Today is the first concert of Rolling Thunder 1976 where they performed two shows—an early show at 5 PM, a late show at 10 PM. There’s no tape of the early show, or even much setlist info, but there is a soundboard of the late show. Not to pat myself on the back too hard, but it’s one I uncovered myself a couple yea…

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For the second song of today’s set in Pensacola, the final of nine consecutive performances in Florida (!), Dylan played “Just Like a Woman.”

Why does this matter? He’d played the song twice already this tour. But both those times—St. Petersburg, Clearwater—he performed it with the band, in an arrangement similar to how they did it in 1975. At today’s Pensacola show, however, he performed it solo, just like he had every night back in 1966. It was the only time he did so on this tour.

That got me thinking about one of the most interesting parts of Rolling Thunder 1976 setlists, and one big thing that differentiates the tour from 1975. Every night, he would open with two solo-acoustic songs. In ’75, he played a few solo tunes in the middle of the show, but now he started off his set with them. The song choices also varied more than they did in ’75—particularly in the second slot.

The number-one song, the first of the concert (well, of the Dylan portion; “Guam” had already been up there rocking for an hour) most nights was “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Here’s tonight’s rendition:

There were only two exceptions, two times he opened a regular concert with anything other than “Tambourine” (with the usual caveat there are a few setlists we don’t know, plus I’m not counting the TV tapings). The first exception came opening night. The very first song of Rolling Thunder ’76 was not “Mr. Tambourine Man.” It was “Visions of Johanna.” Here’s what I wrote about it in my song-by-song look at opening night:

Opening a show with “Visions of Johanna” - hell, opening an entire tour with it - is a bold move. He’s only ever opened one other concert with “Visions” that I can find, a random one-off in 1989. I was hoping for a killer full-band arrangement like Rolling Thunder II offers for so many other ’60s songs, but it’s solo acoustic. Too bad; a scorching ’76-band version of “Visions” would be a hell of a thing. Still, Bob making his unusual entrance with a seven-minute “Visions” must have been pretty amazing to see. Especially after an hour-plus of mostly-loud sets from the Guam backing band.

This was the only time “Visions” was performed at a regular concert the whole tour, though he did also play it at one of the Clearwater TV tapings.

Also, a local newspaper reported that a show in Corpus Christi opened with “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” This falls into the “Just Like a Woman” category of songs he played both solo-acoustic and electric with the band on this tour. In the latter incarnation, it gave the album and TV special its title: Hard Rain. (Another in the both-solo-and-band category this tour: “Tangled Up in Blue.” I wrote about the truly wild band arrangement here.)

The second slot of the two opening acoustic numbers varied a lot more. Here are all the songs he rotated through in that second slot:

• If You See Her, Say Hello

• It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)

• Tangled Up in Blue

• The Times They Are a-Changin’

• Simple Twist of Fate

• Just Like a Woman

• Love Minus Zero / No Limit

• It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

• Spanish Is the Loving Tongue

• It Ain’t Me Babe

• Gates of Eden [reportedly]

Looking at that list, most of those songs feel unsurprising. It’s not like he busted out a solo-acoustic “Subterranean Homesick Blues” or anything. But I made a playlist of all the solo-acoustic performances, and what struck me listening to it is—they’re really good!

The solo acoustic numbers can feel like an afterthought this tour. There weren’t any included on Hard Rain, for instance, but they sound great. Take this “The Times They Are a-Changin.’” Nothing special on paper—an old warhorse he’s sung in this format hundreds of times—but I find this a very convincing version.

Ditto today’s “Just Like a Woman” in Pensacola. As I mentioned, it was the only time on the tour he performed it this way. He had a lot of other acoustic songs to get to.

One of my favorite performances of the entire tour also comes from one of these opening acoustic mini-sets. It’s also the only time he ever performed this song live at a regular concert. In San Antonio, he played “Spanish Is the Loving Tongue.” Presumably a nod to Texas border culture, in the home of the Alamo. Stunning.

If there’s one solo-acoustic song you know from this tour, though, it’s probably none of those. It’s a song he only played twice, and neither on a tape with particularly good sound quality. So why is this particular song well-known?

Well, it’s another Blood on the Tracks song that, like “Idiot Wind,” he wrote vengeful new lyrics for this tour. They flip the song’s meaning entirely from regret to rage. It’s “If You See Her Say Hello.” It used to go like that, but now it goes like this:

If you’re making love to her, watch it from the rear
You’ll never know when I’ll be back, or liable to appear
For it’s natural to dream of peace as it is for rules to break
And right now I’ve got not much to lose, so you’d better stay awake

1976-04-28, University of West Florida, Pensacola, FL

Catch up on all the entries so far here or by clicking the image below:

One big difference between Rolling Thunder ’75 and ’76 I’ve mentioned before: The size of the venues. In 1975, for the most part, Dylan played small theaters, and tickets were hard to come by. In 1976, Dylan mostly played giant arenas and stadiums. Tickets were easier to get, and in a few cases the shows sold so poorly they had to be canc…

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Bowling Green and Chattanooga were supposed to be it for me this tour, but, thanks to an invitation to speak to some journalism classes in Oxford a couple hours away—shoutout professor RJ Morgan and all the great Ole Miss students I met—I tacked on an extra show in Jackson, Mississippi. It was Dylan’s first visit here since 2016, and my first ever. (I teased Prof Morgan about inviting someone from northern Vermont to speak to a class titled “Bob Dylan and the South.” I mean, I’m pretty close to the south of Canada.)

Dylan has played Oxford exactly once, back in 1990. That show became famous as the only time he played “Oxford Town,” his song about the deadly campus riots when James Meredith became the first Black student to matriculate at Ole Miss. So, driving from Oxford to Jackson, it was not lost on me that Dylan also has an early song about this city’s most famous Civil Rights figure too. (Hint: I’m currently writing this from the Medgar Wiley Evers Airport.)

No, I did not really expect Dylan to bust out “Only a Pawn in Their Game” last night, but it wouldn’t surprise me one bit to learn that, on one of Bob’s trips here, he made one of his anonymous hood-up tourist visits to Medgar Evers’ house. It’s still there. The driveway you walk up is where Evers was gunned down by a Klansman who, as Dylan’s song controversially noted, was part of a bigger racist system. As I was leaving, I met a young man going door-to-door pitching AT&T service. He’d only vaguely heard of Evers, but seemed amazed to find this piece of history on a random side street in a fairly rundown neighborhood. He said he’d skip trying to sell them broadband service, but would come back later to take the tour.

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In 1976, Gainesville, Florida was put on the rock-and-roll map. Not because of this show—because local boy Tom Petty made his recording debut! (And before we get to Bob, take two minutes and watch one of my favorite stand-up bits ever, by comedian Pete Holmes, which I stole for today’s subject line: Where’s Tom Petty from?)

B…

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Last night, Bob Dylan played his third show ever in Macon, Georgia. Macon is, as you know he knows, the home of Little Richard. And that’s only the start of the city’s musical story. Below, scholar and writer Anne Margaret Daniel reports on the Dylan concert—but first she takes us on a virtual walking tour through Macon’s musical history. Here’s Anne Margaret Daniel:

A Rambling Man Passes Through Town: Bob Dylan and Macon Music

On Wednesday, April 22—Earth Day—it was close to ninety degrees in Macon, Georgia—summer heat already, on top of a longtime drought that has the huge old magnolia trees already in full bloom, and the red clay ground baked bricklike in all the city’s green open spaces, from parks to cemeteries. After a terrible winter in the Northeast, the hot sun and fragrant air were twin benedictions to me. I roved around town in a sundress, espadrilles, and a straw picture hat, happy and grateful that Bob Dylan had brought me here.

Macon is a completely unique place for a musician to perform, and for a music lover to come and hear that performance. For its size—a population of around 70,000 in the 1960s—Macon is the birthplace of a great number of musicians, including Mildred Bryant Jones, Lucille Hegamin, Veronica “Randy” Crawford, Richard “Little Richard” Penniman, and Jason Aldean. Other musicians gravitated to the town young, and remained there, now claimed lovingly by the town as native sons: Bill Berry, Otis Redding, and the Allman Brothers Band.

Back in 1958, Bob Zimmerman styled his hair in a wild curly pompadour, and the following year the Hibbing High Hematite yearbook predicted Bob’s future: “to join Little Richard.”

Richard (whose name was meant to be Ricardo, but his birth certificate erred) Wayne Penniman was the third of twelve children born to Leva Mae and Bud Penniman. As a little boy in Macon in the 1940s, Richard was known for singing loudly in local churches, and on the porch steps of his family’s two-rooms-and-a-hallway shotgun home. When his idol Sister Rosetta Tharpe played the City Auditorium in 1947, she invited the fourteen-year-old to open for her after hearing him singing her songs outside the venue.

The Penniman home place, moved to the historic and aptly named Pleasant Hill neighborhood when threatened by highway expansion, is now a local treasure: Little Richard House and Resource Center. The skinny hallway with its pine plank floorboards is where Richard slept in bunk beds with his host of brothers and sisters. The piano he played when Mercer University awarded him an honorary Doctorate in Humanities is on the back patio, and you can play it, too, if you dare. When you go, ask for Rose Hunt-Person to give you the tour—this elegant lady knows all about Little Richard and his career, and the neighborhood and cultural events all across town.

Otis Redding was born in nearby Dawson—in 1941, just like Dylan—but grew up and began his musical career in Macon. As a teenager he played with Little Richard’s band The Upsetters. Redding was just 21 when he had his first hit single, “These Arms of Mine,” in 1962. His commitment to helping other young performers was already significant by 1967—he ran camps for kids at his brand-new ranch in Round Oak, Georgia, and sponsored college scholarships for local high schoolers. In December of that year, Redding was in his Beechcraft Model 18 when it crashed into a lake near Madison, Wisconsin, killing the singer and four members of his backing band the Bar-Kays; only trumpeter Ben Cauley survived. Redding’s funeral service was at the City Auditorium in Macon, and crowds filled Cherry Street and Cotton Avenue outside as the 3,000-seat space overflowed. The next month, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” went to number one on the Billboard charts.

Today there is a beautiful sculpture of Redding, sitting on rope-bound dock pilings, with a pencil and paper atop one, holding a guitar and working out the song he wrote with Steve Cropper. It’s surrounded by water that bubbles gently and constantly. The sculpture stands in front of the Otis Redding Center, a magnificent building that opened in March 2025 for central Georgia’s school-age students (5-18) interested in all aspects of music, from performance and composition to graphic design, stage sets, entertainment law, and planning a tour.

In the spring of 1969, a group of newly-named musicians moved from Florida to Macon, following their manager Phil Walden and his label Capricorn Records, and settled into a huge Tudor house on a hilltop in town. The Allman Brothers Band ate for free when they were broke at H&H Soul Food on Forsyth Avenue, thanks to its legendary owner Mama Louise, and hung out in Rose Hill Cemetery, which covers the entire hilltop adjacent to their “Big House” and was a favorite place for the men to write songs.

Their lives are celebrated today in the Big House Museum, where their former residence is stuffed full of musical instruments, stage-worn clothes, and other memorabilia, and the men’s upstairs bedrooms and bathrooms and lounging-around rooms look as if they’ve just walked out for a moment: heavy old oak bedsteads, dozens of needlepoint pillows, blue-jean and velvet jackets on pegs, and Khalil Gibran volumes on the mantelpieces.

In 1970, their careers on the rise, the Allmans decided to rent a studio space down in Lizella, about ten miles from Macon, and dubbed their little cabin “Idlewild South.” Their second album, named for the cabin, was the Allman Brothers’ breakout record, and Macon remained their base as fame took them in fast and mad directions. 24-year-old Duane Allman wrecked his Harley-Davidson at the quiet intersection of Hillcrest Avenue and Bartlett Street on October 29, 1971, and died that afternoon at the Middle Georgia Medical Center. The following year, Berry Oakley, 24, was on his motorcycle when he skidded into a bus, and died that night of a fractured skull. Gregg Allman and Butch Trucks, lost to us in more recent years after legendary lives as artists, now lie in Rose Hill Cemetery with Duane and Berry. The peaceful plot is adjacent to graves of hundreds of Confederate soldiers from all states who died in Georgia, and of those of local families. It overlooks a lonesome stretch of railroad tracks where travelers and freight are always moving on. On April 22, all the soldiers’ graves bore small flags; the fourth Monday in April is no longer Confederate Memorial Day, but remains a paid state holiday in Georgia. The musical brothers’ graves are planted roundabout with roses of all colors in full bloom, and marked with tributes from fans left at the cemetery fence: a harmonica, glass slides, bandanas, flowers, notes, drumsticks, picks.

A quiet guitar player was performing Dylan’s songs and some old folk tunes right next to the Auditorium yesterday afternoon, next to the row of tour buses. He did not open last night’s show. He did, however, set the tone for the evening to come: one of gentle grace.

