Bob Dylan's Most Talkative Tour Ever?

1986-02-13, Entertainment Center, Sydney, Australia

There’s a major element of this tour I haven’t hit on yet: BobTalk!

Was 1986 his most talkative year ever? You could make the case. The early gospel shows where he was delivering full-on sermons might top it, but in terms of more casual chatting rather than aggressively preaching, this tour is hard to beat. He kept quiet the first few shows, but now that they’re in full flow, he won’t shut up. And that’s a good thing!

So today’s it’s the “Whoops: All BobTalk” edition. I wanted to share some of the most interesting things he said from the stage on this tour. A lot of these were lines or stories he delivered every night in some form, so I’ll start with those (the specific shows I’m quoting in parentheses). Then I’ll share some interesting one-off remarks he made along the way.

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“My protest period”

Before “Masters of War” many nights, he would say some version of this:

“This is a song here I wrote about twenty or thirty years ago. In my so-called protest period. I’m still in that period. Don’t let anybody fool you.” (2/22)

Some nights he added asides like “I could never write another one as good, so I still keep singing this one” (3/10) or “There’s still plenty to protest about, I guess” (2/20).

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“A place called the Midwest”

Introducing “Girl from the North Country,” he sometimes paid tribute to the Midwest. Here’s my favorite version of that, with a surprising shoutout:

“I come from a place called the Midwest. It’s kind of nice there at certain parts of the year. If you go up South, by this time I’d either have been killed, or killed somebody, so I figured I was kind of lucky to grow up down there. Of course if I had grown up out West, I’d have been a Beach Boy. East, I never really did consider. Here’s a song about someone I used to know a long time ago. Seems like just the other day, though.” (2/21)

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“We used to hear songs like this on the radio”

Before “I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know,” Dylan’s big duet with Petty and one of the show’s numerous old-time-rock-and-roll covers, Dylan would say:

“We’re gonna sing you an old song. When we were growing up, we used to hear songs like this on the radio all the time. You don’t hear this kind of stuff too much anymore. It’s kind of tragic actually.”(3/6)

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“A lonely grave”

Before “Lenny Bruce,” many nights Dylan paid tribute not just to Bruce himself, but to another man who died tragically: Tennessee Williams.

“Anybody here who hasn’t heard of Tennessee Williams? I guess everybody knows who he is. Anyway, he wrote these incredible lines, you know? He says…what’d he say again? ‘I’m not looking for your pity, but just your understanding. But not even that, no, just your recognition of you in me and the enemy time in us all.’ I used to think about those lines a lot. Anyway, you hear of stuff like A Streetcar Named Desire, Fugitive Kind, Sweet Bird of Youth, all kinds of plays like that. A few years ago back he died in a New York City hotel room all by himself. Nobody even found him until the next day. In his last days he couldn’t get a job. America does that its people sometimes.

“Anyway, here’s another person that they did it too. A guy a little bit before his time. Actually, I thought he was right on time, but I guess most everybody else didn’t. He was about ten years ahead of his time. What he did back then and got crucified for, other people do now and make a lot of money doing it. And I never would write a song about them, but I did write a song about this man.” (2/21)

For more on this monologue, check out this guest post from James Adams. He traces Dylan’s interest in Tennessee Williams to seeing Lauren Bacall perform Sweet Bird of Youth at the beginning of the tour, and connects the speech to Richard Manuel of The Band, who died under similarly tragic circumstances during this tour.

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“Impress me”

Introducing “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky,” several times Dylan said he wrote the song in response to a particular sort of person:

“You know the kind of people that always say ‘impress me, impress me’? As if they can’t impress themselves. People always sitting in judgment on you. I bet everybody knows somebody like that. I know quite a few. I don’t pay no attention to them though. They don’t bother me none… ‘Cause I ain’t got no way of getting back you know? Can’t shoot them. Some people just ain’t worth shooting. So the only kind of way I get back is to write songs. I wish everybody could do that, surely.” (2/21)

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“Put somebody in their place”

One of his most-used and longest speeches always introduced “Ballad of a Thin Man.” It always went something like this: