era. It’s a powerful song, and the Heartbreakers are great, tasteful and pro, and same for the Queens of Rhythm. But it’s all a little much. There’s not a lot of intimacy or delicacy, even on the acoustic and semi-acoustic songs. But, of course, it’s also the setting. I mean: they’re in the Metrodome.

There’s some adorably giggly local Bob-talk, too. “Everybody knows that I came from around here someplace, but it actually wasn’t here though,” Dylan says. “It was a ways away. It’s a little different up there, actually.” Elsewhere: “Mom, I dunno if you’re still out there, but I love you.”

But it’s his sign-off that feels most prescient, perhaps recognizing that stadiums aren’t a good place to do what he wants to do. “Maybe we’ll come back and play at First Avenue for a year,” Dylan says. “Like once a week.”

1986-06-26, Metrodome, Minneapolis, MN [Dylan set]

1986-06-26, Metrodome, Minneapolis, MN [Dead set partial soundboard, archive.org link]

1986-06-26, Metrodome, Minneapolis, MN [Dead set complete audience tape, archive.org link]

Thanks Jesse! Part two, on Akron—the first show where Dylan actually sat in with the Dead—coming July 2nd. Subscribe to get it sent straight to your email inbox.

Jesse Jarnow co-hosts the official Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, and is the author of Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America, Wasn’t That A Time: The Weavers, the Blacklist, and the Battle For the Soul of America, and Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock. The Invisible Hit Parade: A Taper’s History of Music will be published next year. The Frow Show can be heard every Tuesday on WFMU (including Bobsday celebrations).

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When I interviewed director John Hillcoat a couple months ago about his work with Bob Dylan, he sent me a bunch of photos from his various shoots with Bob. One you can see above, from the secret 2017 Nobel performance-video taping outside Dublin. When I looked at this photo, though, something seemed off. That guy standing by the piano sort of looks like Dylan, but not quite, right? Then I noticed Hillcoat had typed a caption: “Stand-ins.”

A stand-in is someone who, as the term says, stands in for someone else. It’s common in the film world. You don’t want to make a famous actor just stand there for hours while the crew adjusts the lighting, so you find someone roughly the same height and build to do it. In Hillcoat’s photo, you see a bunch of other people standing in for Dylan and the band—people who are roughly the same size, wearing roughly the same clothes. In addition to fake Bob Dylan, you’ve got, from left, fake Donnie Herron, fake Charlie Sexton, fake Tony Garnier, and fake George Receli. (And, looking more closely now, I think that “piano” is a stand-in too.)

When I posted my Hillcoat interview on Instagram, one comment caught my eye. @music.city.conor posted: “Being Bob’s stand in was the best job I ever had!”

You know I had to find out more. So today, we hear from the guy standing in for Dylan in that photo.

Note: Read the John Hillcoat interview for more context on what this shoot actually was for

When he’s not standing behind a fake piano, Conor Lumsden records under the name Music City (his new power-pop album Welcome To Music City just got a rave in Mojo). But, for a few days in 2017, he played a different role: Bob Dylan.

How does one become Bob Dylan’s stand-in? I see you’ve got the hair.

Me and my friends were all broke musicians. We would often get scouted, just from hanging out in town, to do extra work for films. We were in the Beatles entourage in the Jimi Hendrix biopic with André 3000 in it. That was my first. They didn’t really have much of an extras budget, so I’m reused in a few scenes. We’re in the Albert Hall performance where the Beatles went to see him. You gotta work your way up in these things. Start with Jimi Hendrix, and then work your way up to Bob Dylan.

One of our friends was working in production and she was asking how tall we all were. I was like, “I’m five foot seven.” and she’s like, “Would you be up for doing this thing? I can’t really tell you what it is.”

I always knew that he was the same height as me. And I had the hair. Usually as a Beatles fan, power-popper guy, I had Cuban heels and drain pipe trousers, turtleneck and wayfarers. That was, and is still, my uniform as such. So when we showed up on set, people were like, “Whoa, whoa…” I think they thought I was a Bob Dylan impersonator, rather than just wearing my own clothes.

Just wearing your regular outfit.

That was the thing on the Jimi Hendrix one as well. We were just wearing our normal clothes, and one of the other extras came up to us and was like, “Lads, I bet you can’t wait to get out of these stupid fucking clothes.”

The whole thing was pretty strange. How do I describe it? I mean, it’s insane that Bob Dylan was in Bray, of all places.