The whole Dylan concert was just that, a beautiful thing of gentle grace. From the lack of a shouting marquee—the City Auditorium announces only itself—to the early-arriving and slowly walking crowd of people of all ages, to the orderly long merch lines and soft conversation in the dimly lit oval of the concert hall, an almost unsettling calm prevailed. When Dylan and the band came on stage at 8:05, the audience stood and cheered in welcome, but quickly subsided and paid attention. Happy applause and whistles and the occasional Southern yee-haa after every song, but quiet and enjoying (except for the two chatty Chi O sorority sisters right in front of me, who departed at “False Prophet” and did not return, hurrah). The keyboard he’s using hardly hides Dylan from his audience: he sat last night front and center, with his pale hooded jacket over his top half. Instead of fussing with his hair, now he likes to adjust the cap under its hood. Occasionally he sips a drink, leaning to his left.

“To Be Alone with You” and “Man in the Long Black Coat” set the tone for the rest of the show. I struggle for the right word, but reassuring is somehow correct. Folks recognized the first song, and were intrigued by the second as one fewer of them knew. It took awhile for the lights to go down at the start of the show, and Dylan seemed to be liking this, looking out at the crowd and into faces, up at the balcony and to the back, while he sang the first song. The expectation for “All Along the Watchtower” is, since Hendrix’s searing cover, for a rocking conflagration; on the current tour, it’s spooky and silent, waiting for the storm. Dylan drew out that last “howl” in a way that made me think of the grief of King Lear, carrying Cordelia onto the stage. The fadeaway felt like it would echo in my mind forever.

Four more quiet songs in a row, of which “False Prophet” has previously rollicked and now seems a series of statements of fact. Its ominous ugliness has become more of a heartfelt caution, and the line that really stood out, enunciated so clearly (as is the case, really, with all Dylan’s lyrics these days), was “I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life.” Looking at all the smiling faces around me, people so glad they’d come to Georgia’s music town, or that they’d come to hear the show, I thought: he really is. I don’t know what he’d say about it, but it seems to me Dylan hates waste, of all kinds; and in so many past interviews has commended others who live meaningful lives.

Similarly, “Black Rider” has never sounded so much like a condemnation of a leader or politician as it does right now. Men his age who have been on the job too long, beware: Dylan’s game is still on, and he’s holding those whose isn’t accountable. “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” is no longer a jump-up-and-dance tune, which I confess I miss; in fact the only danceable song in the set is Eddie Cochran’s “Nervous Breakdown,” which Dylan performed brilliantly. We needed that jitter after the lilting, never-prettier “Soon After Midnight,” which last night made harlotry seem mellow and Slim’s fate not so savage. “Every Grain of Sand” was benedictory, and the final long harmonica solo gratefully received. Dylan came out from behind the keyboard and smiled, and briefly applauded back at the audience, before putting his right hand over his heart for a moment. Then he turned and walked away, while the cheers continued through the Auditorium. The whole night was like a warm, genuine hug: decent and comprehending and comforting.

By the time the lights came on again, Dylan and the band were on the bus to Alabama, heading along Macon’s downtown streets with the wheels rolling over the puddles of painted pink cherry blossoms at every corner. Tonight it’s Dothan; and Saturday, Jackson, Mississippi. How I hate to leave the South and head back to where it’s still cold, and the food I love best is harder to find. I am always thankful to hear Dylan play a show, but for this one, my 447^th and his many, many thousandth, I am grateful. Much has been written about Dylan’s days on tour, and much more will be. But my gratitude to him for bringing me to Macon for the first time in decades, and for such a rich and lovely visit, will keep me happy, and the memory of the show will keep me warm, for a long time. Let’s see more thanks to the man for the places he goes, and brings us along with him. To the ramblin’ ladies, Katherine and Nancy, and dear Sue, safe trails and smooth sails to you—and see you soon, again, on the road. To my traveling pal Janet, who at the last minute couldn’t come: this one’s for you.

Thanks Anne Margaret! Anne Margaret Daniel teaches literature at the New School. She’s published on Fitzgerald and Modernism, and written extensively about Dylan. You can find many of her Dylan articles at Hot Press, most recently her deep dive into last year’s ‘Through the Open Window’ Bootleg Series.

After five consecutive shows in Central Florida, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Revue travel all the way to…Central Florida! As I noted a couple days ago, they just can’t quit this place.

Baez nodded to the home of Disney World by wearing a Mickey Mouse t-shirt (see photo above), but otherwise it was bac…

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Before the second Rolling Thunder tour kicked off, Bob Dylan and the band spent a week or so rehearsing at the Belleview Biltmore Hotel in Clearwater, Florida. Here’s how a couple of the band members described those rehearsals to me:

“I flew down to the Belleview Hotel in Florida for rehearsals. It looked exactly how it sounds, almost that place in that Peter Sellers movie where he was Chauncey [1979’s Being There]. A real old school, sprawling wooden hotel with ballrooms and all this kind of stuff… [Bob] didn’t show up for a while. He was a real nighthawk. We soon learned, it’s not really worth it to come at 3:00 in the afternoon for a rehearsal when Bob isn’t going to be there until midnight.” — Gary Burke

“The rehearsals were kind of nonexistent. We had gone down to Clearwater Florida and taken over this hotel to ostensibly rehearse, but Bob hardly ever showed up. So we didn’t know what the hell he wanted! As the bandleader, I would call rehearsals anyway. We’d show up and rehearse without Bob. I’d be singing the songs in his keys as a stand-in.” — Rob Stoner

Three shows after the tour began, they returned to that same hotel ballroom, this time to record a TV special. This was to be the TV special from the tour. That later Colorado show, the one that became Hard Rain, was just supposed to be a regular concert. They only decided to film it last-minute, to replace this first attempt from Florida; Bob had a contract to deliver something to the television network, and he ended up hating what they did in Clearwater.

He taped two shows, one early and one late. Neither was really a regular Rolling Thunder show, though combined they could become one. Fully half of the early show is solo-acoustic, almost like a 1966 show. Eight solo songs to open—he generally did two at the regular shows—then five Joan Baez duets (again, more than usual), then just a few songs with the band. The late show, on the other hand, is entirely full-band. No solo songs, no Joan duets.

When you watch the film, you can tell which songs come from which show from his headscarf. In a TV taping situation like this, you’re supposed to wear the same thing every time for continuity, but of course Dylan goes rogue. The early show, it’s orange; the late show, it’s blue.

Despite the first three shows being sort of warmups for this taping, Dylan immediately plays a bunch of songs they hadn’t played before. In the early show, 7 of the 15 songs were tour debuts. In the late show, 8 of the 14 songs were. It’s typical Dylan to, when it comes time to tape the big TV special, throw out most of the songs they’d been practicing and throw in a bunch of stuff they hadn’t. Most of the full-band songs were holdovers from Rolling Thunder ’75, at least, but this is the only time the Rolling Thunder band ever played “Most Likely You Go Your Way”:

And it’s the only time we can hear them do “Like a Rolling Stone.” They did it once in 1975, but at a show that was not bootlegged.

Percussionist Gary Burke remembers the TV taping feeling chaotic in the moment. He told me:

“We were going to shoot a show for Burt Sugarman, the man behind Midnight Special. Bob was the MC; he would introduce different segments of the show. He was obviously very uncomfortable doing that. I remember one time he put his glasses on to read the lyrics because there were so many verses he couldn’t remember them all. Someone handed him a book of Bob Dylan songs to read the verses from, which I thought was really funny.”

Sugarman’s right-hand man, Stan Harris, directed this shoot. He came to Dylan by recommendation of guitarist Mick Ronson; Harris had filmed David Bowie’s 1973 concert film, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, when Ronson was in Bowie’s band. “They built these rafters all around [the ballroom] and there were all these kids sitting in them, with their legs dangling down,” T Bone Burnett recalled to writer Sid Griffin (whose Rolling Thunder book has a great chapter on this taping). “The backdrop was all these dangling legs, and we just took one look at it and thought ‘[surely] this isn’t what we’re doing.’”

I like the backdrop with the dangling legs, personally, but I see why Burke told me, “it felt a little showbiz-y.” Unlike Hard Rain, this performance does not look like a regular concert. It looks like what it was: a contrived TV taping. (Griffin compares the set to the hot new show Saturday Night Live, which had just premiered a few months earlier.)

The thing is…the video is pretty good! Maybe the vibes might have felt off, but Bob and the band sound sharp, and I personally dig the stage setup surrounded by fans (or, in some cases, hotel staff who got pulled in) on scaffolding surrounding the stage. I’m glad it got canned because otherwise we wouldn’t have gotten the even-better Hard Rain special, but I’m also glad it’s out there for us to enjoy anyway.

Here are the setlists for the two broadcasts, this first attempt and then the Colorado one they actually aired. I’ve bolded the songs that were different between the two. As you will immediately notice…that’s most of them.

What you might also notice is that the Clearwater setlist has more holdovers from Rolling Thunder ’75. In fact, if you didn’t know better, you might mistake this for a fall show. “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and “Isis” and “Just Like a Woman” were all pretty distinctive songs in the fall. Whereas the Hard Rain setlist features more of the distinctive 1976 songs—and, more importantly, that furious 1976 sound—with “Idiot Wind,” “Shelter From the Storm,” and “Maggie’s Farm.”

Which lands the Clearwater broadcast in a weird transitional place. Visually, it looks like 1976 (see: headscarf), but, sonically, it sounds closer to 1975. The only really notable 1976-specific song on the first show that didn’t make the second is “Lay Lady Lay.” This version features some of the new lyrics you hear on Hard Rain (“Forget this dance, let’s go upstairs…”) and some other new verses too:

His shoes are dirty but his feet are clean
And he’s seen miles that you’ve never seen
Why wait any longer for the one you adore?
You can have your cake, but just try and eat it

Why wait any longer? Why wait any more?
You’re acting* so conceited

(* He mumbles that bit here, but sings it clearly at other shows)

Overall, though, despite a few angry new lyrics, the energy is fairly jovial. Dylan gives his compatriots enthusiastic intros. “Wanna bring out a special friend of mine throughout the years, Miss Joan Baez. She is great!” he says when Joan comes out. And, a few songs later, “Here’s a good friend of mine, we’ve known each other for about 1200 years, Mr. Bobby Neuwirth from Canton, Ohio.” At one point, during one of David Mansfield’s mandolin solos, Dylan walks over to him and mimes (I assume) messing up the instrument’s tuning pegs.

So why did Dylan nix the special? Accounts vary. Late drummer Howie Wyeth told Clinton Heylin that it happened pretty much immediately: “[He] got into a big argument with [Sugarman] over the dinner table one night, after we’d already done half of it. And then he said, ‘No! We’re not doing it. Fuck it!’”

Dylan may have been pissed, but, I was surprised to learn, plans to air this special continued anyway for a while. This syndicated news story ran May 16, almost a full month after the special was taped:

Cameraman Paul Goldsmith, who shot Hard Rain a week after that news story ran—thus giving Dylan a better option to swap in—confirmed to me that Clearwater at least remained a possibility to air up until after the tour. Dylan held a screening at his house with clips from both films, the Clearwater one and the Fort Collins one, to make a final decision. Goldsmith told me:

You screened your Hard Rain film for Bob at his house, alongside the Midnight Special version from Florida, so he could pick one to use I guess. How did that happen?

That’s when Bob lived in Point Dume. [My company] TVTV was the producer, so we made it, and then the editing was a couple of our partners along with Howard Alk. They had cut a 10-minute piece or something. We screened our 10-minute clip and another clip from the Midnight Special one, the first attempt at this kind of film. And that stuff was just horrible…

So what we screened that day at Bob’s house just felt incredibly vibrant and virile and youthful, which Bob was looking for. Because Bob was getting a little older, too. He wanted to be hip and current. And the way we filmed it, that just felt like punk. And the other version is a big stage with this little figure on it, and the cameras are wide, and they have star filters that make the lights kind of twinkle. It could have been John Denver on that stage, because the visual style overcame Bob’s qualities. Which is hard to do, but if you put enough filters on the camera and you film wide, it’s possible. Anyhow, there was no comparison. You couldn’t have had a more extreme example of the new and the old, the moribund and the vital.

Out with the old, in with the new. The special filmed across two shows in Clearwater, Florida was never aired. But, thankfully, it leaked, so we can see it anyway.

1976-04-22, Belleview Biltmore Hotel, Clearwater, FL [early - partial tape]
1976-04-22, Belleview Biltmore Hotel, Clearwater, FL [late]

What I didn’t realize until doing this series is that the first three shows of Rolling Thunder 1976 were all in essentially the same place. For those who don’t know their Florida geography (guilty), Lakeland, St. Petersburg, and Tampa are all basically in the same metro area. They’re about 45 minutes apart. It’d be lik…

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On night two of Rolling Thunder ’76, Dylan shifts back towards his comfort zone. After an opening night where only three songs of the 22 had been played on Rolling Thunder ’75, Dylan swaps in five different songs, all of which were reprises from the previous fall. That includes the solo opening duo “Mr. Tambourine Man” (which would remain the opening number most subsequent nights) and “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” Later on in the set, he added a three-pack of ’75 staples: “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You,” “Just Like a Woman,” “It Takes a Lot To Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.” All three seem to retain their 1975 arrangements (though tape speed fluctuations here make it sound like some unhinged tempo changes have been added). After an opening night where he took such big swings, perhaps he felt a need to return to the familiar.

