Dubuque '96 Stage-Crashers Remember a Uniquely Wild Bob Dylan Show

1996-11-12, Five Flags Center, Dubuque, IA

Nov 12, 2024

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Stage Diving in Dubuque, the bootleg was called, and the title was no exaggeration. One night in Dubuque, Iowa, fans crashed the stage. Not just a few fans, and not just briefly. Dozens (hundreds?) of fans, mostly teenagers, came and went all night, song after song. Jumping around, dancing, crowd-surfing, kissing Bob, putting their hats on the band members, and, yes, stage diving.

If you’ve never seen it, watch this video for a few minutes. I’ve cued it up to start near the end, but you can pretty much click around wherever. After the first person gets up about a half hour in, basically onstage chaos remains throughout.

This wasn’t the only time this happened. It was a thing, briefly, in 1996. Bob and security clearly sanctioned it—no one makes the slightest effort to remove these kids—for reasons that remained murky. There were rumors that director Michael Borofsky was filming these stage-crashes for some project, but he says no, and a band member from that time tells me he had no idea what was happening either.

The Dubuque show, which took place 28 years ago today, was extra chaotic and, thanks to someone filming the whole thing with a camcorder, became extra famous among Dylan fans. Singer-songwriter Amy Rigby even recorded a song inspired by this incident earlier this year, titled “Dylan in Dubuque.” “I’ll take on any comers, any flannel-shirted clown,” she sings. “I'll keep rolling out the numbers cause this ain't just any town.” The music video features some of that same show footage.

Inspired by a subscriber request, for the anniversary I wanted to track down a few of the kids who were up on stage, and, eventually, I did. Find four of their stories below, plus hear from two other young people who were there: one audience member with a unique vantage point, and one person working on the stage crew that night. Six people, all in their teens or early 20s at the time, sharing their memories of a uniquely wild Bob Dylan show. (Their stories are all edited and condensed from phone interviews.)

Bronwen Healy: “I’m just going to go up there and dance”

It was one of the weirdest shows I’ve ever been to in my life. I think I was 17. I went with some of my friends and my parents.

I’ve been a fan for a long time. I had never seen him before, but I grew up listening to Dylan with my parents. I don’t know that they had seen him before either. So we went to the show, and all these people started getting up on stage. I don’t know why security was letting them, but Dylan seemed okay with it.

They were getting up on stage and then stage diving, or trying to shake his hand while he was playing the guitar. It was the time of grunge, so maybe stage-diving seemed more appropriate for that, but it seemed a little out of place at a Dylan show.

I’ve been to many concerts in my life, but I’ve never been to a concert where people just were jumping on stage like that. I don’t know how many of these people were really Dylan fans or if they were just there for the fun of the show. We were all standing there watching it, and we were irritated. We were like, “What are these people doing?” It seemed disrespectful that they were trying to shake his hand while he was playing.

So I decided, all right, this is ridiculous. I’m going to get up there and just dance for a while so that it’ll keep people from interrupting him. I made my way up to the front of the stage. I’m really short, so people just lifted me up. I got up there and I just danced for—I don’t even know how long it was. There’s a video that you’ve seen. It was during “Silvio.”

Here’s Bronwen’s bit onstage:

When he was done with the song, I did go over to him and say, “Thank you so much for everything. I’m a big fan.” I think I gave him a hug. He was very sweet. He didn’t seem mad. He said to me, “You’re a beautiful dancer,” or something like that.

At the time, I was in college, and I studied dance. It felt nice to be up there dancing. I grew up performing in that theater, actually, because I grew up dancing at a ballet school. They had a proper little theater that was just around the corner from this venue.

My parents loved it. They were watching and also shocked at what was happening with everybody getting up on stage. Then they were just like, “Oh, there’s Bronwen…and there’s still Bronwen. She’s still up there!”

Like I said before, it just felt weird to me that so many people were doing it in what I thought was kind of a disrespectful way, which is why I got up there. I’m just going to go up there and dance so nobody can get up there for a little while and try to interrupt him and shake his hand. Let the man play.

Katie Roche: “By far the strangest crowd participation I’ve ever seen”

I was at college at the University of Iowa in Iowa City and a huge Dylan fan. I grew up with all my parents’ vinyl records, and was somewhere between madly in love with Bob Dylan and just admiring his artistry. He just was everything to me.