Yeah, what is Bray? I don’t know the geography.

I’m from Shank Hill, which is the most southern point of Dublin, and Bray is just the next town over. I guess the land is a little bit cheaper there, so in the ‘60s and ‘70s they bought up these large lots to have film studios. It’s cheaper to film in Ireland than it is in London.

Even still, to this day, I can’t believe Bob Dylan—like, what was he doing hanging out in Bray? There’s only room for one of us in this town!

Take me through the day.

It was a few days. It wasn’t just one.

We showed up and then got told that it was a Bob Dylan concert video recording thing. I assumed it was for RT or something. That’s the national TV station. Even that was surprising. I was like, “What the hell is this for? It makes no sense.” And then it was like, “Oh yeah, the guy who directed The Road is doing it.” I’m like, is this gonna be some kind of sci-fi dystopian Bob Dylan concert video? I remember John Hillcoat driving up in a blacked-out Mercedes. The window rolled down. He took out his phone and took a picture of me, then drove off.

It was kind of an empty set at the time. We’re told to hang out on this bus for a while. I think the first day we didn’t even get to see the set. Then the second day, we went in. It was all the instruments: Bob’s piano and the pedal steel and the drums and stuff. I got to play on the piano a little bit until somebody was like, “Don’t do that.”

I don’t know if you know the Irish show Father Ted. It was kind of like an episode of that mixed with The Larry Sanders Show. It was just this ridiculous series of events. Everything was surreal, because Bob Dylan’s there, and because we’re being Bob Dylan’s band stand-ins for this thing that we don’t know what it is. And then just how different people act around him. It was very strict. Like if anyone talks to you, don’t talk to them. If Bob Dylan walks by you, don’t look in his eyes.

I’m actually surprised you were even there at the same time. I envisioned you were maybe there the day before to get the lights set up, and then they could swap in the real guy.

We were, but then management showed up early in the second day, and they’re like, “Bob’s coming on set.”

It was then that they saw me at the piano, and I think they got really upset with the crew. They were like, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing hiring this guy? Bob is not going to like this.” Because I was dressed like ’65 Bob Dylan. Completely unintentionally.

They thought you were a Bob Dylan impersonator.

Yeah. They’re very protective over how he might react to things.

It was at that point I got my own bus. I really got the star treatment of all the extras.

Just to keep you away from Bob Dylan?

Yes. They got me an entire separate bus. Any time Bob was on the set, I had to go on this bus that was parked behind the studio. So I wasn’t able to talk to my friends in the band.

You mean your friends were doing the bandmember stand-ins too?

Yeah. My friend Dylan was doing Charlie Sexton, and Ruan, he was a drummer, but I think he got pushed to pedal steel because of the height. So I didn’t get to talk to them for days.

Sequestered.

You know, just to create some tension within the band. I got the star treatment. Some of the guys in the band didn’t talk to me for a while because they were jealous that I got to be Bob.

The management—which were these shadowy figures in a doorway—looked kind of scary, like FBI agents or something. They were just pointing at me. I don’t think they had time to find anyone else. I know Albert Grossman’s been dead for years, but when I remember it, in my head, it’s him there. I guess he was haunting the set.

A few hours later, Bob showed up on set. I was sent to my tour bus, and the other guys were sent to the catering tour bus.

It was interesting to me because all of the people were at such a high level. Like [cinematographer] Lol [Crawley], who won an Academy Award recently, and John Hillcoat and stuff. But even how they were with him was really strange. Like, nobody is comfortable on this set. Everybody seemed terrified of Bob. But I was having the time of my life, seeing all these strange interactions and seeing everybody freaking out.

What were some strange interactions you saw?

It was just really strange how I was this liability. Because I was dressed in these clothes, they thought that I was some obsessive. Once I got my own tour bus, they made me swap clothes with a rigger. I had to wear more baggy jeans and a hoodie. I was like, “Surely this is like how Bob looks now. Maybe this is going to freak him out too.”

He loves the hoodies.

Yeah, his 2000s-era multiple hoodies. The Unabomber thing.

When you’re not on the bus, what are you doing? Like what actually is stand-in work?

You basically are just a 3D model for them to make sure that the lighting is correct. They have all their blocking and lighting and camera angles sorted out, so that they can position people wherever they want and make sure that it’s all well-lit. There were two or three different sets that I remember, and they had to keep rearranging them. They were all very anxious about getting it right. So you’d come back in for like five minutes.

