Bob & Bruce at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

1995-09-02, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, OH

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Last year, I wrote about the most recent time Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen performed together, when Dylan guested at an E Street show for a truly shambolic run down “Highway 61 Revisited.” Today, we look at the first time they sang together (outside of a few all-star things and guitar sit-ins), at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum concert on September 2, 1995.

I’d seen the video years ago of them doing “Forever Young” together, but, not having been following Dylan when the performance took place, didn’t know much about the context. So I called up Joel Gallen to tell me about it. Gallen has directed and produced 18 different Rock Hall induction ceremonies, as well as a variety of the Hall’s special events. The Bob-Bruce performance took place at one of those, a stadium show in Cleveland for the Hall of Fame museum’s grand opening.

The lineup is bonkers, the show lasted six hours, and you can see an edited version of the broadcast below. Bob’s five-song set starts about an hour and 56 minutes in, but I’d encourage you to watch the whole thing, or just click around to get a taste.

Here’s my conversation with Joel Gallen, touching on what the concert was all about, Dylan’s last-minute appearance, a few other times he’s produced TV events with Dylan, and more.

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Can you give an overview of how this show came together and what your specific role was?

I had started working for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on an annual basis doing their induction ceremony, I think in 1993. I was still pretty new. Once they started to break ground building the museum, it was always like, "Hey, when the museum is done, let's have a grand opening concert." I started explaining to them, this is going to be very expensive, way more than doing these little induction ceremonies in a banquet room at the Waldorf Astoria.

Is that what they had been doing up until that point? They were still in this private event mode, rather than a big public thing like it is now?

Yes, they were in the private event mode, I think all the way to like 2007 or something when it became a much bigger show. [Editor: With a couple of exceptions, the annual induction ceremonies were private events at the Waldorf Astoria until 2012, though those events started being consistently televised in 1997 (via Future Rock Legends)]

Getting back, we needed to get a license fee from a network, because otherwise we were not going to be able to afford to put the show on, even with ticket sales and all that stuff. They still were very inexperienced when it comes to television. I knew some people at HBO. We went in there and presented the show. They got all excited, and they basically paid for the concert.

Did you have any names officially attached yet?

We had no names attached initially, but we made a list of who we thought would come, and basically over-delivered. I think that their condition was you got to get at least three or four of these really big names, and we got like 10 of them.

The concept of the show was this. We book artists to each do two songs, sometimes three. We said, if you're in the Hall of Fame, you'll do two of your own songs. If you're not in the Hall of Fame, we want you to do at least one song as a cover of an artist that is in the Hall of Fame.

They got everybody. Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry and Little Richard all confirmed right away. Then, of course, we got Springsteen and the E Street Band, which at the time hadn’t played live together for seven or eight years.

Were you involved in the artist outreach process of it?

Yes, I was definitely involved with that, along with Suzan Evans, who was the executive director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She probably booked most of it, but I would come in and get creative with, "Okay, why don't we get this for a special guest?" because there were a lot of layers in that show.

We had a turntable stage so we could make the changes very seamless, but we also had an acoustic stage. I booked in a lot of artists to do that. I got Nancy and Ann Wilson of Heart. They came on and did “Battle of Evermore” by Led Zeppelin. Jackson Browne came out with his acoustic guitar; he did Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” Bon Jovi, who was booked on the main stage, did, unrehearsed, “With a Little Help from my Friends” with Richie [Sambora], because we needed some more people on the acoustic stage to make some stage changes.

I remember one of my big missions was, how do I get Sly and the Family Stone to be at this show? They were just inducted in '93, and Sly actually showed up. He didn't say anything, but he showed up, picked up his trophy, and left. I reached out to every single member of the Family Stone. I talked to literally every other person in the group and they all came. But we couldn't get Sly to come, so the actual reunion didn't come to fruition. Except then we got George Clinton and P-Funk. We asked them to do, as part of their set, a Sly and the Family Stone tribute. Basically, we have 30 people on stage, all P-Funk and all the members of Family Stone. That to me was really, really a great moment.

The backstage was unbelievable, seeing Bob Dylan hanging out with James Brown and, of course, Bruce Springsteen hanging out with Chuck Berry or this or that. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of that on the broadcast, but it was all happening.