Beach Boys Riffs in Singapore

2018-08-06, Star Performing Arts Centre, Singapore

Photo via needsomefun.com

Listening to this phenomenal subscriber-requested show (thanks Aditya), two things jumped out at me:

1. All the lyric changes

2. All the arrangement changes

I realize that list doesn’t seem to differentiate this show from many of the others I write about. Arrangement changes, especially, come up constantly. (Lyric changes slightly less so, partly because they’re sometimes harder to make out on audience tapes). But, even by Dylan’s standards, this show has a lot of both. And thanks to a crystal-clear tape, we can hear them all perfectly.

Lyric changes first. There are two big ones, and a few smaller ones. The big one is “Gotta Serve Somebody.” He’d only resurrected it a week earlier, at a show in Seoul, for the first time since 2011. This was its second outing. When a few weeks later, Rolling Stone wrote an article headlined “Bob Dylan’s 2018 Setlists Are Starting to Get Interesting,” “Gotta Serve Somebody” was one of the examples.

Here are the new “Gotta Serve Somebody” lyrics in Singapore. If some of these seem old-hat now, it’s because many he’s kept singing ever since. In 2018, though, they were all brand-new.

May be walking on a high rope, staring at the crowd
May be [?], talking out loud
They may call you mystic, call you Mr. Soul
You may be on the wagon, you may be on a roll

You may be on the highway, heading for the coast
Maybe you're hallucinating, you might think you've seen a ghost
They might call you Peter, they might call you Paul
They might not call you anything at all

Well you may be someone's neighbor, you may be somebody’s son
Someone's jealous husband, maybe someone on the run
They may call you Father Time, they may call you Mother Earth
You might not even know the date of your birth

The other big one for lyric changes is “Tangled Up in Blue.”