Different sets like literally different stages?

No stages. It was a very bare-bones thing, but I can kind of remember there being picture frames hanging. Then there were those old studio lights.

Oh, so it’s the same stage, and the musicians are in the same place, but things around them are moving.

Yeah. Set decorations. By the end, it got very bare bones, I guess how he plays live. A couple of lights, very subtle.

It was a lot of fun like hanging out. They made me wear a hat though. I remember I didn’t want to.

You got a hat on in that photo. So that wasn’t part of your typical outfit?

I don’t typically wear my trilby around, no. If it ever comes up I’m like, “I was Bob Dylan’s stand-in,” I don’t think people believe me. But now I’ve got proof.

I remember on the day that they were about to film, Lol grabbed me aside once they were kicking everybody off set. There was curtains pulled and everything. Everybody had to get off.

John said he wanted very few people in Bob’s eye line.

Lol was like, “I’m going to keep you in here for this. You can be my assistant. Just don’t say anything to anyone.” So I got to see this whole eight-hour jam session, which was absolutely mind-blowing. I got to hunker down over a monitor while Lol was filming.

Why did Lol ask you to be his assistant?

There was no reason. He was probably like, “This guy’s been shoved around everywhere for the past few days. I can give him a story he’ll remember forever.”

You didn’t actually have any work to do as Lol’s assistant?

No. I mean, I went to art college, so I know about framing and things, but he didn’t ask me for any advice. He had it. He’s like, “Here’s some clothes. Just sit beside me the whole time.”

Wait, you had to change your outfit again?

Yeah. I had to go into crew clothes so I wouldn’t be noticed.

The band had to keep up with Bob in terms of what he wanted to play. My jaw [dropped] when they started playing “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.” Bob Dylan, as you know, the songs don’t always sound like the songs. So it took awhile for me to catch on.

Just getting to see a band at that level rehearse, I suppose, or work on things. Even the band seemed [nervous noise].

John said Bob was giving Sexton a lot of shit.

It seemed like he was the musical director. I can almost remember Bob asking him what the chords were, and it was this “Oh, I better figure this out quick” kind of thing. It was just incredible to see that that level of musicianship being tested, and just to see how they adapted so quickly.

After that day, we were also working on taking down the set. We were crew after the thing had been filmed. Bob was in one of the buildings with John editing. It was like, “Don’t go near those windows.” You’d kind of be like, “Is he in there?”

It was funny because they really make such a huge deal out of, don’t be in his presence at all. But then Bob was walking around when we were packing up, and he’s like [to me], “Hey, excuse me?” I was like, “Aw for fuck’s sake.” I don’t know what to do.

I was like [awkwardly], “Hi…?” It’s this guy in a hoodie, and it’s fucking Bob Dylan. It was like I’m listening to Theme Time Radio or something. He’s like, “Do you know where Sonny is?”

I kind of just stared at him. I was like, “If I say something, I’m gonna get”—I didn’t care about me getting in trouble, that’s worth it for me, but I was like, “he’ll end up like cancelling the whole film.”

I really don’t think he’s like that, though. I think this is just his protectors and minders that make it seem like this. Because I think he’s like a very funny, cool guy. From my three or four sentence interaction with him.

So what happened?

I was like, “Uhh… Uhh… You know what? I’ve seen him, and he’s just over here.”

So I walked with him over and I was like, “I think that’s the guy that you’re looking for.” And he’s like, “Thanks.”

What were you wearing at this time, and was he freaked out by it?

I was in my costume that they provided me of a hoodie. I don’t think I was in my Beatle boots. I don’t think that would have been great footwear for rigging anyway.

So did he ever catch sight of you in the initial outfit that they were so worried about?

I don’t think so. I mean, a great, great effort was put into hiding me away.

So this whole time you never knew about this Nobel thing?

No. I had no idea what it was for. Every year we’d be like, “Maybe something…?” I kinda thought maybe he wanted to work with John Hillcoat on something else and he was testing this out because he was hanging out in Ireland. But what do I know? I’m just the preeminent Irish Bob Dylan stand-in.

Thanks Conor! Check out his new album ‘Welcome to Music City’ at Bandcamp or wherever you get albums.