So getting to go to my hometown of Dubuque and see him in my community felt like this unbelievable opportunity. My perception of my town at that time was that it would never be cool enough for something like that. Walking in, it was like a This Is Your Life. Everybody I knew in Dubuque was there.

I had a broken foot, which plays a role in how I experienced the concert, because everyone who was working there was giving me special treatment. Bronwen really wanted to be up front, but I was worried about protecting my foot. These guys that were working up on a platform running lights were like, “If you can climb up, you can come here with us.” So I climbed this ladder with a broken foot and hung out on the platform with them for the show.

I remember feeling like I had the best view of the concert possible, because I was up above the audience, but still pretty close to the stage. So I could see into the place where the bouncers were and was like, “Wait, what’s going on?” Bob just signaled to security, like, “All right, let people up on stage.” He sort of did it with a gesture. Then it was just chaos.

Person after person got up there. I’m like, “Oh my God, I went to preschool with that person.” “That’s my neighbor.” It was just really strange. Such a weird, weird night.

The two people that I was closest to that got up there I think had the coolest experiences on stage with him. One was my friend Laura, who kissed him on the cheek. Then Bronwen, who is a professional dancer. I think there was a moment of recognition between them. “We’re both Jewish people. We both have this curly hair.” I feel like Bob couldn’t have looked at her without realizing, “We’re from the same tribe.” I just watched them on stage together, freaking out with excitement, because Bronwen and I were obsessed with Bob Dylan.

For me, I had been ashamed of my hometown and its behavior and this spectacle that unfolded. But then I saw my bestie who I’d gone to the concert with acknowledge him, which most people who jumped up on stage didn’t do. They were more into the “Hey, I’m on stage and I’m going to jump off” crowd response thing. For her, it was about honoring him and his music. That redeemed the whole thing for me.

Even if I hadn’t had a broken foot, I don’t know that I would have gotten up there. I think I would have felt like it was disrespectful to him. As much as I was in love with him as a child, as much as I kissed his face right off the Blonde on Blonde album cover when I was 10, I just have a reverence for him. So I think it felt beyond the pale for me. But I was really proud of the way that Bronwen handled it. I thought she was the most artistic and respectful person that got up on stage.

The other thing that I remember about that night is that, if you’d ever asked me if anyone smoked pot in Dubuque, I would have been like, “Probably not.” It had never seemed like it was a part of the culture. But it was like a bong in there. I was like, “Oh, I guess pot’s a thing in Dubuque. Who knew?”

Until a couple of years ago, I worked in performing arts, so I’ve seen more concerts than almost anyone I know. I’ve seen some crazy stuff over the years, but I think that that was by far the strangest crowd participation I’ve ever seen at a concert. Controlled chaos.

Maybe the closest thing to that was a night when I saw Wu-Tang Clan play in Iowa City. They invited women up on the stage to dance. And I was in the audience just laughing. I was like, “That lady’s a kindergarten teacher. That lady’s a banker.”

Jakob Breitbach: “I’ve never done a stage dive since”

I went to the show with my parents and my sister Maple and a couple friends. I would have been 15 years old. I skipped ballet class to go.

The first thing I remember was walking into the quote-unquote arena and hearing [opening act] Kenny Wayne Shepherd, who I vaguely knew of at the time, and it was just insanely, ear-poppingly loud. I mean, I’m a symphony kid. I played violin in the youth symphony. I’d never heard of using earplugs to go see a show.

Bob Dylan came out in his Ernest Tubb outfit with the silver pants and the big hat. I remember there being rows of seats with pretty wide aisles. There were enthusiastic folks who stood up early, and then the people behind them were pretty p.o’d. They were yelling, “Sit down!” It became this early schism between people that wanted to party because it was rock and roll, and then people who wanted it to be the Bob Dylan from the Newport Folk Festival. It was like, I think we already saw this happen when Pete Seeger was gonna chop the electrical cord with an axe when Bob Dylan brought the band up.

Once the dam broke, the chairs got pushed away and people just came down from the upper stands onto the main floor. When people start to get onstage, it was like, “Well, might as well get up there.”

Maple and I got up. I just did a few spins, danced around with my sister. People later recognized us. I don’t think I had much interaction with Bob. I certainly wasn’t up there for more than one song. Then I did a little stage dive, kind of a belly flop. For two or three seconds I lost my glasses on the floor. I was like, “Oh no. I’m gonna be blind trying to find my seat.” But I found them.

