I’ll Let You Be in My Dream If I Can Be in Your Dream

1988-06-07, Concord Pavilion, Concord, CA

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As I mentioned last week, I’m taking a bit of paternity leave for the next month and have lined up a run of killer guest writers. That kicks off today with the great James Adams, who you may know as @bob_notes on Twitter (and if you don’t, it’s worth signing up just to follow him). Adams is an expert on Dylan history and fan culture and hosts the Bob-boots radio show “Pretty Good Stuff” for Aquarium Drunkard. He’s selected a historic show that celebrates its 32nd anniversary today. Take it away, James - and happy birthday NET! - Ray

Bob Dylan’s Never Ending Tour (NET) began thirty-two years ago tonight with a show at the Concord Pavilion in Concord, California. The broad outline of what followed is familiar to many Dylan fans: 3,063 subsequent shows across five continents, performances for what must be millions of fans, and special stops along the way for David Letterman and Dharma & Greg, presidents, and the Pope.

Before all of that, there was Concord.

I’ve been to a few Dylan shows—not nearly as many as some of you freaks—and think about them every day. I also daydream about shows I didn’t see. Some of my fantasy selections are obvious to even casual fans. Newport ’65, Manchester ’66, anywhere on either leg of Rolling Thunder, or the Fox Warfield in San Francisco in November 1979. My other selections are perhaps a bit more obscure. Earls Court ’81, Krakow ’94, Newport ’02, and yes, Concord ’88.  

If you’re like me and you consider the NET to be its own distinct work of art, seeing Concord is the equivalent of watching Van Gogh load his paintbrush and make the first stroke on a new canvas. So much has flowed from the Concord headwaters that the idea of that first show now occupies a prominent place in my imagination. I’m jealous of those who got to experience the NET at the moment of its birth, who own that memory, and can share it with others.

Still, there’s nothing stopping us from daydreaming about the show and trying to piece together a picture of what it was like.

It was a Tuesday. The weather was pleasant, with a high of 63° F and a low of 50° F, with a little rain earlier in the day. Reagan, Thatcher, and Gorbachev were in power. George Michael, Rick Astley, and Debbie Gibson sat in the Billboard top ten. Crocodile Dundee II was the number one movie in America.

Bob Dylan had recently been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and was at the nadir of his career. His previous two albums, Empire Burlesque (1985) and Knocked Out Loaded (1986) were artistically and commercially disappointing. A week before Concord, Dylan released Down in the Groove. Many fans consider it his worst album. In a 1997 interview with David Gates of Newsweek, Dylan remembered: “I’d kind of reached the end of the line. Whatever I’d started out to do, it wasn’t that. I was going to pack it in.”

But it wasn’t all bad news. Dylan’s first collaboration with his half-brothers in the Traveling Wilburys, in May 1988, resulted in a critically and commercially successful album. There were also large and profitable tours in 1986 and 1987 with the Grateful Dead and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Dylan himself would credit his work with the Grateful Dead for helping to balance his creative scales. And he cites a concert with Petty and the Heartbreakers in Locarno, Switzerland, on October 5, 1987, as the point where “everything came back, and it came back in multidimension.” It’s true that Dylan’s contributions to those tours were uneven, but there were high and creative points in both years.

As 1987 ended, a new path emerged for Dylan. Rather than retirement, he would turn toward a future that would require more touring, not less. “The shows with Petty finished up in December [actually, October] and I saw that instead of being stranded somewhere at the end of the story, I was actually in the prelude to the beginning of another one,” Dylan wrote in Chronicles Volume One. “I could put my decision to retire on hold. It might be interesting to start up again, put myself in the service of the public.”

That isn’t revisionist history on Dylan’s part. In a tour diary for Dylan fanzine The Telegraph, published just months after the NET began, editor John Bauldie recalled a conversation with a source in Dylan’s camp. “Bob wants to go on playing shows all the time,” the source said. “He wants an audience to follow him around from place to place, like the Dead.”

Which brings us to Dylan’s next proper concert following the 1987 tour with Petty, at an amphitheater thirty miles northeast of San Francisco. Designed by Frank Gehry, the Concord Pavilion has a capacity of 12,500. It wasn’t anywhere near full on 7 June 1988. Low attendance figures were common at the beginning of the NET, and another reality Dylan acknowledged in Chronicles. “In reality, I was just above a club act,” he wrote. “Could hardly fill small theaters.”

The show started at eight. Welsh rock band The Alarm (original punk name The Toilets) opened the show. In his tour diary for The Telegraph, Bauldie called The Alarm “a patently phony U2 clone version of what might once have been an interesting band.” Ouch.

During changeover between acts, fans who had seen Dylan at any point in the previous fourteen years must have noticed that things had changed. Gone were the backing bands with their own names, reputation, and fans. Gone also were the backup singers and keyboards. The onstage equipment rig was simple, with Fender amplifiers and a small monitor setup for stage sound. The band was “the standard rock unit” of two guitars (Dylan and G.E. Smith), bass (Kenny Aaronson), and drums (Christopher Parker).

There was one other musician onstage with Dylan in Concord and it was a very big name indeed. Neil Young guested on guitar during all of the night’s electric songs. During the first decade of the NET, it was common for Dylan to invite friends onstage to perform with his band, and it’s interesting to note that the tradition began on the very first night of the tour. Unfortunately, besides Dylan’s introduction (“We got Neil Young here playing tonight”), there is precious little evidence of Young’s contributions on the surviving tapes. He was there, but it’s hard to hear him.

Concord established the format of Dylan’s show for the rest of the tour. It opens with six electric songs, followed by a three-song acoustic set where Dylan is accompanied only by G.E. Smith. A batch of three more electric songs ends the show, and then it’s on to the encores, which varied in number from night to night but usually consisted of two or three additional songs.

The band opened with “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” a song Dylan had never before performed live. It’s quick and driving stuff, with Dylan spitting the lyrics mostly clear and intact. There are breaks in the tune—and others that follow—that are ripe for a harmonica break, but Dylan won’t play harmonica on this first leg of the NET. It’s just another example of how the sound has changed.