Bob Dylan has spent the last two nights performing at the famous Greek Theatre in Berkeley, California. Each night featured a slightly different setlist—the return of “I Shall Be Released” to close night one, and the perennial “Every Grain of Sand” to close night two.

Ian Grant attended both nights and reports in. Ian is probably well-known to many of you. He’s the co-host of two excellent podcasts, Jokermen and Never Ending Stories (and I’m not just saying that because I’m an occasional guest on both). Jokermen just finished their epic Beach Boys series (I talked about my favorite Brian Wilson solo album), and are taking a summer detour through indie punks Death Grips before revealing their next full series. Ian also writes for Aquarium Drunkard and GQ and has his own Substack, Hard Disk.

I’ll turn it over to Ian…

Here’s a theory I’m working on: the Serious Bob Show vs. the Unserious Bob Show.

The two are distinguished by a few key elements. At the Serious Bob Show, there are no opening acts. The performance will take place in a relatively small hall, typically between 2,000 and 4,000 cap. Ideally, the venue will be an old movie palace in a historic downtown, though municipal performing arts centers are also acceptable, and the setlist will be almost entirely static. Finally, with increasing regularity, the Serious Bob Show will likely take place in a far-flung town several hours from a major metropolitan area, often in the American South or Midwest. You know these places when you see them listed on the latest tour schedule: Huntington, WV; Youngstown, OH; Tyler, TX.

At the Unserious Bob Show, Bob will take the stage after (and in some cases before) a series of other artists. The performance will take place at a sizable outdoor shed, and occasionally major historical venues: Forest Hills, the Hollywood Bowl, the Gorge. Setlists will come and go, songs appearing, disappearing, then reappearing haphazardly. Some of these shows will occur in exotic corners of the nation, but others will take place in and around major cities—cities like San Francisco and its sleepy, uptight satellite Berkeley, where I just witnessed Bob’s two-night stand at the historic Greek Theatre.

The question I find myself asking here on Monday morning: were these shows Serious or Unserious?

To most in the audience, it probably wasn’t clear that they could’ve gotten anything else. They saw the strange, hunched figure huddled over a keyboard toward the back of the stage, they heard snippets of a few songs they recognized—the words at least, for the music sounded nothing like it did on the records—and they thought to themselves, “This is what a Bob Dylan concert is.” Descriptors like Serious and Unserious never even occurred to them.

For readers of this newsletter or subscribers to my podcast, the different phyla of Bob performances should be familiar. This year, however, the matter has been complicated with the so-called “Long Hot Summer Tour.” On its face, this current run has much in common with the Outlaw Fest, the site of almost all Unserious Bob Shows over the past several years: multiple openers, big outdoor venues, large cities. It’s tempting to understand these shows as Bob’s own miniature Outlaw, one that dials down the quotient of red hat jug-hooters in the crowd and instead replaces them with an equal number of greybeard “In This House, We Believe…” sign-types.

At the same time, there’s something undeniably Serious about Long Hot Summer. The two shows I saw this weekend featured nearly-identical setlists, indicating the potential emergence of the latest iteration of The Set, a hallmark of the Serious. Bob also seems to be returning, once again, to the Rough & Rowdy Well. Recent gigs have featured no fewer than four R&RW songs, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see others creep in over the coming weeks. This makes Long Hot Summer—the first non-R&RW headlining tour leg in seven years, per the official branding from Bob Dylan Industries—nearly as rough and rowdy as what came before.

For the past half-decade, the calculus had been simple: if you heard “Black Rider,” you were at a Serious Bob Show. If you didn’t, you were at an Unserious Bob Show. Now that equation is all fucked up.

To be sure, these performances would be better without “Black Rider”—and, for that matter, most of the Rough & Rowdy material. The current take on “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” is a beauty, lines tumbling out of Bob’s mouth like so many artfully arranged dominos, but “False Prophet” and “Crossing The Rubicon” aren’t in peak condition, and “Rider” is a complete momentum-killer. It’s the venue more than anything. Songs that fill high-ceilinged auditoriums with spectral visions of skeleton doctors and well-endowed reapers seemed to piddle away into the vast bowl of the Greek, swallowed up by the immensity of the Northern California night.

My sisters, attending their first (and presumably last) Bob show, both remarked that the middle of the set seemed to blend into one long song. I can’t blame them for feeling that way, especially considering the fact that both have listened to Rough & Rowdy Ways precisely zero times in their 31 and 14 years, respectively, on this earth. Bob’s penchant for confronting and confounding his audience is well-understood, but ideally he pursues that urge in service of a greater artistic project. I can’t say that was always the case this weekend.