A reporter for the Miami News met up with Joan Baez backstage. She told him, “Rolling Thunder is Dylan’s baby. It’s all his doing. If I was in charge of it I’d be like a camp counselor. Strict as hell. But Bob’s not that way. He’s very loose. We had one rehearsal and halfway through we broke up laughing. It was shaggy to say the least. Dylan looked at us and said: ‘Don’t worry, everything is going to be alright.’ And damned if it wasn’t.”

Slight exaggeration there; there were five days of rehearsals at the Belleview Biltmore Hotel (where they’d return a week into the tour to tape an aborted TV special). But, as a featured performer rather than a member of the backing band, Baez might not have been there for all of them.

You know who else wasn’t there for all of them? Dylan! Bandleader Rob Stoner told me:

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A few minutes before last night’s show began, a man sitting behind me tapped me on the shoulder. “Why won’t he play his older stuff,” he asked me, with a note of accusation. The phrasing reminded me of how my daughter, age 5, has started asking to do things. “Why can’t we go on a bike ride?” “Why won’t you l…

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Ten. That’s how many songs Dylan got into his first Rolling Thunder 1976 show before he repeated a single song he’d played on Rolling Thunder 1975. Five of those first ten songs were live debuts. In the end, only three of the 22 songs Dylan played that night were holdovers from the previous fall.

The tours may have run under the same name, but, from the very first show, it was clear Rolling Thunder 1976 was going to be very different from Rolling Thunder 1975.

Everything about Rolling Thunder 2.0 was different. The music, certainly, as we’ll explore in depth in this series—both the songs themselves, and just as importantly, the energy. The jolly gypsy carnival feel was long gone. Rage, passion, and volume feel more like the vibe of 1976.

Offstage, too, things had changed. They no longer had a camera crew tagging along filming a movie, so the offstage shenanigans got cut way down (give or take an alligator barbecue—we’ll get there). They were playing much larger venues in areas of the country where Dylan was less popular, so the mad scramble for tickets vanished; several shows were actually cancelled due to low ticket sales. Dylan, now in the middle of his marriage collapsing, proved more distant and standoffish.

Every participant I’ve spoken to who was on both Rolling Thunder tours says some version of the same thing: The music remained great, but the camaraderie was gone. A few examples:

There was a magic to the first leg of the tour. There was a great sense of harmony amongst all the players. Although the music was as good on the second leg, I think it was a little bit less harmonious. Some element of tension wove itself in that wasn’t there in the first one. Perhaps it was because Bob was going through his divorce or maybe there was some more tension with the guitar players and the band. I don’t know. There was a little bit less of that magic fairydust glow on the second one for me. - Violinist Scarlet Rivera

All of that mood stuff in the band is always set by the main guy. The train follows the locomotive. And the locomotive was dragging, discouraged. - Bandleader Rob Stoner

The first part of the tour was unbelievable. It was idyllic. It was romantic. We were all having a wonderful time, and Bob was very happy. The second part of the tour, he was like a different person. I mean, he was great on stage. There was no point in time that he wasn’t really good. But he wasn’t a happy camper. You know, everything starts at the top, and it filters through. And that was the case on the second tour. - Jacques Levy’s partner Claudia Levy

It shouldn’t have happened, honestly. A good thing happened and then they tried to recreate it in a different space and it didn’t work. It just wasn’t the same. Nobody felt the same way about it. They should have stopped and just left it at the one. - Tour Manager Chris O’Dell

It was a totally different vibe. Bob was very serious and he was totally into it… I think that tour, the performances were in some cases more intense than they were relaxed. It was a different atmosphere, but the shows were great. - Producer Louie Kemp

But, as Kemp says: The shows were great! I know some people who actually prefer ’76 to ’75. Certainly it’s more exciting for a setlist-watcher, with more changes and surprises night-to-night.

So, like I did for Rolling Thunder 1975, I’m going to be going show-by-show through Rolling Thunder 1976 over the next month and a half for its 50th anniversary. Starting today and going all the way through Hard Rain and the lost Salt Lake City finale.

As is always the case for these show-by-show series, two out of every three entries will go to paid subscribers only. So if you want to follow along and haven’t upgraded already, now’s a great time to do so.

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Rolling Thunder II: The Return of Rolling Thunder (not the official name) kicked off in Lakeland, Florida, on April 18, 1976. The band had been camped out in Florida for several days rehearsing in a hotel ballroom (Rob Stoner talks more about those rehearsals in our first interview). They even taped a TV special in that same hotel ballroom a few days after this kickoff show, but Bob scrapped it. We’ll get to that too.

In total, opening night had ten live debuts! Almost half of Bob’s set was songs he’d never performed live. This included three from Blood on the Tracks: “If You See Her Say Hello,” done solo acoustic after “Visions of Johanna” (what an opening two-pack!); “Shelter From the Storm,” with Dylan’s wild slide guitar; and “Idiot Wind,” with the new extra-biting lyrics.

It’s funny, the fall tour was so devoted to Desire, at a time when no one in the audience would know that material. Now that the album is actually out, and people do know the Desire songs, he practically ignores them. “Mozambique” (another live debut) is the only one he plays on opening night. A few others would return occasionally, but Rolling Thunder 1976 is like the Blood on the Tracks promo tour that never happened. Only the songs don’t sound much like Blood on the Tracks anymore.

One thing that hasn’t changed from Rolling Thunder 1975 is that these shows were a group affair. Thankfully, we have a complete tape* of opening night, and there are 16 songs performed before Bob even steps onstage. That includes songs by newcomers Kinky Friedman, taking the Ramblin’ Jack Elliott slot (Jack told me he didn’t know why he wasn’t invited back), and singer Donna Weiss, subbing in for Ronee Blakley (who told me she needed to leave for Nashville promo duties).

* About that tape: It’s listenable, but not up to the standards we’re accustomed to from Rolling Thunder 1975. This will unfortunately be a trend this tour. Another downside of playing outside of his core markets is that the top Dylan tapers of the time were in less evidence. I’m hoping for some sort of 1976 Live Recordings box set this year that might unearth some new soundboards (I unearthed a couple myself a while back). But until then, we take what we can get.

Though Dylan’s mood may have been dour this tour, the vibe looks jovial enough onstage on opening night. Dylan debuted his famous headscarf, but that was not this show’s boldest sartorial decision. Check on the opening-night outfits on T Bone Burnett and Kinky Friedman:

In a St. Petersburg Times article, reporter Peter Gallagher describes a funny moment at this show, after Dylan and Baez sang “Blowin’ in the Wind” together:

The crowd roar was deafening, equal to the applause when Dylan first walks on stage. Dylan suddenly whirled, did a deep knee-bend, and pointed quickly out to the crowd—it was three hours into the concert and the first time he had acknowledged the crowd—a wierd [sic] movement, not a hand wave or a nod like other performers. It was as if he had burst from his shell at the feeling of it all and for a person who is uncomfortable on stage, it was the first natural reaction which came up.

Today’s show took place on April 18th. Just another day most years, but a special day in 1976. What day? It was Easter Sunday!

To celebrate, Dylan performed a ragged and raw “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” full of barrelhouse piano and scorching slide guitar (slide played by Dylan himself, just as he would on “Shelter from the Storm”). It was the only time they played the song the whole tour. And if you think the timing was maybe just coincidental, at the end Bob repeated the opening line again, just to make sure the crowd hadn’t missed it: “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez and it’s Easter time too.”

Throughout the fall tour, the all-hands-on-deck singalong that closed every show was “This Land Is Your Land.” That was jettisoned for 1976. Instead, they swapped it for “Gotta Travel On,” a Weavers and Paul Clayton song that Dylan had carried with him for years. He’d likely seen Buddy Holly perform it in 1959; on that tour that so impressed a teenage Dylan, Holly was opening his sets with it. Dylan himself first performed it the year after, on the 1960 home tape Karen Wallace recorded. A decade later, he recorded a version for Self-Portrait.

Six years further on from that, the song achieves its final form. Everyone who was onstage that night got a verse, with Joan Baez throwing to ‘em with what sounds like no warning. Kinky Friedman steals the show here. From the recordings I’ve listened to so far, it sounds like Friedman improvises a new verse every night. Tonight, following Joan Baez, Kinky sings:

Joanie sang it first (x4)
I tried to sing it better
I only sung it worse
Take this fucker home
And rehearse!

They wouldn’t rehearse though, not for quite a while. This motley crew’s rehearsals would be mostly onstage. Songs would come and go much more frequently than in the fall, for a wild and ramshackle spring run through half-empty football stadiums across the South. Rolling Thunder ’76 doesn’t have the same mystique as Rolling Thunder ’75. But I suspect it will be every bit as fun to follow along with.

1976-04-18, Civic Center, Lakeland, FL

PS. If you want even more on this historic first show, a few years ago, for its measly 45th anniversary, I went through it song-by-song.

PPS. You can find the entire Rolling Thunder 1976 series as it develops here. Next entry in two days.

A rocking Rough and Rowdy Ways show? A year or two ago, the idea seemed impossible. The trend lines, for a long time, moved in the other direction. Circa 2023, 2024, I remarked more than once that it seemed like Dylan should just do a solo piano tour. Every song was slow and subtle (and often stunning!), led entirely by his piano. The band added the quietest of accents, at times barely playing at all.

Things, as a wise man once noted, have changed. Dylan’s first show ever in Bowling Green, and the smallest venue of the spring tour, was the highest-energy and highest-tempo Rough and Rowdy show I’ve seen since the early days. Having not spent much time with this tour’s tapes yet (I’ve been busy diving deep on a new anniversary series, starting tomorrow!), I had not appreciated until seeing it last night how dramatic a shift he and the band have made. This started last year, a bit more of that Outlaw energy transferring over, but has progressed dramatically.

The funniest part is, this change has come at the same time as this has become an entirely acoustic show. The guitars, at least; Bob Britt and Doug Lancio don’t touch an electric instrument all night. “Acoustic” usually implies “quieter,” but the opposite has happened here. Back in 2021, Bob Britt would bust out a Flying V guitar—usually the domain of tongue-wagging hair-metal guitar solos—to play soft accents on “Key West.” Now that he’s on an acoustic guitar, he’s suddenly rocking out.

You get that from the opening moments, which come through loud and clear on this tape. Drummer Anton Fig walks on stage first and starts bashing away. Then Tony Garnier enters and his bass begins rumbling along. Then the two guitarists walk on to play the riff, and finally Bob enters and starts jamming along. It makes for a fiery way to start the show. (Not to mention easily the best part of “To Be Alone with You,” which otherwise suffered from a extreme case of mumble-mouth that thankfully cleared up partway through the next song.)

Listen to how the show starts, and as you do picture the musicians walking onstage one by one:

The all-acoustic guitar setup seems to have inspired some dramatic new arrangements, notably on “I Contain Multitudes” and “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You,” plus the best “Crossing the Rubicon” I’ve ever seen. Both “Mind” and “Rubicon” have been relatively impervious to dramatic new arrangements up until now, so it’s fun to hear them reimagined. I think this is the first time ever “Made Up” has not built to that long held note before the title line (“Been thinking it oveeeeerrrr…”). The new music has him singing the melody entirely differently. “Rubicon,” meanwhile, was the only song where Fig did not play for extended stretches. Until, that is, that instrumental bridge. That bit used to be Dylan slamming piano chords; now it’s Fig, like an unseen new contender hurtling in off the top rope, suddenly bashing the hell out of the drums.

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The newsletter is already coming fast and furious with the current tour, and it’s about to come even faster and furious-er with a big anniversary series coming up. So, since I know your inboxes are already groaning under the digital weight, I’m combining April’s four paid-subscriber requests into one newsletter. Let’s go.

By the way, I’m finally catching the spring tour in a few days! I will report back from Bowling Green, Chattanooga, and Jackson (paid subscribers only). Hope to see some of you there.

PS. If you don’t get the reference in the subject line, as I was laying this entry out I happened to be listening to this Meshell Ndegeocello cover of a Prince song. Kind of a stretch, but I went with it.

Request #1: Asheville 2004

Requester Josh knocks it out of the park with a killer first show. This spring Asheville date coincidentally came only a few weeks after my own first-ever Dylan show. (This will be a trend with these requests: The first three connect closely, in different ways, with my very first Dylan shows).

This Asheville show was also, unfortunately, one of Freddy Koella’s last. Not that he knew it at the time. I interviewed the wonderfully inventive guitarist for my book, and he explained that he experienced sudden kidney failure during time off between tours:

“I called the manager and I told him,” Koella recounted. “This is when I’m at the hospital in really bad shape. I missed the tour after, and I was still sick for the next one, and the third one I was still sick. So they said, we’re gonna keep the guy who replaced you. I lost the gig because of that, which I will say was very depressing at the time.”

He went out blazing. This Spring 2004 tour was mostly small venues (The Orange Peel’s capacity is 1,050), and Dylan pulls some wild songs. “If Dog Run Free,” “I Believe in You,” “If Not For You,” and, for the first time in almost 10 years, “Unbelievable.”

