Last Night in Abilene (by Erin C. Callahan)

2026-05-01, Abilene Auditorium, Abilene, TX

Photo by Graham Gaskell

Last night, Bob Dylan finally ended the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour. Or did he? That’s the question fans have been debating in group chats and message boards for weeks now.

The case in favor: For the first time since it began, Dylan is heading out on his own headlining tour this summer with no Rough and Rowdy Ways branding—they even removed the skeleton logo from the website tour page (which they never did during the two Outlaw tours). The case against: We’ve been fooled before (ahem), and Dylan didn’t do anything last night to indicate it was anything other than one more show. No, he didn’t finally play “Murder Most Foul.”

Reporting in from that maybe/maybe-not final show last night in Abilene, Texas—his first show there, after a botched attempt 50 years earlier—is Erin C. Callahan. Callahan is the host of the excellent Dylan podcast Infinity Goes Up on Trial, where once a month she interviews a Dylan expert or fan (here’s my ep about Rolling Thunder). She’s the co-editor of The Politics and Power of Bob Dylan’s Live Performances: Play a Song for Me and a forthcoming book about Dylan in the ’80s, where I wrote a chapter about the Tom Petty tours.

Here’s Erin on Dylan in Abilene last night (bonus: we’ve already got a tape too):

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Last week, Bob Dylan went to sleep in Shreveport and, after a brief stop in Tyler, woke up in Abilene for the last show on this leg of the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour. Abilene seems like a strange place for Dylan to end the tour. This is also the first time he’s played Abilene. The question stands, why single out Abilene as the last stop on the tour, whether it’s the end of the Spring 2026 leg or of the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour in general?