[Watching the video in the background] Whoa, somebody just did a flip off the stage. I thought I’d seen myself in this video at some point, but there’s so much zooming in. I had really long hair, baggy pants and a baggy shirt. You know, typical mid-’90s. Not really grunge, but sort of a hippie kind of a look.

It didn’t feel like it was a big deal at the time, except that I’d never really seen anybody get on stage at a concert before. There were a fair number of kids that got up there who probably didn’t have much of an idea who Bob Dylan was. I’ve never done a stage dive since. That was a one and done.

There was a pretty big music scene around Dubuque. Still is. A lot of bars have music one or two nights a week, and a lot of smaller semi-pro bands probably play in an hour radius. More in the rock and blues vein, which is not my genre; I’m a fiddle player and an upright bass player, so I go from bluegrass and roots music to swing jazz and classical.

I remember at the time, as a musician, thinking, “Hey, it’s cool if you want to get up and dance on stage, but why are you interrupting him to shake his hand? He’s playing guitar.” [watching video] Yeah, somebody just tried to get an autograph. Dude! That’s crossing the line. Now somebody just threw an article of clothing on stage. Wow. Somebody just kissed Bob.

Andy Benson: “We were expected to have security in place”

I was working for Five Flags on the stage crew. I was probably 20, 21, something like that. We started really early in the morning to set that one up, much earlier than any of the other shows that we’d had, because they had so many buses and people with them.

It was just the two bands, Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Bob Dylan. It was expected to be one of the biggest shows that we had, with the most old people. But it turned out that it wasn’t.

If you’ve never been to Dubuque, especially if you’ve never been to Dubuque in the ‘90s, it was always ten years behind everybody else. So someone like Bob Dylan coming in here was a pretty big deal, because it was kind of a dead town.

It started with Kenny Wayne Shepherd. People were getting up on stage with him too, though it wasn’t as crazy. It was just the occasional thing. I think in the video somewhere, you can hear Bob Dylan say something like, “This is what happens when you have Kenny Wayne Shepherd open.” It happened at one of their shows before that too. I guess it was just a phenomenon.

Stage-diving was a tradition at Five Flags. It all started when they started having heavier bands. Kids would just wind up on stage and dive off. It happened during Firehouse and Tesla and Gin Blossoms. It was just a thing with a bunch of bored Dubuque kids with nothing better to do. I did it myself when I was really young. Pantera and Skid Row came through, and I got on stage and dived off.

When I started working there, that’s the one thing we were always worried about. We were expected to be the ones to have all of the security in place. Bob had a few people with him, like his stage crew, but those were techs. I remember getting yelled at by my boss’s boss. He said, “Why don’t you guys have enough people on hand?” What we did was we hired all temp workers for extra help, and we sent them home when it was done. Then, when it would come time for teardown, they would come back in at 3 in the morning or whatever. They weren’t allowed to be there at the actual show.

We sat there dumbfounded for a little bit [when it started]. We didn’t expect all these kids to want to jump up on stage or anything crazy like that. It was Bob that let it happen. There may have been a person or two [on his team] that said it was okay. There were plenty of opportunities for people to tell us to step it up or for them to get the security in order. Nobody seemed to be getting hurt. To me, it was just obnoxious.

In ‘95, ‘96, people were all about, “Let’s wear our flannel, and we’re going to be grunge kids.” And Bob Dylan, for some reason, seemed to fit in for a short period with that. Bob Dylan and Neil Young. So it kind of made sense to the kids.

I was towards the right of the stage where people were coming off. Most people were coming up from the middle, and they were exiting off the right. We were just sending them out the side door. That was my job, just to sit there and direct people off. I remember people were throwing their tapes at me. “I brought this tape. Make sure Bob gets it. Leave it on his guitar case.” I can’t give this to him!

As soon as he got off stage, Bob’s security stepped it up a little bit. They started pulling people away. There put up this barrier really fast to keep people from coming out and touching him. They were quick to get out of there.

I’ve watched that video a bunch. I know most of those people that are jumping on the stage. All my hippie friends. Me, I was just working.

Heather Schmidt: “We gotta stop this”

I was not a big fan of growing up in Dubuque. I felt very non-conforming, and people didn’t like anybody that was non-conforming.

So when that started happening, I was like, “This is Dubuque. What did I expect?” I was very upset. It was kids—but I was a kid too. I graduated in ‘93 from high school. It just didn’t sit with me. The people that were there doing that shit were probably just there for the party, you know?