None of those rarities are the highlights for me though. To me, the Time Out of Mind songs stand out the most. Even though Love & Theft is the newer album, there’s something about Time Out of Mind that inspires him to dig deep. It’s one of the most fiery “Can’t Wait”s I’ve ever heard, growly and menacing. And check out “Cold Irons Bound” with that killer vocal echo:

George Receli’s thundering drums shine on that one, as they do everywhere. He’s also the recipient of the dad joke in the band intro. “George comes from a broken home,” Bob tells the crowd. “His kids break everything in it.”

2004-04-09, The Orange Peel, Asheville, NC

Request #2: West Lafayette 2025

When Shahbaz requested this Rough and Rowdy Ways show from last spring, I figured maybe I’d compare the song arrangements or something. The setlist, after all, would likely be the exact same as it is right now. Right? Wrong!

As it turns out, Spring 2025 looks very different than Spring 2026! I’m listening to this show like, “Oh yeah, remember when he used to play ‘My Own Version of You’?” Back in the distant halcyon days of 2025…

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Last night, the final (maybe?) leg of the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour hit Cleveland. Rebecca Slaman was on the scene and reports in.

Slaman co-hosts the new Definitely Dylan podcast series “The Bob Dylan Hotline,” in which she and Laura Tenschert (another recent correspondent) answer questions about all things Dylan. Slaman also leads walking tours of Bob Dylan’s New York; find more info at ramblintours.com.

By the way, our next tour correspondent is…me! After following along from home the past month, I’m going to finally see the tour myself, in Bowling Green, Chattanooga, and Jackson. If you’re going to the latter, I’m doing an event at a nearby record store beforehand, hope to see some of you there; find more info here.

Here’s Rebecca Slaman on last night’s show in Cleveland:

BOB IS ON FIRE!

Weirdly, I had a dream the night before the show in which Bob did the most awesome concert my brain could conjure: he walked onstage donning his iconic sunglasses, did some light choreography and power posing, and directly referenced things I said on the Definitely Dylan podcast. It was so real that when I woke up, I panicked that I had forgotten to write this review.

Bob hasn’t been to New York on his own since 2023. After what I would describe as some unpleasant vibes at the nosebleeds of various Outlaw shows, being in the crowd in the Playhouse Square theater in Cleveland was as welcome as a hug from Bob himself. The house staff were extremely friendly to boot; one bathroom attendant/stall director thanked me for “patronizing their bathroom.” Whether it was from the helpful staff or the effusive praise from the crowd, Bob was in top form.

Dylan really rewarded our attention. After an overstimulating experience at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, I welcomed the screenless, rapt focus awaiting me at the Bob Dylan concert. Dylan performed a show no less than incredible. He exhibited great musicianship over a variety of rock music styles, proving he can really do it all.

At 8:04, the band came out one by one and joined in an ongoing groove. Tony Garnier grabbed an electric bass, setting down the driving groove to “To Be Alone With You.” Soon, Bob himself walked out in a white raincoat, resembling the risen Christ. The crowd leapt to their feet, filling the auditorium with whoops and applause. The house lights remained on for the first three songs. I think Bob maybe wanted to see some love.

The sound in the auditorium was fantastic. First of all, it was loud. There were some level adjustments in the first song, but otherwise, Bob’s vocals were high in the mix. And thank God! His vocals were incredible throughout the night. Bob had one stationary mic on his keyboard area, and one mic on a long arm for when he wanted to stand. They were slightly offset from each other. Bob took advantage of this mobility, sometimes switching from sitting to standing mid-note. “Maaaade” from “Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” was one such case.

His keyboard playing was very fast, complex, and insistent. At times, he would hammer it incredibly hard. It reminded me of Schroeder’s sarcastic “Jingle Bells” for Lucy in the Charlie Brown Christmas. This, along with the remarkable coherence of his lyrics, felt like a heraldic message. Listen, listen, listen!

“Man in the Long Black Coat,” a recent addition to the setlist, was very, very good. Sporting his short white coat, perhaps he wanted a little irony in his fashion. “All Along the Watchtower” was a crowd favorite, inspiring some clap-alongs and applause breaks.

The vibe of “I Contain Multitudes,” to me, gave mid-tempo '90s piano girl rock. Its groove resembled Dylan’s collaborator Fiona Apple and Outlaw tourmate Sheryl Crow. (I think this makes Bob a spiritual sibling to Taylor Swift.) But then when he sang, “I’ve no apologies to make,” one guy clapped emphatically. Okay, dude, whatever. I don’t know what that clap implied, but I don’t like it.

Bob has been accused of hiding in recent years, but tonight, he didn’t seem to be hiding at all. His face was fully lit and exposed. The only thing the hood covered was his hair. I was grateful to be able to witness the classic Bob slow nod during a sexy “False Prophet,” when he lifted his eyebrows and chin while singing. This was another sign I perceived of his sense of purpose while performing these songs.

Between songs, Dylan would grab a silver(?) cup and take a sip. Once, it was a bit audible on the speakers. That was awesome. I fear I’ve really drunk the Kool-Aid when I’m entertained by his sippin’.

“Black Rider” was a standout. He started messing with the table mic, bringing it very close to his lips before slamming it down. Then his audio was quieter as it was further away. But then, on “Black rider, black rider,” Bob’s voice echoed the phrase over and over, quieter and quieter. Only on this line did this echo occur. It was a really cool, subtle, artistic move in the audio. If I could speculate on Bob’s intentions for a moment, I think the quiet audio was to make us lean in even more.

“Love Sick” was also a crowd favorite. Here, I considered how the stage is where he really belongs.

“Goodbye Jimmy Reed” had a classic country, honky tonk sound. The bridge really picked up from there. When Bob stands up, it gives energy to the whole band. His mobility is so vital to the show. I would recommend he get a Britney-style headset mic to accommodate this.

Bob then did intros for the band. Tony gave a big Bob-esque point to cue up the next song, “I Can Tell.” I’m happy this one returned from the Outlaw sets; it fits really well with Bob and the band’s current grooving rock sound.

When “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You” began its light waltz, I thought to myself, I could die happy here. I thought about how lucky I am to see Bob Dylan. I felt a connection with the silent masses who decided Shakespeare’s work was worth collecting every scrap of his plays they could find, ensuring his place in history.

“Crossing the Rubicon,” by stark contrast, was march-like, made up of staccato hits.

“When I Paint My Masterpiece” has never sounded more like “Istanbul (Not Constantinople).” The people in front of me even whispered “They Might Be Giants” to each other. At one point, Bob mirrored the exact cadence of “That’s nobody’s business but the Turks.”

“Forgetful Heart” contained my favorite Bob vocal trick: when he slides down an octave at the end of a line. “Soon After Midnight” had a doo-wop feel, and at one point sounded like “Heart and Soul.” It was followed by “Nervous Breakdown,” the Eddie Cochran cover. This was extremely high energy, elevated by Bob’s powerful vocals. This cover made me think, “Why aren’t we all dancing right now?” Almost as if to answer, Bob did a little bouncing and wiggling himself.

Bob whipped out the harmonica for his final song, “Every Grain of Sand.” After the last note, Bob turned to face the back of the stage. For a moment, it seemed he wouldn’t let us see him, like he was turning his back on our applause. Then, he turned around, walked out from behind his keyboard, and bowed slightly to us. Then! He clapped! He clapped for us! As he left the stage, he did a little jog around the back of the drum kit.

This Cleveland concert filled my cup full. I felt a symbiotic relationship between crowd and performer. As I was heartened by Bob’s good spirits and gratitude, his performance completely enthralled. I don’t know what to say other than that I feel so lucky to appreciate Bob Dylan!

Thanks Rebecca! Next time you’re in New York, take one of her Dylan walking tours; more info at ramblintours.com. You can also find her on the latest two episodes of the Definitely Dylan podcast and on Instagram @rebeccaslaman @ramblintours and Twitter at @ithrewtheglass.

No tape yet, keep an eye on the Discord for when one pops up.

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In the 2010s, director John Hillcoat (Lawless, The Road, George & Tammy) worked with Bob Dylan on several different film projects. The first was a new music video for “Visions of Johanna,” to promote 2015’s The Cutting Edge Bootleg Series. Dylan didn’t appear in the video—in fact, Hillcoat hadn’t even met him yet—but he gave notes.

From there, their collaborations grew more direct. Next came the Desert Trip music festival, the giant 2016 concert bringing together six of the biggest names in the ’60s-rock pantheon for two blowout weekends in California. Hillcoat was brought in to oversee what would be shown on the screens behind Dylan. It was the biggest screen in the world at that time, a fact Dylan did not necessarily view as a good thing. As Hillcoat recounts, this situation caused no shortage of backstage drama.

There were a couple other music video ideas that came and went before Hillcoat’s final project with Dylan: Several days in a film studio outside Dublin shooting a private performance to be shown to the Nobel Committee. The details of this project have never been reported before. It was to serve as Dylan’s acceptance speech of a sort, a private video to present to the Nobel people in order for him to collect his prize. After days of filming and editing, though—well, I’ll let Hillcoat explain what happened.

Since this is a long conversation covering several distinct projects, I’ve inserted mini-headlines to serve as guideposts, starting with…

“VISIONS OF JOHANNA” MUSIC VIDEO

How do you start working with Dylan?

I got into filmmaking via music video. I became close friends with Nick Cave. This was before the Bad Seeds; he was in The Boys Next Door and the Birthday Party. Nick was obsessed by my record collection. He would come over and do all these recordings. I shared with him this passion for the music from America—folk, blues. Of course, Dylan was a major figure in all this. I never dreamed that our paths would ever cross.

I started doing loads of music videos with Nick. Then over the years, it became more and more artists. I did this video for Johnny Cash. It was for the first release of the lost album. That caught the attention of Jeff [Rosen, Dylan manager]. He has an eye on cinema. So he got in touch, because of my movie work as well as the Johnny Cash thing, which was a combination of stock footage and shooting stuff. They had the Bootleg [Series] thing. That’s how “Visions of Johanna” came up.

I didn’t meet Bob at first. It was all through Jeff. There were messages going back and forth between me and Bob about the video, via Jeff. Bob was fascinated, Jeff said, by violence in cinema and the history of America. Anyone coming out of the ’60s, that violence has impacted them, right? America also just has that tradition. It was founded on violence. Hence my interest in Blood Meridian and Cormac McCarthy.

I did notice that guns are a big motif in your “Visions of Johanna” video.

I was thinking, “When ‘Visions’ was written, it was the height of the ’60s and the cultural revolution.” I was trying to research and get information, but, as you know, one of Bob’s masterful things is not giving away too much. Making sure there’s enough mystery to keep people guessing.

What do you mean you were trying to research and get information?

I was trying to get to when he wrote the song. He wrote it during the New York blackout—or there’s rumors that he did. Because it was a music video that needed more imagery than just the footage. We had this brilliant Pennebaker footage, but we wanted it to stand out in a different way. Not just rest on Bob’s performance film. We wanted something more conceptual. That was where we got into the conversation of violence in America.

Initially, my pitch deck was all this reference to violence in the ’60s. But I got the message from Bob to stay away from being on the nose like that. The violence was more of a reference in a broader sense. He didn’t want to be linked back into that whole “I’m the protest leader of the ’60s.”

Not have the standard footage of the riots and the police dogs.

Exactly. And Martin Luther King and the assassinations and all those upheavals and blah, blah, blah.

Sorry, I didn’t mean “blah, blah, blah.” That was intense, serious shit. The opposite of “blah, blah, blah.”

So I went into a more abstract mode, but I also wanted to have Easter eggs there for how that song came about. Hence the blackout in New York. Even the bloody bed was based on the photos of Fred Hampton. He was asleep in bed and they machine-gunned him.

I had access to outtakes of Pennebaker. I looked at stock [footage], and then I shot bits where I was blurring the line.

I was trying to figure out which parts you filmed. Was it like the woman on the bed?

Yes. There were references to the different women in his life, but also the kind of tumultuous violence between couples. Make it more surreal, unsettling. Go more abstract with it and reference violence in a much more broad sense.

So at this point, you still haven’t actually met Bob?

Correct.

Apparently that video went down very well with both Jeff and Bob. That’s when the next venture came up, which was Desert Trip, where Coachella takes place.

DESERT TRIP CONCERTS

So what was your role at Desert Trip? Did you have something to do with the footage that aired behind Dylan?

Yeah. I was approached by Jeff saying, “Look, Bob wants you to do visuals for his show.” That whole event was going to be filmed by some guy that does loads of giant live shows. He was shooting for the big screen. It was the biggest screen in the world at that time. It was like a sci-fi thing, 40 feet high, 450 feet long. They wanted that screen as a big part of all the performances. Jeff said, “Look, you’ve got to make him comfortable and go with his ideas, because the big screen concerts are not the way he does his live shows.” You know, the Rolling Stones are old experts at that, but Bob’s not that kind of live performer.

Dylan didn’t want to be covered in the way that everyone else was going to be covered. The way musicians are covered really irritated Bob. He had very specific thoughts about it.

What were his very specific thoughts?

