I'm listening to Annie Lennox, I gotta turn up the sound

2000-09-17, Scottish Exhibition & Conference Centre, Glasgow, Scotland

Photo by John Hume

During this tour, Dylan rotated between four opening numbers. All were covers, all were acoustic, all came from the bluegrass tradition, all featured hearty backing vocals from Larry Campbell and Charlie Sexton. Three of the four were bluegrass-gospel tunes the Stanley Brothers sang. The fourth was a murder ballad the Stanley Brothers didn’t sing, but, sonically, it fits right in with the rest.

Today, on our fourth show, Dylan plays the fourth and final of those opening numbers: “Somebody Touched Me.” It follows “Duncan and Brady” (Night 1), “I Am the Man Thomas” (Night 2), and “Hallelujah I’m Ready to Go” (Night 3). He’d continue rotating through all four all tour.

That wouldn’t be the only bluegrass-cover representation at most shows either. In the sixth slot, the final of the opening acoustic set, he would draw from the songbook of the country-bluegrass duo Johnnie and Jack. He played either "Searching for a Soldier's Grave” (recently revived on the Outlaw Tour) or “This World Can’t Stand Long.” He’d soon begin doing a third Johnnie and Jack song too, “Humming Bird.” I guess both The Stanley Brothers and the lesser-known Johnnie and Jack were getting a lot of play on the tour bus.

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The setlist songs switched a lot this tour as we’ll see (one reason it’s fun to do a deep-dive series like this), but the setlist structure remained pretty standard. Here’s how the shows generally went:

• Six-song acoustic set

  • Bluegrass-gospel cover (Stanley Brothers songs mostly)

  • Three '60s chestnuts

  • “Tangled Up in Blue”

  • Another bluegrass cover (Johnnie and Jack song)

• Six-song electric set

  • “Country Pie” *

  • Four (occasionally five) rotating songs—wide variety here

  • “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”

• First Encore

  • “Things Have Changed”/“Love Sick”

  • “Like A Rolling Stone”

  • Acoustic '60s chestnut

  • Electric song (wide variety)

  • “Blowin’ in the Wind”/“Forever Young” (acoustic)

• Second Encore

  • Electric song (often “Highway 61”)

  • “Forever Young”/“Blowin’ in the Wind” (acoustic)

* Side note: Having listened to a lot of these tapes, it strikes me as very funny that, in the most-common pairing, “Searching for a Soldier’s Grave” went straight into “Country Pie.” What a wild transition. It’s thematic whiplash.

Some nights he’d slot a bonus song into the first encore, but otherwise this framework remained pretty rigid. That isn’t to imply these shows were static. In only 18 shows, he managed to play 74 different songs. (Compare that to last year, where in 78 shows he only played 53 different songs.)

New additions in Glasgow include aforementioned bluegrass covers “Somebody Touched Me” and “This World Can’t Stand Long” (both standouts with the backing vocals), “It's All Over Now Baby Blue,” “Most Likely You Go Your Way,” “It Ain’t Me Babe,” “To Be Alone with You,” and the one I previewed yesterday: “Highlands.” The song he didn’t play the night before in the actual Highlands. He saved it for the following night, here in the Lowlands.

In one of my first-ever entries, I wrote about an earlier “Highlands” from 2000. I found it disappointing. The song is extremely musically repetitive, so if he’s not really enunciating the words—or if the tape isn’t clean enough that you can easily hear him enunciating the words—it drags. Thankfully, today’s version delivers. For once (and you know I’m the last person to usually say this), you can pretty much ignore what the band is doing. Just listen to Bob telling this story. My favorite moment is swapping Neil Young for a local Scottish hero: “I'm listening to Annie Lennox, I gotta turn up the sound.”

“Highlands” forms the meat in the three-song sandwich that is the tape’s highlight: “Most Likely, “Highlands,” and “Drifter’s Escape,” played in the loud electric arrangement that borrows from Hendrix’ “Crossroads” with Bob snarling every lyric. My favorite (non-“Highlands”) moment: Listen to the guitar effect after “a bolt of lightning” in the final verse of “Drifter’s Escape”:

It then goes into something he didn’t do that much on this tour: A harmonica solo! As I’ve mentioned before, I love a harmonica solo on a loud/fast song. You don’t get those as often.

This show was pioneering in a bleaker way: “Like a Rolling Stone” features some of the worst upsinging I’ve ever heard. Listen to a sample below if you dare. This was a few years before it would become a regular thing. A sign of dark times to come…

2000-09-17, Scottish Exhibition & Conference Centre, Glasgow, Scotland

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Reader Gerald Brown emails in his memories of the show:

I was at the Glasgow show and remember it very clearly. The show was in the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre (SECC) no longer used for concerts. It is basically a huge metal shed intended, as the name suggests, for exhibitions, and the sound was notoriously terrible. However, somehow Dylan’s people got a good clean sound that night.

I’ve seen Dylan lots of times in Glasgow; he seems to play there disproportionately often. Maybe he likes the audience - check out the famous Barrowland tape, especially Like A Rolling Stone.

The 2000 concert was all-standing which I think added to the energy, and the band seemed to feed off that energy. The acoustic songs were every bit as dynamic as the electric ones, with Charlie, Larry and Bob strumming madly at times like a weird amalgamation of the Allman Brothers and Status Quo.

Two highlights from my memory:

It’s Alright Ma with a crushing acoustic guitar unison chorded riff

Highlands which rightly or wrongly we thought had been chosen for us.

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PS. Here are the first three entries in the Europe 2000 series if you missed them (the full series will be updated here):