The R&RW holdovers were all the more disappointing because of how wonderful everything else was. Most thrilling was “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven,” back after seven years in the mothballs. The mellow warmth of the current band suits the song perfectly, draining away all the swamped-up sturm und drang of the recorded version, leaving behind a perfect finished plan of a song. Also stunning was “I Shall Be Released,” which brought the house down at the conclusion of the Saturday show. Despite the fact that it returned for the first time in nearly two decades at last week’s Eugene show, I chose to read it as a bit of sentimentalism from Bob, who concluded another show just across the bay in San Francisco half a century ago with the very same song. “Lotta people gone, lotta people I knew,” indeed.

The latest batch of Theme Time Radio-type covers provided some welcome texture to the evening. “Nervous Breakdown” was a killer once again—this band can really rock, even if they don’t often get the opportunity—and “I Can Tell” continues to seem like a not-so-subtle jab at the audience and their expectations. There’s something intriguing about this current suite of covers: lots of tunes about love and lost love and wanting love and having had love but no longer having love. The pacing isn’t quite right—“Black Rider” > “Share Your Love With Me” > “Masterpiece” > “I’ll Make It All Up To You” > “Rubicon” was a particularly bumpy stretch, whipsawing between any number of emotional registers—though most numbers work well enough on their own. I’m inclined to believe these covers are indicative of a new direction Bob may be headed in his own work (it’s been over six years since Rough & Rowdy Ways after all…), but that’s a conversation for another day.

Quick hits:

• “Under The Red Sky” continues to be a standout. Dig that harp solo.

• Black North Face rain shell > white North Face rain shell.

• “To Be Alone With You” is so completely rewritten it’s essentially a new song. That “My eyes are still blue” line is a hoot.

• He should bring back the “I Forgot That Love Existed” version of “Watchtower.”

• For that matter, Poetic Champions Compose is the perfect companion for the post-show BART journey back across the bay.

• Doug Lancio is back on electric guitar. Probably a necessary move for the sheds, but I miss the warm, grassy sound of the spring tour.

• Merch continues to be almost entirely dogshit (who is designing these shirts???), although I do appreciate the return of the eye logo. I couldn’t say no to this tote:

It’s tempting to interpret the Serious Bob Show as more “important” than the Unserious Bob Show. It’s only logical; after all, the Serious Bob Show begins and ends with Bob Dylan. He is the Alpha and Omega of the evening, the absolute center of gravity. The experience is, presumably, a reflection of his—and only his—artistic vision. At the Unserious Bob Show, on the other hand, Bob shares the stage. The show is influenced by factors beyond his control: the weather, other artists, the phones that people are told to put away but which they do not put away. Bob is forced to compromise at these gigs.

Lest this reading come off as pretentious, let me clarify that Serious Bob Shows are not ipso facto superior to Unserious Bob Shows. In fact, the best Bob show I’ve ever seen was Unserious—August 10th, 2024 (which I also wrote about for Ray). Just for the hell of it, a first thought/best thought power ranking of all Bob shows I’ve caught since Jokermen began in June 2020:

1. 8/10/2024 (George, WA)

2. 11/20/2021 (New York, NY)

3. 6/14/2022 (Los Angeles, CA)

4. 3/25/2025 (Tulsa, OK)

5. 5/1/2026 (Abilene, TX)

6. 6/15/2022 (Los Angeles, CA)

7. 4/29/2026 (Tyler, TX)

8. 6/13/2026 (Berkeley, CA)

9. 10/12/2023 (Milwaukee, WI)

10. 6/16/2022 (Los Angeles, CA)

11. 6/14/2026 (Berkeley, CA)

12. 6/11/2022 (Oakland, CA)

13. 5/16/2025 (Los Angeles, CA)

As you can see, this weekend’s shows weren’t the best I’ve ever seen. I’m still not sure whether to classify them as Serious Bob Shows or Unserious Bob Shows, either. Maybe that means the whole theory is bunk in the first place. In any case, it doesn’t really matter.

What matters is that I brought my whole family to the show and cajoled them into recording a shambolic installment of Never Ending Stories with me (my own Unserious effort, to go along with the Seriousness of this one). What matters is that my wife and I heard the lines engraved on the inside of our wedding bands sung to us live as we sat together arm-in-arm: “I knew you’d say yes/I’m saying it too.” What matters, in other words, is that I saw Bob Dylan live in show and concert once more.