We had to have a meeting in advance of the two shows. The meeting was extraordinary. It was in a big hotel in Valencia, a blazing hot summer day. The hotel was virtually empty.

His stage manager—a real character, amazing guy who does all his practical managing—Jeff Kramer sets this up. Jeff takes me up to the hotel room first. He checks the bathroom, he checks the balcony, he looks into the vents, searches the room. It was just strange, as if people were after Bob or something. This is high up, by the way, overlooking the sea.

It’s all clear. We sit down. Bob comes in, and he’s got probably three or four layers of clothing. Two hoodies, fully up. Dark glasses. Totally hidden. With the layered hoodies, you could just see a bit of forehead, a little bit of cheeks and nose and mouth, and that’s it. Very strange.

I decide that I’ve got to somehow break the ice with this guy. I didn’t want to let him down. So I do a big gamble. I tell Bob the story of my family moving from Australia to New Haven and being big fans of his. They would drag me along as a really young kid to different concerts and events. I got dragged to Newport Folk Festival, the big one. I was four years old.

When he went electric? Wow.

I tell Bob how there was a big area where, when they were setting up for the nighttime show, they had Pete Seeger entertain the kids. We were all running around like wild things and we had Pete Seeger perform to us. I remember that really, really clearly, but I couldn’t remember anything about seeing him go electric that night. I probably fell asleep, to be honest. So I can’t remember that, whereas I have a very vivid memory of Pete Seeger playing to the kids.

It could have gone either way, right?

That’s taking a real swing, telling him his Newport ’65 performance made zero impression on you.

Yeah, but he laughed. Like a real laugh that wasn’t guarded. Then all the layers came off, including the sunglasses. That’s how I broke the ice.

We had this incredible long conversation, really detailed. He was talking all about the way performers are filmed and the impact of Ed Sullivan’s show with Elvis. The way that the camera just held this wide shot on Elvis. It wasn’t cutting to guitar solos or anything like that. There was something so pure and direct with that performance that made a huge impact on him.

I brought up Woodstock. They would sometimes just hold those shots for almost the whole song. As time went by, it got more and more jazzed up. All the clichés that he hates. He wanted this radically different approach.

He used the Rolling Stones as the kind of antithesis of what he wanted, where they have all these cameras flying around. Super dynamic camera moves, guitar solo close-ups, everything’s cut like a music video to the beat. He said he wants to avoid all of that. So as the master contrarian and the creative anarchist, he decides it’s got to be black-and-white, because he knew everyone else was doing color. We don’t use any of the cameras that everyone else is using, the giant showbiz cameras on wires.

So he wants to use literally different cameras from all the other acts on the bill?

Bob’s whole setup was, he was going to do it all differently. He wanted to be polar opposite to everyone. He also loves the idea where the lead performer is part of the band and not being singled out. So he didn’t want close-ups on him at the expense of him with the rest of the band.

Where the shot is 90% Bob Dylan and once in a blue moon you see the drummer or something.

He wanted to avoid that. Everything should be wide-ish. No close-ups of instruments, no close-ups of individuals. It’s always about different angles on the group.

Then Bob has this wild idea of having 25 cameras on the stage. Nothing out [front]—no giant telephotos, no zoom lenses, no tracking cameras, no cameras on cranes or wires flying about. He wanted the cameras all arranged with a pattern that he drew out. I don’t think people could ever put it together, but there was an underlying pattern of where the cameras were placed that formed this ancient [symbol] that predates the Star of David into ancient times.

Wait, you’re saying this ancient symbol determined the camera placement?

Yeah, as a floor plan idea. Also, he said he didn’t want the cameras to cut to the music like a music video. Typically you cut to the beat; you make it musical. He wanted slow dissolves so that it’s working in a different way. It’s more as a sort of stream-of-consciousness background, versus typical razzmatazz live event coverage.

He also wanted some other projection up there, not just the band footage. He didn’t want the imagery to tell you about each song. One of the problems with some of the Pink Floyd back projections, I think, is they illustrated the songs too literally. Whereas the genius of Pink Floyd was when they had the more mysterious album covers. Their animations were so on-the-nose.

So it was very conceptual and very out there. The contrarian in every sense.

I’ll never forget when we were setting up in the first soundcheck, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards appeared on the edge of the stage. They were snooping around because the word got out that Bob’s doing his own thing. They were trying to work out, “What the fuck is he up to?”

Surely they could have asked him. They’ve known the guy for fifty years!

Exactly. This is how funny it is. And of course the backstage contrast. Dylan’s backstage area, you could count on one hand the amount of people. Whereas the Stones’ was just this packed nonstop party. All the Hollywood celebs were going in and out. You could not make up a greater contrast.

They must have intersected at some point. There’s a photo Ron Wood posted from backstage with Dylan holding Ron’s new baby.

When he was talking to me about the way the Rolling Stones are covered, he was very dismissive, but I think it was more just that he wanted to highlight what to avoid.

I saw him live last summer on the Outlaw Tour. It’s all big venues with big screens. Everyone else—Willie Nelson, etc—is using the typical shots. Bob Dylan, his entire performance was a single camera that appeared to be positioned at the absolute back of the venue, not zoomed in at all. Just an awful static shot, which I’m sure was deliberate.

That was very intentional. I remember these old lenses that had all these aberrations and were really fucked up, he loved that about them. I think he loved doing exactly what you’re not supposed to do. But also, I think with these old lenses and black-and-white and all this stuff, on some level he’s hiding, whether it’s conscious or not. He doesn’t want that big close-up.

I’ve worked with so many actors that use makeup and props and wardrobe to hide themselves. Even like Viggo [Mortensen] in The Road, because that character was an everyman and had to expose himself emotionally so intimately, he was initially looking for ways of hiding. Like an extra big beard and a lot of things to get behind. I’ve grown to really respect people like Dylan and the great actors. There’s so much emotion that they’re putting out there. When there’s teams of people around examining that, it can be very intimidating. Even for the polished professionals that have been doing it forever.

We’ve talked about the cameras on him. In terms of the other stuff, the stock footage, the film clips, how are you choosing those?

I had full access to all of Pennebaker’s outtakes. Pennebaker, as a master documentarian, filmed all sorts of aspects of New York and other [things]. So we weren’t using Pennebaker filming Dylan; it was just Pennebaker’s outtakes, which Jeff has a massive collection of. I utilize a lot of stock and found footage in my work, so there’s an element of that too. I did a pre-edit that I shared with Jeff and Bob. I think it lasted about an hour or something and then recycled.

So the soundcheck arrives. It was really important, Jeff said, to use that soundcheck to make Bob comfortable. Show him the shots up on screen in advance, because he’s never performed with a screen like this.

Now here’s the rub. The man that was shooting everyone else is a rock and roll animal. He wanted to fuck me up, because he was so resentful that he didn’t get to do Bob’s show. This guy wanted to make sure we failed so that he could move in and be the savior. I didn’t know this, but I discovered it the hard way.

We rock up before the soundcheck to prepare all these cameras. We had all these small cameras that were independent, but we needed a hookup to the rest of the system, right? He didn’t give us the proper equipment we requested. We didn’t even have ways of attaching the cameras to the tripods. We didn’t have the right threads; we didn’t have any proper staff to support us. And we had a massive setup. He completely sabotaged us. We were panicking, literally taping the cameras to light stands.

You said 25 cameras, right?

I think it got reduced in the end to 17 or something. It was well over ten.

So we couldn’t show Bob the cameras by the time it came to soundcheck, because most of the cameras hadn’t even been mounted. So he had no visual reference. I was freaking out, because I knew this was a big problem.

Also, we weren’t going to get there on time for 85,000 people. They all started to load in. This is how close it got: By the time we set up each camera and got them working and hooked up, the lights were going up for the show.

As the show itself is actually starting?

As the show is starting. That’s how close to the wire we were.

Is there a lot of tension? I know you’re stressed, obviously, but is Dylan pissed?

Yeah. He’s not communicating with me at this point. There wasn’t even time to explain what was going on. All we did was focus on, we have to get this going by the time the show goes on. It was the opening act for the whole event. We were sweating blood.

By the way, I didn’t want him bogged down with any of this shit either. I’ve learned that working with actors, you don’t want to give them any additional stress of the behind-the-scenes. That’s the last thing they need. They have to focus on their thing, and you have to support that at all costs. I just apologized that the cameras weren’t ready to show him.

He did nearly make me implode by saying at the last minute, “Should we go color?” After I had completely designed the whole thing in black-and-white. I even turned color footage into black-and-white. As he was leaving the soundcheck, he said, “How about we go color?”

How did you respond?

I was so shaken. I was just like, “Well, I think we’re really prepped for the black-and-white, and I think that’s going to work better.” He’s just like, “Okay, okay.”

So we went live and I was calling out the different cameras. We had all these different cameras starting to move around and dissolve as Bob requested. In the middle screen, we had the background footage.

Here’s the problem: Bob hadn’t got used to it. We were a few songs in, and I saw Bob look up on the screen for the first time. He was just into the music, then he looked up and saw himself forty feet high. I saw his whole face change. The audience didn’t notice, but I noticed. Sure enough, he literally kicks the camera that was closest to him. He kicks it and sends it flying.

Oh my God.

I’m hearing panic backstage. “Kill the cameras! Kill the cameras!” We’re only a few songs in. There’s 85,000 people, and they’ve come to see Bob, right?

They’re not gonna be able to see anything now. So did you have to kill the cameras?

Of course. Bob ended up saying in between the songs, in no uncertain terms, “Kill all the cameras.” So I had to just cut all the cameras. Luckily, I had this beautiful stream-of-conscious Pennebaker montage, so I just filled all the screens with that instead.

I thought it was all over between Bob and I. I said to both Jeffs that I should just go dig a grave and kneel down and wait for the bullet, right? Because if he’s kicking cameras and shutting down the whole show—not good. There was one more weekend. I just thought I’d be replaced and that was the end of everything.

Luckily, the New York Times did a review saying everyone was super excited to see Bob and he’s doing all his great classics, but all new arrangements, no one knew what to expect, and then suddenly he vanishes. And it’s like, “the genius of Bob Dylan!”

Like it was all planned to not show him onscreen, you mean?

Yeah. Which I thought was hilarious.

I explained to Jeff Rosen what happened. He’s been around, he knows what these live event people are like. So he rings up this guy and absolutely grills him. He says, “I want everything set for this next weekend, where Bob sees all the cameras in advance. You’re going to give us all the prep we need. We’re going to take the Rolling Stones soundcheck.”

Can he do that? Don’t the Rolling Stones need a soundcheck?

I don’t know if we got all of it, but we definitely got the prime slot and all the time we needed to set it up properly. Jeff was very impressive on that phone call, I have to say.

Word must have got back to Bob what happened. When I saw him at the soundcheck for the next weekend, he took me aside and we had a chat. He was saying, “Okay, let’s give this another go.”

He was in a good mood because, between those two weekends, it was announced about the Nobel.

Oh, really? I didn’t realize that was the timing.

We didn’t know whether Bob was going to even accept it or not. I was told by Jeff Rosen, “Whatever you do, don’t mention the Nobel.” That was just off the table.

Bob was definitely in a better mood. I didn’t know whether it was to do with the Nobel or whether it was he had heard that we were sabotaged. There were no problems on that second weekend.

I convinced him to take his hat off as well, because he has amazing hair. His hair for his age, it’s just incredible. And it’s all natural. He hasn’t done any kind of specialist hair work.

What are you doing during the concerts themselves? Are you queuing cameras or are you sitting back and watching?

I’m there with a control panel in a booth that’s near the stage. I’m looking at all the different monitors and queuing the cameras to do their dissolve.

Are you having to remind yourself not to do it on the beat?

Oh yeah. I drilled it into the guys that were working the panels.

I neglected to mention that before Desert Trip, or maybe it was after, there was also a music video I was going to do with Bob in it.

For what song?

“That Old Black Magic,” from when he was doing the standards.

“THAT OLD BLACK MAGIC” MUSIC VIDEO

He was interested in new tech. Again, just trying to be on the vanguard. As a creative anarchist, he wants to do unexpected things. The idea was to do a full 360 video. We were going to do it inside a club as a film noir. My reference was Weegee. Do you know that brilliant New York photographer?

I do. I wrote a 33 1/3 book about this Leonard Cohen tribute album where they used a Weegee photo on the cover. Kids playing in the street in the summer.

That’s right. I did this whole pitch deck and a lot of research into the characters that hang out in those bars at that time. You know, barflies, card sharks, gamblers and all those sort of mythic noir figures in this edgy club. Really pushing the boat out. Then I cast it. I had the most incredible faces. That’s what is missing in modern cinema. If you look at the ’30s or ’40s, some of the top leading actors—even Bogart has a real character face. You don’t see as many characterful people in the way that used to populate cinema.

We had it all ready to go, and Dylan suddenly disappeared. Both Jeffs could not track him down. He went, what do you call it, missing in action?

MIA.

MIA. And they were desperate because we’d all lined up everything. We’d cast it, we booked it, we did camera tests. We had the whole thing pinned down.

It turned out he was in Japan. He just wandered off for some downtime in Japan and lost track of all time and communication.

What was he supposed to do in this video?