My friend thought the same thing. She looked at me and she was like, “What are we gonna do?” I said, “We gotta stop this.”

So she was trying to stop people from going up on the stage, pulling them back into the crowd when they tried to climb up. And when the lights went down, I had someone hoist me on stage. I went up to Bob Dylan and said, “We need to do something.” He said, “I can’t do anything about it.”

Then the guitar player sat me on stage. I deterred people from trying to get up. That was my whole job the rest of the show. I sat on stage and wouldn’t let them come up. I pushed them down with my hand.

There’s a very brief glimpse of Heather sitting there on the lower left when the camera zooms out:

I thought, “This isn’t what you do in a Bob Dylan show.” This is not a mosh pit scene. This is not stage diving. And I used to love doing that stuff. I did that all the time at other shows. But not at a Bob Dylan show. I saw him years later with Elvis Costello at Carver Hawkeye Arena in Iowa City, and it was absolutely nothing like that. I don’t think it’s a big deal to dance and stuff, but crowd surfing seems crazy.

The funny thing is that I was mad about it, but, I found out later, he encourages it. I remember hearing about it at the next show he did, and that he was fine with it and didn’t care. So I was like, “Well, why do I care so much if he doesn’t?”

I think I had some biases against Dubuque so I was just pissed off the whole time. I kept on thinking, “This would never happen anywhere else.” And then, of course, it did. So I got less mad at Dubuque.

Jessie Eberhart: “He was egging us on”

I’d spent a month out in San Francisco and gotten back in that very same day. I get back into town and there’s Kenny Wayne Shepherd opening up for Bob Dylan. He’s just such an amazing guitarist, and I was really stoked to go.

I was only 15. It was my freshman year in high school. I had two hippies for parents. I didn’t know what to expect, but I thought it was going to be a little more classic Americana kind of stuff.

Then he pulled a Newport on everybody and came out in a cowboy suit, with the hat and electric guitar and everything, and just really went for it. Dylan himself was encouraging people to just really get into it and stage-dive. He was egging us on: “Go for it.”

I think somebody spontaneously did it, and then he was just like, “Heck yeah, keep going.” And so we did. That’s the first time I ever stage-dove and it’s the last time I ever stage-dove. I was up there, but I was so nervous doing it that it went by very quickly.

I think I must have gone up twice and just jumped off the stage. I remember, you got up there and you jumped right away. Otherwise you’d lose your nerve to do it. The crowd pretty much just caught me and put me down. I didn’t know there was a video, to be honest. I had a red sweater on, then I had a brown floppy hat on and some cords. The lead singer for Kenny Wayne Shepherd’s band and I had pretty much the exact same hat on that night.

I got kicked in the head, actually. I was talking to this couple next to me and they’re like, “Are you okay?” I’m just looking the them like, “Yeah, I’m fine…” I had no clue. They said that I had gotten bopped in the head by one of the crowd surfers and blacked out for a hot second.

One of the roadies was like, “Let’s get you checked out.” So I got to go out to the bus and get ice cubes. Now I’m off on Bob Dylan’s concert bus! I was excited. Then we just went right back in and kept going.

I remember being really angsty about being in the newspaper. I didn’t realize how you just take a snippet of the conversation and put it into the paper. I was just taking a break from being in the crowd, and this guy rolled up on me and was asking me questions.

This could have been my excitement, but I didn’t sense a sour attitude amongst the whole crowd. I think the vast majority of everybody that was there was like, “Well shit, I didn’t expect that to happen.” They were pleasantly surprised.

You weren’t Googling for information back then, so there was this raw ignorance, getting to go to a live event like that. People were just there to be there. No one had a bunch of cell phones out taking pictures. That’s almost hard to describe now. Instead of documenting yourself trying to have an experience, you actually have the experience.

It was such a fantastic show. It’s like how you know where you were when “Smells Like Teen Spirit” first aired in MTV. It’s one of those. I’ve been to a few shows and that’s probably the closest I can get to describing how the energy was. It was just one of those nights you remember.

Thanks to all six for sharing their stories! Bonus thanks to Cory Ritterbusch, who wrote about the event for Isis a few years ago and was extremely helpful with research.

1996-11-12, Five Flags Center, Dubuque, IA

PS. Were you there? Do you know someone who was? Love to hear more stories/memories in the comments!

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