Last Night in Coventry (by Adam Selzer)
Plus Swansea two days before
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The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour: 2025 Edition is nearing its end. But as of yesterday afternoon, Dylan has seemingly announced the tour will continue next year:
That announcement surely gave an extra jolt of excitement to last night’s show in Coventry, England. Another jolt of excitement: A pedal steel spotted before the show on stage! It turned out to actually be a lap steel (no pedals) set up on a stand, and was played not by a new person, but by guitarist Bob Britt on a number of songs. Can’t wait to hear the tape; it’s the first time someone’s been playing steel since Donnie Herron left early in 2024.
Adam Selzer, who last reported in from the wild Outlaw 2025 opening night, was on the ground in Coventry last night. He sends in this scene report and travelogue from the start of his run of UK dates, starting in Swansea the previous show two nights before. Here’s Adam:
One of the great pleasures of following Dylan is ending up in towns you’d never think to visit. I hadn’t been to Wales before at all, and if I had, I wouldn’t have thought to go to Swansea, a charming seaside town with excellent ice cream and one of the castle ruins that seem to come standard in Welsh towns. Of course, all towns in the UK feel charming to me; they’re nearly all walkable, with populations clustered around a city centre. It’s a contrast to the spread-out nature of American small towns, where people drive for every single trip and seem to want to be as far from the neighbors as possible.
Before the Swansea show, I took my seat with Graham G, said hi to the other regulars such as Frederick and Ian (how cool to land in a new country and already have friends!), and watched Bob appear. He looked so different from the last time I saw him, now unhooded and looking like a badass in black blazer over a Welsh dragon t-shirt.
In the spring, there were a lot of “sounded like they were tuning but they weren’t” jams for intros, like primordial ooze out of which the songs emerged. They’ve expanded and gotten a bit more coherent now; “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” began with another jam that became focused around one riff which became the basis for the song. I was reminded of the clip of the Beatles writing “Get Back,” with Bob adding some not-bad guitar. He reached for the guitar a lot in Swansea.
I was a bit too jet lagged to properly judge the show, but Bob seemed to be experimenting a lot, looking for new melodies or hooks for the songs and not quite landing on one. These sorts of shows aren’t as compelling as nights where it all comes together, but can actually be more interesting, since it’s a fascinating chance to simply watch him at work.
And to be sure, there were times when it all came together, particularly in the second half of the show. “Black Rider” was back to feeling like The Doors, as it sounded to me a couple of years ago. It was one of the best “To Be Alone With You” performances I’ve seen in a while, possibly the strongest “Made Up My Mind” I’ve seen since the very first one, and the new “Baby Blue” arrangement took my breath away. “Crossing the Rubicon” was especially well sung. The newly upbeat “Mother of Muses” with its martial drum beat worked but sounded a bit … patriotic… for my taste, but I can’t say it didn’t work.
Doug seemed to be playing a bit of “I’ll Fly Away” on the electric guitar during “Every Grain of Sand,” a particularly inspired bit of interpolation.
However, having avoided listening to too many recent tapes, I wasn’t sure how much of this was really “new” yet. And one of the great benefits of following shows is being able to spot the little variations. Was that bit of “I’ll Fly Away” an every night thing, or what?
Jet lag aside, though, I was able to get myself to Queens Hotel with Graham, Graham, Nightlymoth, Maddy, Alison, Marielle, and Lili for a couple of Theakston’s Old Peculiars, which hit enough for me to read out a dirty unrecorded song I found in the Dylan Archives. I think a lot of interesting stories probably begin with “After a couple of Old Peculiars.” It became a night that ended up with a few of us absolutely sloppy in Graham’s (parked) car, listening to ten seconds of a watch recording of “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” over and over trying to make out a new line replacing the “like my head needs a noose” line (sounds like “I’ll play the fool, got no excuse”).
I spent a travel day getting to Coventry, which turned out to be the home of Two Tone music (a subgenre of ska). It was also the home of Lady Godiva, who, according to legend rode a horse nude through these very streets to protest taxes. This seems like a pretty odd way to bring about economic reform, but hey, my girlfriend and I just dressed in inflatable “riding a chicken” and “riding a snail” costumes at a protest. If I could get anything done with a nude horseback ride I’d probably give it a go, too. But around here I’m on a break from such protest duties, just doing my part to raise a little hell by wearing my “This Ass Ain’t Street-Legal” shirt to an EDLIS luncheon (thanks to Craig for organising that!)
Overall, Coventry seemed like a British version of the minor league ballpark towns of the spring tour. Unlike every other UK town (even Wolverhampton), I didn’t walk around feeling like I would like to live there (except for the chance to see some nude horseback riders once every few centuries). I did find an excellent record store, though.
The arena looked like a place where you’d normally sell tractors or something, but they’d rigged up some curtains. Looking around, I wouldn’t have held out for miracles, sound-wise, but when the show began things were crystal clear.