He was going to be the club performer.

In the middle of this 360-degree camera thing?

Yeah. In fact, like Shadow Kingdom, but with a more edgy Weegee vibe. Like you’re really leaning into the more smoky barfly characters.

Anyway, so that never happened.

They did a noir video a year or two before for another standard, “The Night We Called It a Day,” with Robert Davi. Was it connected to that?

It was to push that even further. He’s had a long interest in cinema, the kind of larger-than-life characters and outlaws he writes songs about. Hence why I keep saying Weegee, because if you see Weegee and then look at those videos, I hate to say it, but they don’t have the edge that Weegee had. There was a real underbelly of the city at night that was genuine noir. So I wanted to just push it more in that tradition. Take it into a more cinematic, gritty realism of that world.

That sounds like it would have been a cool video. I’m sorry that Dylan wandered off on you. That must have been quite a disappointment.

I never found out—and I don’t even know if the Jeffs know—what was going on with him personally. But obviously he just checked out. And I totally get that. I’m amazed he doesn’t do that more.

Then there was also another music video after Desert Trip that I was going to do for a beautiful version of “Simple Twist of Fate.”

Like a new version?

No, from a Bootleg Series.

They did a Blood on the Tracks Bootleg Series [in 2018]. It must have been that one.

I have to say, in all honesty, I think that bootleg track of “Simple Twist of Fate” is even better than the album. I mean, both versions are fucking amazing, don’t get me wrong, but I think there was an extra rawness and emotional power to the bootleg one.

What was the concept of the video?

The concept was a color noir. When I say color noir, I mean like Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, with the rich colors and the sordid hotel rooms and the loneliness. Bob wasn’t going to perform in that one. Rather than the more abstracted “Johanna,” this was going to have a loose narrative of a noir character in hotel rooms.

Like telling the story of the song? Because obviously a hotel room is prominent in the lyrics.

Exactly, yet without being literal. Using some of the thematics, so it’s almost like a visual echo of the song rather than a literal interpretation. Hinting at the impressionistic journey of doomed love.

So what went awry with that one?

Well, sadly—and this is just the brutal fact that shocked me to the core—it was the budget. Our budget was around forty or fifty grand, and the label said, we can’t budget fifty grand for promotion of this set.

It’s Blood on the Tracks! One of the greatest albums of all time.

To be honest, having done that whole journey in music, that’s when I really woke up to how profoundly the music industry was changing.

NOBEL PRIZE PERFORMANCE VIDEO

Then the last big event I had with Bob was for the Nobel. He wanted to avoid showing up in person. I think it was the whole dog and pony show that he didn’t want to do. Because there was the controversy flying around of, “What are you doing giving him the Nobel for literature?” People were outraged. Cormac [McCarthy], who at this point was a very close friend, we talked about that. He was thrilled. He said, “Look around. Who else is writing that great? He deserves it.”

There was that long controversy: “Is he going to even accept?” To get the prize, you do have to engage in some way. So he said, “Okay, I’m going to do a bespoke film to present to them.” He would rework a lot of his classics to present for the Nobel.

We timed it where he was going to finish a tour. He’s going to be in Dublin [in May 2017]. We’re going to get a studio where we would shoot it all, edit it together.

So a concert film, although not at a real concert? Was that sort of the idea?

Yeah. Now, again, he was really specific. He wanted the band to be really close to each other. It shouldn’t feel like a film studio where you’re all placed in your special spots. He wanted this intimacy, where the group is tightly working together in a huddle. He wanted to now go color with it, instead of black-and-white. We talked about color noir. We were going to have intense colors, some red carpet under this little huddle that we would film.

So we set it all up. We had the meetings and we booked the studio [Ardmore Studios].

The setup you’re describing sounds kind of like Shadow Kingdom a few years later, in terms of the noir vibe and the reworking of old songs and everything.

Even the approach too, like the way of keeping the whole band close. In that case, they set it in a little club or café.

We had it all set up. Lol [Crawley] was gonna shoot it. Lol was very resistant to the idea that they could be so close together. We had a big arm wrestle over that. The closer they were all together, the harder it was to light.

Because they’re casting shadows on each other?

And just to shape the lighting. It’s much harder when they’re all on top of each other.

That was one thing, but then there became a series of things. It was probably not a good idea to try and attempt such an ambitious thing at the very end of a long, long tour.

Just in terms of exhaustion, you mean?

Kind of. I mean, he has unlimited energy. I don’t know where it comes from.

We get everything set up for Bob, ready, waiting for him. We had this whole crew, all these cameras set up, we had a crane. It was all planned out. He comes there. The first thing that happened, we had to reset. It was still too spread out. It was too much in the space of the studio. He wanted that more intimate vibe.

So we put it closer. We had to move it all to one side and change the whole setup. After four or five hours of pre-light, we had less than an hour to redo the whole thing. I managed to break the ice again when he was getting frustrated ‘cause the setup wasn’t right. I told him how Cormac felt there was no better person to give the Nobel to. He loved hearing that.

He also had an idea about looking into the lens.

He wanted to look into the lens?

Yeah, he asked about that. He had done a thing recently that was kind of inspired by the Ed Sullivan thing of a one-take crane move where he’s looking at the lens the whole time. I guess he had the residue of this idea of looking into the lens. [Note: I think this would be the Tony Bennett 90th birthday performance below.]

The problem was, we had multiple cameras, multiple angles. He looked at all the angles and was fine. But then when he wanted to make eye contact, it would never work. You’d need visual lights flashing to indicate which camera to turn your attention to. Because you can’t look in the lens of five different cameras [at once], can you?

To be honest, it was better as a Desert Trip-type heightened documentary where they’re lost in the music, versus like a performance.

More fly on the wall, like you’re catching this intimate rehearsal.

Correct. Rather than trying to do the more self-conscious straight-into-the-lens thing, which is a much more stylized vibe. I explained, “Don’t worry about locking eyes. You can drift to any camera in the moment, but just focus on doing your thing. We’re ready to roll whenever you want.”

I hid everyone behind curtains, because I knew that crew members are a distraction. So I tried to minimize people in his eye line. Minimize all the distractions, so he could be as focused as possible.

Did this thing actually get filmed amidst all this?

Oh yeah. We filmed it. We had a couple of days filming, and then a few days of editing, all at this studio in Dublin. [Technically in Bray, just outside Dublin]

The thing that I learned is that, you know Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back? That is literally his philosophy. There’s no looking back; there is no going back. It’s all forward motion. That’s why he never does anything exactly the same. He didn’t even know which albums some of these songs came off of.

What songs was he performing?

The most jaw-dropping was “Girl from the North Country.” They were from a bunch of different albums. A lot from Time Out of Mind. “Love Sick,” “Standing in the Doorway,” and “Trying to Get to Heaven.” Beautiful renditions, I must say. Also I think “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.”

But the thing is, he didn’t tell anyone, including the band, which songs they were going to do. When a song formed, we had to just roll the camera. He was never going to go, “Okay everyone, here we go.” He said we had to be ready, because he was just going to warm up and find the songs, and the band had to find the songs with him in the moment. We had to be ready to capture it.

This is where his energy is limitless. Eight hours without a single coffee break, of just improv noodling. Sometimes you would gradually hear a song emerge, and I’d have all the cameras start rolling, and then we realized, “Hang on, it isn’t.”

So this is eight hours of not even playing songs? Nothing that you can capture.

Correct. The grips at this point, the sweat’s just rolling off them. They’re gripped, ready to go into action the second the song hits, right?

Everyone is just on the tips of their toes waiting for something that sounds like a song.

Everyone. We were all set to go with dollies, cranes, all that. As I said, we’d sometimes start to roll and then stop when we realized, “Oh, no, it hasn’t formed yet.”

As you know, the band members have to know every song inside out and backwards in advance, and they have to be on it in the moment. So all eyes are on Dylan. I’m talking every band member. And also, as you know, he tends to focus on a member of that band. [laughs]

Sometimes you don’t want to be the one he’s focusing on.

Absolutely. And it was Charlie Sexton, in this case. Bob was really leaning in on Sexton. Everyone else was on eggshells.

What makes this even more perverse is they just finished an entire tour. He could have just played a regular set like the one they had done two days ago.

Absolutely. And also to not even take a coffee break—and by the way, crew regulations, you can’t just do eight hours straight without some kind of break.

How did he get around that?

Everyone had signed up for this. Whatever happens, happens. It’s Bob Dylan. Be prepared.

He found these prop swords. The props guy from the studio thought they were from Excalibur, the Boorman film. John Boorman’s an old friend who was living outside of Dublin while we were filming. I told him, “We’re using your swords from Excalibur. Bob’s placed them on the piano.” And the hilarious thing is John Boorman said, “I hate to tell you this, but the props guy is telling tall tales, because the sword is above my mantelpiece.”

It was just some random swords?

Yeah. I didn’t break that to Bob. He loved the swords on the piano. I didn’t want to break the spell.

He’ll have bits and pieces, little trinkets [on stage]. On Desert Trip, he brought the statue of Beethoven and a bust of a female Greek god. This was all part of that. He laid down the swords crisscross. I guess he loved that Celtic tradition.

Anyway, out of all of this, eight hours later, “Girl from the North Country” comes out, and it is breathtaking. Half the crew were in tears. Partly from physical exhaustion. As soon as it finished, I went out. Bob just looked up at me and said, “Did you get it?”

From there, more and more songs came out.

How many songs ultimately are we talking here?

I think it ended up being eight or nine. Like a mini album. It was meant to be substantial enough to have a show to present to them.

When you say present to them, was this going to be released to the public or was it just going to be shown to some Nobel people?

It was just going to be shown to the Nobel people and then, maybe, go beyond that. You never know.

But no concrete plans to ever actually release this thing?

No.

The other thing that happened was there was an old ribbon mic. I didn’t know this, but old ribbon mics, you have to hit straight-on horizontally. If you look down at an angle of 45 [degrees], or 45 up, you’ll miss the mic.

The mic won’t capture you?

It does, but it’s not as good. So that was a challenge. Half the songs were in this huddle where he’s on guitar and singing with the band. The other half, he did some songs at the piano. He explained that when you’re playing, you’re looking at the keys, but you’re singing at the same time. So if you’re singing horizontally, you can’t look at the keys. He said it interfered a bit with his performance. It was a challenge. I wish I’d known all this in advance, because I could have sorted all these issues.

He was kind of in a weird space about whether he should wear a polka dot scarf or not. I was with his long-term stylist talking about that, and a piece of his hair was sticking right up. It was catching the light, really distracting. It’s the sort of thing that you’d have to paint out in post. No one had it in them to go and get it planted down. No one was game. I asked the stylist, who was comfortable with him; even she was like, “No.” So we both did it together. I distracted him by talking to him, and then she quickly patted it down.

[He had] like a ten-minute delayed reaction. This is once we’re in the groove, and the songs were coming out faster. He suddenly fiercely grabbed his hair with both hands and messed it all up. Like, “Don’t fucking touch this thing.” That was hilarious.

So then we got into the edit. We cut it all together. Bob was in the edit, dictating.

So he’s even involved after the shooting’s done?

As you know, he’s gone in and out of filmmaking mode. He’s got very strong opinions. I think he probably is better having directors with more experience work on those things, but who am I to judge?

I think history has borne that out.

Yeah. [laughs]

John Boorman came to visit. I was hoping to introduce them, because they’re from a similar generation, and I knew Dylan admired his films. That day Dylan was having a bit of a meltdown out in the parking lot with Jeff Rosen. I think in time, with the edit, he got frustrated with his own performance.

He’s his own worst enemy. Look, the sound and the performance, obviously he has to have that final say, and he is the judge. But I think he was getting caught up on some other details that distracted from how good it was, particularly “Girl From the North Country.” His voice was incredible. It sounded almost like an amalgamation of the great Johnny Cash duet. It was like Johnny Cash and Dylan combined as one voice.

So when do you know it’s being shelved?

I knew from the parking lot meltdown that something was up. Jeff later explained, it was a whole lot of things. The ribbon mic thing. His performance. Coming off that tour was probably the worst time to attempt it. So he decided to do the voice thing on the influence of literature and Moby Dick, etc. [The recorded Nobel speech he eventually submitted instead to collect the prize.]

The way you’re talking about this falling apart is reminding me of another thing fifteen years earlier. He recorded these shows at the Supper Club in New York. It was supposed to be like an intimate video for HBO. I interviewed the director of that, and a similar thing happened. Everyone there thought the performance was great, but Bob was very involved in the editing, and, as the editing went on, he became more and more displeased. Eventually he scrapped the whole thing.

That’s the thing. Had he walked away sooner and had more distance from it, I think it would have been a different story. Then he’d see it with fresh eyes. By that stage, he’d burnt the candle both ways. I think that was the problem.

You know, he’s hypercritical. He can get a bit spiky. That’s part of his whole innate character. Even with this not working in his eyes, he was lovely with me. No doubt he had his frustrations, but he was very gracious about it. He wasn’t an asshole at all. He hasn’t drunk the Kool-Aid and done the big kind of star trip. He’s remained pure to the work, hence being so hypercritical. If you’re a contrarian by nature, and that’s part of your process, to sustain that edge is really something. I heard from a friend where he came over and said, “The key to this business is to keep them guessing. Always keep them guessing.”