What a time to be alive.

Thanks Ian! Check him out on his podcasts Jokermen and Never Ending Stories and his Substack Hard Disk. He’s also on Twitter and Instagram.

2026-06-13, Greek Theatre, Berkeley, CA

2026-06-14, Greek Theatre, Berkeley, CA

Check out the opening night report by Death Cab for Cutie’s Dave Depper (and, if you don’t already, subscribe for more next-day Dylan show reports all summer):

In mid-May of 2017, Bob Dylan was in Ireland filming a never-seen performance film for the Nobel Committee. (I recently interviewed the director, and there’s another interview related to that project coming next). Only a few weeks after that secret taping, he was back in America and back on the road. The Summer 2017 tour kicked off nine years ago today in Port Chester, NY, at the recently-reopened Capitol Theatre.

Amazingly enough, almost 10 years later, a soundboard just dropped! This marks the only complete-show soundboard between 2009 and the various ones from 2025. It came as part of a massive soundboard drop of dozens of never-heard tapes from Capitol Theatre shows, which appeared mysteriously on a music message board a couple months ago. For some equally mysterious reason, the one Dylan tape in the bunch was the only link that didn’t work. But then, a while later, it belatedly appeared. Huge thanks to the mystery leaker for liberating this.

I actually attended this show—I lived in New York at the time, and The Cap was just a short train ride north—but barely remember it. So I thought this new soundboard (downloadable below or in FLAC here) would be a good opportunity to look back.

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Last night, Bob Dylan kicked off what is officially called—according to a t-shirt on sale in the merch booth at least—the Long Hot Summer Tour. He played alongside openers Lucinda Williams and John Doe (who I interviewed last year) in an outdoor venue in Troutdale, Oregon, near Portland. The setlist featured a number of songs returning from last summer’s setlist as well as, for the first time, a few Rough and Rowdy Ways songs played at a non-“Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour” show.

The big news though was the debut of an extremely deep Basement Tapes cut: “Baby Won’t You Be My Baby.” I crunched the numbers and this is the longest gap ever between Dylan recording a song and playing it live. 59 years! That easily tops the previous record-holder, “Outlaw Blues” at 42 years (I did a whole list if you wanna see more).

Dave Depper was on hand to report in for us. Depper is a member of the iconic indie-rock band Death Cab for Cutie, who have a new album out today, I Built You a Tower. (I also highly recommend his solo album covering the entirety of Air’s landmark electronic record Moon Safari.) Since he had a million other things on his album release day to-do list, Depper called me on the phone a couple hours ago, and I pulled his remarks together into this piece.

(This will be the first of many show reviews from this summer’s tour, including a few by me when the tour heads east. Most go out only to paid subscribers. Sign up here if you want to get them all.)

I’ve seen Dylan twice before. I saw the Time Out of Mind tour in ’98 when I was 17 in Eugene. The setlist that night, I had no idea how lucky I was. Then I saw the Love & Theft tour in Bend. It was the first tour where he started playing keyboards a lot. I have not seen him since then. Part of the blessing and curse of being a touring musician myself is that pretty much any time that all these acts are on the road and coming to my town, I’m not home to see them. Because I would have seen Dylan like 15 times otherwise.

I have been checking in with those setlists, and I’ve dipped in here and there to listen to some bootleg recordings, so I had a sense of what I was in for. But like everybody, I didn’t know what he would do in the context of this no longer being the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour. That was really my only regret about last night. I did not get to catch a Rough and Rowdy show. I adore that record, and I adore the live versions of the songs I’ve heard from that, and we only got two Rough and Rowdy Ways songs last night. I was a bit sad about that.

The all-acoustic band really flatters what he’s trying to do right now. You can hear every single note everyone’s playing, and it really centers his voice and his keyboard playing in a powerful way. His keys led everything. I remembered the last time I’d seen him feeling like he was just kind of diddling around on the keys, coming in and out, and some of it was more amateurish. But he was completely leading the way on every song last night. And his voice was just pristine. It was like the Shadows in the Night croon, just really loud and cutting through the mix. My last experience with him, he wasn’t in quite as in command of his voice as he is now. He’s done so much work around his vocal instrument, and his piano playing has come so far since then, that I was just stunned.

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