A Bob Dylan-Tom Petty '86 Miniseries

1986-02-05, Athletic Park, Wellington, New Zealand

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Photo via National Library of New Zealand

Forty years ago today, one of my favorite Bob Dylan tours ever began.

Unfortunately, it was not one of Bob Dylan’s favorite Bob Dylan tours ever. Writing in Chronicles, he didn’t have much positive to say about his time with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Dylan wrote:

I’d been on an eighteen month tour with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. It would be my last. I had no connection to any kind of inspiration. Whatever was there to begin with had all vanished and shrunk. Tom was at the top of his game and I was at the bottom of mine. I couldn’t overcome the odds. Everything was smashed. My own songs had become strangers to me, I didn’t have the skill to touch their raw nerves, couldn’t penetrate the surfaces. It wasn’t my moment of history anymore. There was a hollow singing in my heart and I couldn’t wait to retire and fold the tent. One more big payday with Petty and that would be it for me. I was what they called over the hill. If I wasn’t careful I could end up ranting and raving in shouting matches with the wall. The mirror had swung around and I could see the future — an old actor fumbling in garbage cans outside the theater of past triumphs.

There’s a Dylan-in-the-'80s collection coming out at some point where I contributed a chapter that makes the case that, frankly, Dylan’s wrong. More specifically, that he’s perhaps primarily remembering his second round of Petty touring in 1987, which everyone I’ve interviewed has reported was bleaker and less fun, even if the music remained strong. (Think Rolling Thunder ’75 vs Rolling Thunder ’76.)

So to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the tour dubbed True Confessions, I’m going to track the first seven 1986 shows with Petty. I’m not going to do the full tour this time—the shows and setlists get repetitive, plus more tapes than usual are missing or unlistenable. But maybe I’ll pick the project back up for the tour’s U.S. leg in the summer and do the first chunk of that too.

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As is always the case for these show-by-show series, roughly two out of every three entries will be for 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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If I’m making the case that this 1986 tour is secretly great, it sure would be helpful if this first show, the one I’m kicking off this entire series with, was a good one, right? Nope! Heartbreakers’ keyboard player Benmont Tench told me it was one of their worst:

I think the first show was a festival in New Zealand. We went down there for a week or so early to do some rehearsing, acclimate to the time. So we were in Wellington for a pretty long time. We played New Zealand, and, if I remember right, it was not good. For us on stage, at least. I remember several things were kind of like a train wreck. It’s like, I didn’t know it was in this key… Then we’d start in that [new] key and Bob would realize that he didn’t want to be in that key, so he’d change back to the original key. It was pretty shaky. I don’t know what the audience thought.

This marked Dylan’s second time playing in New Zealand, after two dates on the monster 1978 tour not long after Budokan (this '86 tour travels the reverse route, from Aus/NZ to Japan). When reporter Don McLeese asked Dylan why he was starting the tour in Australia, Dylan joked, “I’ve never been offered that much [money] here in the States. There’s really very little reason for most of the stuff I do. There’s not very much logic behind it.”

Things got off to a shaky start as soon as the band touched down. An Air New Zealand strike left everyone stranded in Auckland for a few hours, waiting to fly onward to Wellington. Dylan was besieged by press as he escaped to a nearby hotel to wait out the strike. When someone shoved a microphone in his face and asked why he’d flown all the way to New Zealand to perform, he quipped, “I just love to fly.”

You can see the chaotic airport scene in this news footage:

Finally, they caught a plane to Wellington, the site of the first show, where the airport scene repeated itself. In an article headlined “Rude Dylan Stars Again,” the Sunday News gripes, “Even the Wellington Airport’s flower vendor was shoved out of the way while attempting to give the rock star a welcoming rose.” Reports from the scene at the airport were so bad the tour’s PR person had to issue an official response:

If you had seen Wellington Airport at the time, you would have understood why they had to push him through. The place was packed because of the strike and everything was going crazy around there. And when we came through you couldn’t move. We had to literally push people out of the way to get him through. It’s the beginning of the tour, he had just arrived in the country after a flight from Los Angeles, arrived to an airstrike, had to be put into another hotel, and then flown down to Wellington at six o’clock at night. He was pretty exhausted as well. It’s understandable. I’m not worried about Bob’s rudeness to people. I think the Press is winding it up a lot bigger than it is.

Even when the band finally got to work, things continued to go sideways. In the Sydney Morning Herald a few days later, Stuart Coupe reported that a loud three-hour rehearsal the night before the first show in Wellington “prompted such a high number of complaints from residents that the local mayor made front page news threatening to withdraw the permit for the concert.” The mayor eventually relented, and the show went on. I guess local residents didn’t appreciate hearing “Trust Yourself” played over and over again on a work night.

This was Dylan and the Heartbreakers’ first full show together, after the short set at the first Farm Aid that kicked off their partnership. The tape is pretty sketchy—for completists only, really—but opening night does feature one song they would not perform again: “Heart of Mine.” So that one’s worth listening to, though it’s not some wild new arrangement. It sounds like the gospel-era holdover that it is.

Reviews of this first show were mixed at best. “Bob Dylan may be looking his age but still has some power,” one reviewer wrote—and that was one of the most positive ones! Another wrote, “Bob Dylan is boring…Even the full-bore rock’n’roll turned on by Petty could not lift the concert flattened by Dylan’s limp whine.”

A police blotter noted eleven arrests for drunkenness at the show, and even more people taken away by ambulance. Those who didn’t get forcibly removed didn’t seem to dig it that much either. A newspaper reported, “Twenty minutes into the concert most of the audience was still standing around hands in their pockets, discussing the weather.”

No wonder Tench has bad memories of opening night! Thankfully, things would soon improve.

1986-02-05, Athletic Park, Wellington, New Zealand