He’s obviously a very complex person. There’s a part that he wants to be very, very private and he wants to keep a lot of mystery. Even when he is gregarious, there’s still this contradiction of this private nervy little guy. But he has this immense ability to project past that and become something else.

Thanks to John Hillcoat for taking the time to share these stories! Check out more of his current work at Blank Films Inc. And check out my interviews with other Dylan-directors like Gillian Armstrong (the Dylan-Petty concert film) and Michael Borofsky (Supper Club, MTV Unplugged, “Not Dark Yet”)

Last night, Bob Dylan played the final of his three Michigan shows this tour. Veteran music journalist and Detroit resident Caryn Rose attended all three, and reports in on the final night.

Rose is the author most recently of a great Patti Smith tour zine which you can get in print here ($1 off with code ROWDY) or as an ebook here. And, if you’re a Bruce Springsteen fan, she’ll be covering his just-begun tour over at Radio Nowhere. Bringing those two people together, she interviewed Bruce about Patti for her last book; read an excerpt with that interview here.

Here’s Caryn Rose on last night’s show in Detroit, and how it compared to Saginaw and Grand Rapids:

The Never Ending Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour rolled into the Motor City on Saturday night after previous stops in Grand Rapids on Thursday and Saginaw on Friday. If the room wasn’t officially sold out, it was close to it, and there was a definite big-city energy vibrating through the crowd in the hour or so before the show.

In a subjective, highly visual survey, demographically the audience was a solid cross-generational mix; special shoutout to the 20-something gentleman in the front rows who was rocking a solid Robbie Robertson ’74-era cosplay. (In the interests of full disclosure, I really have no ground to stand on here because I was wearing my Bob polka dots and my biker jacket.)

As he had the previous few evenings, Bob’s appearance onstage was prompt, after Anton, Tony, Bob Britt, and Doug had come onstage in the darkness and begun the opening vamp of “To Be Alone With You.” Dylan walked onstage to a warm ovation and delivered a brisk and energetic rendition of the tune while we in the audience had to listen to it through loud static coming through the speaker stacks. I feel bad for Detroit, because while I had two static-free evenings where I got to enjoy the 2026 version of this Nashville Skyline track, for everyone else here, this might be their only opportunity. The static got fixed by the next piano solo but issues with the mics remained. (More on this later, or it would end up being all I talk about.)

The stage lighting seemed like it was getting brighter as my shows progressed. I sat in about the same basic location every night (6th or 7th row, mostly center or just right of center) so it’s not that it seemed brighter because I was closer (which would be a logical conclusion). I mention the lighting because both tonight and the previous evening, the additional illumination made it easier to observe Bob’s face while he was singing, the expressions he would make, and the various turns (and glares) at the various band members. And it’s weird, because he’s coming out sporting the hoodie-over-a-ballcap combo (I decided tonight that he reminds me of a beekeeper in this getup) so you would think it would be harder to see him and yet somehow you’re still able to closely observe this essential activity you’re here for. It’s really such a gift after having his visage deliberately obscured in various ways over the years.

“Man in the Long Black Coat” has been an absolute treat to hear and, although I’m sure this has nothing to do with its appearance, I’m still giving props to Patti Smith who spent the spring of 2024 teaching herself how to play the song on guitar (and demonstrating her progress for her Substack subscribers) before introducing it to her setlist that summer. There’s something about the song’s simplicity that makes it fascinating and at times, electrifying. Tonight it fell somewhere in the middle, and that’s about where this show falls on the continuum of Bob Michigan Week. The same setlist, the same arrangements, the same basic performances, and yet, three definitely different experiences. But this is why we do this.

It’s always fun to hear the different responses to those opening notes that herald the reconstructed “All Along the Watchtower.” People know what it is and it’s not just the frequent fliers; the shouts and cheers come from the back corners and up in the balcony, the people who are not spending their spring vacation following Bob Dylan around the Midwest.

I was also considering how “‘There must be some way out of here,’ said the joker to the thief” is one of the great opening lines of popular song, how it works so well because we are immediately brought into not just the action of the moment but brought into the heart of the conflict, and because we know who the main actors are in the story. Just the immediacy of it will never not strike me as genius no matter how many times I hear it.

“I Contain Multitudes” is of course next. He’s playing with the choruses, sometimes offering a short piano-filled pause before singing the refrain, sometimes he just keeps things moving. The Indiana Jones lyric gets extra applause. Bob is definitely feeling himself towards the end of the third verse, a man of many moods, he croons, and then seems to deliver “I’ll show you my heart/but not all of it” with a slight frown and a particular emphasis. The mention of Beethoven sonnets gets a nod as he delivers it, almost punctuating the line.

“Multitudes” is still a welcome slot in the setlist but the entire song was troubled by the current situation with Bob’s microphones. At least once during this song’s performance I found myself sitting on the edge of my seat, because I don’t know if the next line is going to be sung on the mic and if I will actually get to hear it. This is the moment where I pray to every available deity that someone who can fix the situation with the microphones would do so.

In case you have not yet seen a show, I will offer a sketch I drew of the mic situation in Grand Rapids since we obviously do not have photographs:

These meaty, verbose songs from Rough & Rowdy Ways are the ones that suffer the most from the boom mic/floor mic configuration for many reasons, none of which anyone reading this needs me to tell them: it diminishes the power of the song because you can’t hear the words, it makes it hard to keep the attention of the audience members who can’t fill in the words in their heads automatically, and it just absolutely sucks as a fan to have to not know which line or word in what song is going to suffer the consequences of the microphone setup.

It is possible to fix this, because there were absolutely zero problems in Saginaw. The sound was fantastic. I heard every word Bob sang, and so did everyone else who paid money for a ticket to see and hear Bob Dylan.

The sound had more problems in Grand Rapids and it was my first show so I probably noticed them more, but you know what? For most of the people in the audience, this is their only show. Maybe this doesn’t bother other people as much as it bothers me, but it is painful, it is like nails on a chalkboard. Just when you settle into the vibe or the flow of the song, suddenly there are missing words, phrases, sometimes verses. Bob sits down and pulls the floor mic towards him, and sometimes it helps—but sometimes he does this and then turns his head away from the mic. Sometimes he does this and the boom mic picks it up, sometimes he stands up and sings into the boom mic and voila, here is Bob Dylan singing!

::steps off soapbox::

“False Prophet” is fine but not exceptional. The audience seemed impressed by “Black Rider,” and an attentive, respectful silence fell into place before Bob even began singing. He is impassioned in the introduction, Anton using brushes to give some texture to the rhythm, and the whole number felt like it benefited from more substance and definition. “Love Sick” was super popular and Bob seemed really into it. “I’m sick of love, I’m luvvvvvv sick,” he tossed off just like David Johansen would. I always appreciate the enthusiastic hoots from the audience that punctuate lines of this number.

“Jimmy Reed” felt a little off-kilter, and Bob gave one of those sideways glances to Bob Britt and all I could think was, can you imagine getting one of those looks? It would turn my insides to stone, instantly. Doug Lancio was watching even more closely than he usually does, if that is at all possible.

If you remember, keep an eye on Tony Garnier as he energetically counts in “I Can Tell.” This and “Nervous Breakdown” are always so much fun and so enjoyable to watch because Bob is clearly enjoying himself, and it seems like the band relaxes into things a little bit more than they usually have the opportunity of doing. It has been an utter joy to sing “I KNOW YOU DON’T WANT ME NO MORE” with Bob Dylan every night. It’s also interesting to consider the juxtaposition of “I Can Tell” coming right before “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You.” Tonight this number is particularly gorgeous. I love that this song survived the cut. But man, it is hard to listen to him sing, “I hope that the gods go easy with me” some nights.

“Rubicon” lands well, starts off a little off-kilter but I decide Bob is freestyling until he finds his way into the song. Bob’s piano work here, especially on the outro, felt especially strong. So when they next head into “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” he is absolutely cooking, and that tempo continued into “Forgetful Heart.” It was bold, heartfelt, precise. Which is why it was particularly infuriating that one of the two people sitting behind me used this number to express what seemed like her frustration in being forced to sit through this Bob Dylan set. She tried to imitate how she felt Bob was singing. I did not have the energy to tell her that there were only a few songs left and I would appreciate it if she could just…not do that. (The previous evening I had to listen to two men next to me discuss playing stand-up bass at a conversational volume, because one of them had taken lessons, so he felt qualified to critique Tony Garnier.)

Bob’s drinking vessels are gray. Are they Solo cups? They must make gray ones. Springsteen has black ones. (He also has black tissue boxes and all cable ties onstage are black.) I was grateful to see that the guitar I labelled “Elijah’s guitar” (that’s a Passover reference) is still sitting behind him, but had to burst bubbles when audience members pointed it out.

“Soon After Midnight” lost a little steam. Bob moves the floor mic over like it is impeding his range of motion before engaging in what was a lovely interlude on the ivories. He had such a big grin singing “Nervous Breakdown.” This one remains bulletproof, even though I had hoped (fine, dreamed) that we might get some kind of Detroit-specific cover choice.

And now, of course, the benediction of “Every Grain of Sand,” which felt oddly appropriate the night before Easter, even though I’m not quite sure it possesses the same grace I have found in it during previous shows. I didn’t sneak out early because it looked like Bob was checking his pockets and making eye contact and given that he didn’t play harmonica during “Masterpiece,” I wasn’t sure we’d get that here and that the signals meant “no harmonica.” But then he stood up and there was a glint of silver and here it was. The crowd roared, Bob comes very close to the edge of the stage, there’s that dramatic cut to black and we’re stumbling out of Masonic in the dark while everyone else is cheering and hoping for just one more. Of course they are; they just saw Bob Dylan.

When I was driving to Grand Rapids, I was thinking about the purpose of these essays that we write about these shows. How each leg starts off with answering the question of, What is Bob doing, and how is he doing it? And once we establish that, the next aspect we need to address is Why is Bob doing this in this particular fashion? We’ll never know (unless someone from the band spills the beans in the future), but I have developed a theory as to why this is the electric-piano-and-acoustic-guitars tour.

My theory is that he is happy with his voice. Maybe something changed, and he seems to be singing better and clearer, and with reasonable power in his instrument. But maybe not enough power to deliver effectively over electric guitars, or not enough to sustainably offer the same level of power throughout the length of a tour. And maybe he has decided that this is a way to let people hear Bob Dylan songs with vocals that are both more melodically recognizable to the general population and alongside a more muted instrumentation that lets the vocals shine brighter than they might have previously.

I don’t know, but I love that Bob Dylan still gets out there and offers us these zen koans that we have the opportunity of considering and thinking and trying to come up with answers. I love that I might be completely wrong, but I love more that at age 84 he is still making us think.

2026-04-04, Masonic Temple Theatre, Detroit, MI

Thanks Caryn! Get her Patti Smith tour zine in print here ($1 off with code ROWDY) or as an ebook here. And follow her Springsteen tour coverage at Radio Nowhere.

Things have seemingly settled in on the spring tour. The setlist hasn’t changed in a while, and the constant microphone issues that plagued the early dates seem to have finally subsided. Last night the tour came to Saginaw, Michigan, Dylan’s first show ever in the city. Adam Selzer has seen three shows this tour, and reports that this—his 100th Dylan show ever!—was the best one. (Though I gotta say, compared to the last two we saw here, that theater marquee leaves something to be desired).

Here’s Adam:

Even the message board signs are missing a few letters around here. Whole town seems like it needs a new coat of paint and a couple of consonants. As we rolled into town, a skunk was running past the Welcome to Saginaw sign. The locals told us “it’s kind of crusty here,” but we found out it was the good kind of crust. We often say the best shows are in the most unlikely places.

This held true tonight. My 100th show was an absolute banger. I got to meet up with my Wales road buddy Graham and my longtime partner in crime Michael Glover Smith. I got to ride in an Uber with a guy talking about Alice Cooper and then step into a “Mar ini Bar” where more people were talking about Alice Cooper. I heard tales of Question Mark, the Saginaw-based garage rock icon (“96 Tears”) wandering around the theater tonight telling people he died on the Titanic in a previous life (he met with Bob after the show). I’m just saying: all the pieces were in place.

Once again Anton Fig kicked off the show with a drum beat, Tony joined on bass, and soon Bob was aboard in his white hoodie, wailing a “To Be Alone With You” worthy of a Question Mark and the Mysterians garage-rock single. In Grand Rapids, I felt this was a high-octane opener to a generally laid-back show, but tonight this simply wasn’t the case. The crowd was very responsive; Bob took note of the people dancing up front and fed off their energy. I could see it from the balcony. I couldn’t sit still, even though the woman behind me said that my head-nodding was giving her an anxiety attack. Now, I’ve been bugged by people standing and blocking my view in the past, I admit. Usually I’m on the “sitting” side of the sit-vs-stand debate. But I think it’s a fact that Bob likes to see people up and responding, and tonight that was clear. As they say to rock and roll crowds: “You drive us wild, we’ll drive you crazy.” The crowd tonight was destined to drive Dylan wild, and he in turn drove us crazy.