I noticed in spring that some songs in the set that weren’t political had now become political, with even the notably not political “Watching the River Flow” mentioning “people disappearing everywhere you look” (so much worse now than it was in spring) and the cheers for Dylan singing “Gulf of Mexico” instead of “Gulf of America” (a bit of absurdity of which UK concertgoers seem blissfully aware.) These past few months of the blitz, I’ve had “Desolation Row” on my mind. It’s a marvel how many songs Dylan has found inside that song; the same summer he recorded it as an apocalyptic travelogue, he performed it as a comedy routine. In late summer this year, it was played like a Chuck Berry song, the sound of a narrator motorvating through the parade of grotesques. And, well, now I live in a city where, despite our carnivals and feasts, the riot squads are restless and bringing people to the factory. We all play on our penny whistles. Every day a new line of seem a to ring true, and in its surrealist way it’s a perfect portrait of my city and neighborhood today. In Coventry, I looked forward to hearing it without the jet lag, eager for the emotional release it could bring.
Maybe it’s just that I was more energized and had some context, but the show in Coventry seemed like a triumph compared to Swansea. Though the guitar jams meandered some, Bob’s singing was deliberate and impassioned from the start. He wasn’t being quite as experimental, but such experiments as there were seemed to land. And around “Masterpiece,” the show clicked into another level, with Dylan really telling the story of the song, getting inventive with his delivery while staying inside the rhythm and building to a terrific harp solo.
“Black Rider” seemed a bit more stripped-down and less like the Doors than before, and it was at this point I noticed Bob Britt was playing a lap steel guitar, mounted on a stand in front of him, playing mostly simple parts to add a bit of atmosphere, like a slightly louder version of the organ on the last couple Outlaw shows. He went back and forth between guitar and steel guitar on “My Own Version of You” and some others, but it wasn’t loud in the mix from my side to be sure. Standing behind it and not taking off his guitar, sometimes I couldn’t see for sure which he was playing!
“My Own Version of You” deserves particular notice; so often it seems to tell a story. Sometimes it’s a monologue from the weird guy next to you at the bar, the next time it’s like a Shakespearean actor doing a soliloquy. Tonight it seemed to conjure the image of an inventor in his lab stalking around his lab, muttering to himself and shouting “Fools! They think I’m mad! I’ll show them all!” as he works on his creation. “Can you look at me with your sightless eyes” sounded like the inventor had spun around to threaten the cat, and the lines toward the end sounded like he was lovingly addressing the monster he was about to animate.
It made me think of all the lines I saw in the Archives about reanimating the dead (a theme that seems particularly common in unreleased songs). One stray couplet in an early ’80s notebook begins with “there’s got to be a price” and rhymes it with “You wanna raise the dead just to kill him again? Well that’s possible but not nice.” (Damn, I love that) And, of course, there’s the “guy who lived a long time ago” in “Red River Shore.” “My Own Version of You” is really a song he built towards for years. How wonderful is it that we’ve gotten a career’s worth of wildly different versions in four years?
“To Be Alone With You” followed with some new lyrics, after accidentally opening with the words to “Watching the River Flow,” a mistake he quickly corrected (“What’s the matter with me? I don’t have much to say….under the moon, under the starlight sky”), but with a whole new bridge that wasn’t there in Swansea:
Night time is the right time
To be full of holy smoke
But it’s not new(?) any time of day
Was that some kind of joke?
That last bit, of course, is a line in a later song, too, meaning that there were, intentionally or not, lines from two other songs in the set interpolated into the tune.
“Rubicon,” a bit more uptempo than before, featured some killer delivery. As he sang it, though, I saw that a lot of people were standing off to the side, in the area between the doors and the aisles, creating a makeshift general admission session, and I got up to join the party—the view of Bob was a bit better, and there are only so many chances to see a Rough and Rowdy Ways show in a standing crowd.
“Desolation Row” in its ’50s rock arrangement might not have been the version that resonated with me in Chicago this year, but it was a blast and I danced with wild abandon. It was well-sung, with a staccato delivery that made me think he should bring back “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and a piano solo that had the new section cheering. I still think this arrangement is a ’50s rock style, but the guy next to me thought it sounded like “Dreams” by The Cranberries. We all hear what we hear!
“Key West” was great but tried the patience of some; he got them back with a gorgeous take on “Baby Blue,” with its new melody like a rubber ball bouncing back and forth then dribbling to a stop. The chorus became singalong in the makeshift GA section, and the harp solo was to die for.
In the last few songs I really felt the benefit of seeing multiple shows in a row. “I’ve Made Up My Mind” was as good as the other night or better, and “Mother of Muses” lost the martial drum beat. The line in “Jimmy Reed” that had been “no excuse” in Swansea was “but it’s no use” tonight (I understand it’s been different every night). By this time the makeshift GA section was a full-on dance party; I ran into Carla and we did the swim and the twist. Since Coventry was the home of Two Tone music I even skanked the pickle, which might be the wrong era of ska, but was certainly something you don’t get to do at most Dylan shows.
“Every Grain of Sand” was transcendent, and didn’t have the “I’ll Fly Away” guitar bit, just a fairly similar line from Doug, and a great benedictory harp solo to send us home.
What a show! New instrument, new lines. Bob was locked in throughout. Maddy, Nightlymoth, Carla and I went through hell on wheels to get an Uber to Wetherspoons, a UK pub chain that looks fancy but really isn’t, then took pics in the most photogenic alley I ever saw. Another new adventure in a strange town! Coventry wasn’t my favorite town to discover, but it was great to see Bob perform in a place he’d never played before, and what’s not to love about a town whose claims to fame are The Specials and The Naked Horse Tax Lady? This, too, is Desolation Row. On to Leeds!
Adam is a Chicago historian, author, and tour guide; find more info at adamchicago.com.