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Update: This ran on April 1st an April’s Fools joke. Now that it’s no longer April Fool’s Day, it lives on as a regular Weird Al concert deep-dive. If that’s your thing.

In March 1984, Al had just released one of the biggest songs of his entire career, but you wouldn’t know it from his tour billing. Even with “Eat It” out in the world, he was still opening for the wacky radio host who first played his zany songs on the air, Dr. Demento.

Weird Al, though, was already stealing the show. A Kansas City Star headline a few weeks before today’s show in Buffalo read: “It’s Dr. Demento’s Show, but The Star Is Weird Al.” You can see from that poster up top too that sometimes the promoters would take it upon themselves to flip the order. (Al’s longtime drummer Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz confirms that this tour was primarily Demento’s show.)

At the time, most writers seemed skeptical that such a gimmicky act would last long. When interviewing Al before his show in Rochester, a writer wrote:

Although writing rock parodies might seem limiting to some, Yankovic feels there’s a future in it. “I figure there will always be hit songs, and there will always be people who can accept a certain amount of irreverence about them. I can see myself doing this for a while.”

“A while” is, as of this writing, 43 years and counting. Though at the time of today’s Buffalo show he was only a year or so into his professional career, you can already hear his staying power. The show was taped for the King Biscuit Flower Hour syndicated radio program. It aired as a double-bill broadcast alongside cowpunks Jason and Scorchers, who performed their great version of “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” a song written by someone whose name escapes me.

Check out the cool hand-lettered calendar for this month’s run of shows at Buffalo’s Tralfamadore Cafe:

Al opens with “Yoda,” the Kinks parody that for several decades now has closed every show in a medley with his later Star Wars song “The Saga Begins,” the only good thing to come out of the prequels. From there it’s into “Buckingham Blues,” the John Mellencamp almost-parody Al wisely jettisoned from his set soon after (the hosts of the podcast Weird Al-Gorithm, which I appeared on a while back, have ranked it as his worst original song ever). “I’d like to play a little blues number for you now,” he says by way of introduction. “This was actually written by my great grandfather, who originally brought the blues to this country. You’ve probably heard of him, the famous Blind Lemon Yankovic.”

After that, getting its own dedicated setlist.fm slot, it’s “Drum Solo.” Which it is…technically. Al and Bermuda still do this gag today.

I wrote a whole chapter in my first book about the next song, “Polkas on 45,” the first of Al’s many polka medleys. I describe it as the exact opposite of his more-famous parodies. In the parody, he keeps the music but changes the words. In the polka medleys, he keeps the words but changes the music. The humor comes in hearing self-serious songs like “Every Breath You Take” and “Smoke on the Water” done in a goofy accordion-fueled polka, complete with copious sound effects. Weird Al adapted the technique from 1940s bandleader satirist Spike Jones, who occasionally performed a zany polka cover of some serious composer like Tchaikovsky. “I listened to a lot of polka music because I want to make sure it passes muster with a hard-core polka enthusiast,” Al told me at the time. “But it’s comedy, so my medleys owe as much to Spike Jones as they do to traditional polka.”

For the same book, drummer Schwartz recalled: “Our crowds back then really liked the polkas. He’d sing them sort of sweet; that was half the gag. We were usually playing for the Dr. Demento audience, and they were into anything wacky.”

Sure enough, “Polkas on 45” gets a huge audience response here. You can hear an enthusiastic clap-along before he even starts singing. Here’s a video from a different show a few months later (with a horn section!):

One thing you might notice watching that video is that a big hallmark of later Al shows is missing. There are no costumes, no props, no giant video screens. He either didn’t have the ambition or, more likely, the budget for the full production. It’s a fairly straightforward concert presentation. He does don a red leather jacket for “Eat It,” but a long way from the elaborate studded fat suit he’d incorporate the next time he parodied Michael Jackson.

In this show, Al performs a few of what fans have christened “style parodies.” That’s where he parodies the sound of a certain artist, but not one specific song. For instance, “Mr Popeil” is a style parody of the B-52’s generally, using the band’s distinctive yelps, synth stabs, and off-kilter guitar riffs to sing about the dude who invented the infomercial. “Buy Me a Condo” is a style parody of Bob Marley, using reggae music and Jamaican slang to sing as an extremely white suburbanite excited about tupperware parties and Lacoste polo shirts.

Unfortunately, this show took place years before Al recorded one of his best style parodies, “Bob.” Every line is a palindrome (that is, the same forwards and backwards, like “senile felines”) to spoof the lyrics and sound of some guy from the '60s. Donovan I think?

The most exciting thing about listening to Weird Al live tapes, as I’m sure all of you regular Weirding Down the Double Al’s readers know, is hearing the concert-only songs that never made an actual album. There are a few here.

The first is “It’s Still Billy Joel to Me.” Most Weird Al parodies have nothing to do, lyrically, with the original artist. “Eat It” isn’t about Michael Jackson. “Amish Paradise” isn’t about Coolio. But there’s a smaller subset of parodies that are. “Smells Like Nirvana” gently ribs Kurt Cobain for mumbling his lyrics. “Perform This Way” pokes fun at Lady Gaga’s wild outfits. This is one of those.

It’s in the even smaller subset of parodies that are, in Al’s own words, “kind of mean-spirited.” It takes copious shots at Billy Joel for jumping on the new-wave trend with his new album Glass Houses. As Al explains in a podcast interview, an interviewer actually played it for Joel at the time. Joel didn’t seem overly offended, but Al said, watching that, “That was the point where I thought, ‘I don’t want to be mean to people. You can be funny without tearing people down.’”

The second concert-exclusive song here is another anomaly in Al’s catalog. His humor is usually pretty G-rated. A decent chunk of his audience is kids, after all. When he slips in a more ribald joke, it’s usually pretty subtle. It took me years to realize the joke, in his weepy breakup song “One More Minute,” in the line “Now I’m standing all alone at the gas station of love / And I have to use the self-service pumps.”

The brief Jim Croce parody he plays in today’s show is not similarly subtle. Here are the lyrics, in their entirety:

If I could make love to a bottle
The first thing that I’d like to do
I’d search the world over to find one
That had the exact same circumference as you

Finally, and most excitingly, is the “Food Medley.” He intros it as his “medley of every song ever written in the history of the world,” which was a gag he used to do in college that was sort of a precursor to the polka medleys. Here, though, it’s a medley of his own parodies.

In his shows to this day, he often throws in medleys that let him rip through a dozen hits in one long chunk, maybe a quick verse and a chorus from each. That’s what this is, except he doesn’t have many hits, so most of the songs in this medley are concert-exclusive parodies. This Buffalo 1984 show features an epic 10-minute food-themed medley where a full 9 of the 12 songs are ones he never actually released:

You get, interspersed with bits from three songs you might actually know (“Theme From Rocky XIII,” “I Love Rocky Road,” “My Bologna”), the following concert-exclusive mini-parodies:

“Flatbush Avenue” (parody of Eddy Grant’s “Electric Avenue”)

Down on the street they got bagels
And there’s a sale on cream cheese and lox
Nosh on some blintzes at Ratner’s
Not in the mood for Jack-In-The-Box
Oy vey!

We gonna schlepp on through to Flatbush Avenue
For matzah and chopped liver
We gonna schlepp on through to Flatbush Avenue
Or maybe they’ll deliver

“Spameater” (parody of Hall & Oates’ “Maneater”):

Oh-oh, here she comes
Boy, she likes that processed meat
Oh, oh, here she comes
She’s a spameater!

“Feel Like Throwin’ Up” (parody of Bad Company’s “Feel Like Makin’ Love”):

Baby, when we go to parties
I drink too much beer
Then my tummy
Starts a-grumblin’
Feelin’ queer
And then I feel like…I feel like throwin’ up (repeat)
Feel like throwin’ up on you

“Avocado” (parody of The Eagles’ “Desperado”):

Avocado
What makes you think you’re so holy?
You’re gonna be guacamole before too long
Oh, you’re a green one
You know that you’re out of season
You’d better let somebody eat you (repeat)
Before it’s too late

“Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut” and “Take the L Out of Liver” (a double-dose of The Motels parodies: “Suddenly Last Summer” and “Take the L Out of Lover”):

Sometimes you feel like a nut
Sometimes you don’t
Peter Paul Almond Joy’s got nuts
Mounds don’t

(These are words taken from an old Almond Joy commercial)

Take the L out of liver
And it’s “iver”

(He had an earlier unreleased Talking Heads-via-Al Green parody “Take Me To The Liver”)

“Fatter” (parody of The Rolling Stones’ “Shattered”):

Fatter, fatter
Shake ‘n Bake, fatter
Shake ‘n Bake, fatter
Fatter

Pizza pie, Coca-Cola
Yogurt, butterscotch, granola
Look at me, I’m fatter!

“Whole Lotta Lunch” (parody of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”):

Wanna whole lotta lunch! (repeat)

Robert Plant-style screaming:
Way down inside…
Woman…you need…luuuuuuuunch

“We Got the Beef” (parody of The Go-Go’s “We Got the Beat”):

Had ourselves a little barbecue
Corn on the cob and mashed potatoes too
Joe got the Fritos, Ernie got the stew
So what did you bring?

We got the beef (repeat)
Yeah, we got it!

Everybody get on your feet (we got the beef)
Got a hunk of your favorite meat (we got the beef)
Chuck steak (we got the beef)
Now, ground round by the pound
We got the beef (repeat)

That’s a lot of songs you’ll never hear anywhere else! Al has explained that these concert-only songs often don’t have enough meat on the bone (no pun intended) to sustain a full-length parody. So he throws a few lines in these medleys and calls it a day. I don’t know that I need a four-minute version of “Spameater,” but at 15 seconds, it tastes great.

1984-03-10, Tralfamadore Cafe, Buffalo, NY [late show]

Weird Al will embark on the latest leg of the Rough Bigger and Rowdy Weirder tour this May!

Oh, and happy April 1st…

Last night, the final(?) leg of the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour came to the Chicago suburb of Waukegan, a town Bob Dylan has never played before.

On the scene to report in was Rob Mitchum. Rob’s a longtime music writer. His archive of Pitchfork reviews from back in the day is vast, covering everything from Tom Waits’ Orphans to Weezer’s Raditude—hope he got hazard pay for that one. He currently co-hosts the recently-resurrected Grateful Dead podcast 36 From the Vault with Steven Hyden and writes the newsletter Phish Essays, about every Phish show 25 years later. In his day job, he’s the editor-in-chief of Kellogg Insight.

Rob took his son to his first Dylan show last night. The dad who popularized the term dad-rock tells us how it went:

I have tried my damnedest not to be The Onion’s Remain in Light dad. Despite an “illustrious” “career” talking about bands on the internet, I’ve avoided pushing my tastes on my kids, knowing that any aggressive lobbying would likely only lead to backlash. If they ask questions about what’s on the speakers, I’m all too happy to subtly fan the flames. But mostly I just trust the power of osmosis, hoping that the constant background noise of Dad’s odd music will someday strike a nerve.

Dylan has been a great test case for this theory; my oldest, now 14, has been half-aware of him his whole life. A toddler-age mispronunciation forever renamed the artist “Bob Billins” in our household, and I fondly remember him asking me to turn the Rolling Thunder documentary off because Bob’s performance of “Isis” was “fo fcary.” It’s a treasured Mitchum family tradition when I sneak the Christmas album into the holiday playlist. But all that didn’t really cultivate an appreciation of Dylan beyond being a Weird Guy…accurate, but incomplete.

For that breakthrough, I got an assist from Hollywood. My older son turned out to be the exact A Complete Unknown audience that the Dylan fan community imagined, condescendingly or not — a teenager drawn in by Timothée Chalamet’s star power. I took him to see it and used him as a shield against my own biopic cynicism, grinding my teeth during “Judas”-at-Newport but noticing that the rebellious thrill of the moment, however ahistorical, still resonated with him. Afterwards, my son’s main two takeaways were pretty astute: that Dylan was a jerk to women (true), and that he did not like when people expected him to do something.

All that said, seeing Timmy Dylan didn’t lead to my son binging the discography and appreciating the finer points of Infidels and Tempest. So I was pleasantly surprised and unpleasantly guilty when he expressed disappointment that I was seeing Dylan this spring without him. Just two summers ago, he declined my offer to take him to the Outlaw Tour when my buddy backed out sick at the last minute. Now, he was eager to go to the outskirts of Chicagoland to see a show that he knew (because I constantly warned him) was going to be nothing like Dylan in the movies.

After one near-scamming and a whole lot of Ticketmaster refreshing, I found him a balcony ticket near face and we were on our way to Waukegan. Because I grew up in the southwest suburbs of Chicago, the northern suburbs have always been an indistinct blur of wealth and snobbery to me. But Waukegan turned out to not be that at all, more similar instead to Davenport, Iowa, where I last saw Dylan about one year earlier. Both are hollowed-out water-adjacent downtowns with some green shoots of cultural revival and a gorgeous century-old movie palace, miraculously preserved amidst the boarded-up storefronts and empty high-rises.

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