Last Night in Rockford (by Michael Glover Smith)

2026-03-28, Coronado, Rockford, IL

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Photo by Jacob Billany

The first few shows of the spring tour sounded pretty up-and-down. Opening night in Omaha went pretty well—some big setlist surprises always help!—then the second night in Sioux Falls was reportedly quite chaotic due to inaudible vocals and an increasingly hostile audience.

Today we check in again a week or so down the line, at last night’s show in the small town of Rockford, Illinois. Things have smoothed out (mostly) with the microphone chaos, and there have been some further setlist tweaks: “Key West” is out, replaced by “Goodbye Jimmy Reed.” Ditto “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” to open the show, replaced by “To Be Alone with You.” Most dramatic of all, perhaps, “Don’t Think Twice” has been replaced with “Forgetful Heart.”

Our man on the scene is Michael Glover Smith. Smith’s been making waves in Dylan-world this month due to his excellent new book Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think. Read his thoughts on Rockford last night below, then go pick up his book if you haven’t already. I’ll repeat what I wrote in my blurb: “I’ll give it the highest praise possible: It made me want to watch Renaldo and Clara again.”

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Last Night in Rockford
By Michael Glover Smith

He plays the entire show seated behind the piano, making it difficult to even see him. He rearranges the melodies of his songs so that they’re no longer recognizable from the studio versions that we all know and love. He doesn’t engage the crowd with small talk; he simply comes out, plays the songs, then leaves.

Man, Cameron Winter’s concert at Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel last December sure was phenomenal! That was probably the best show I’ve seen by anyone other than Bob Dylan.

As for Dylan, we’re fortunate that he’s still on the road, heading for another joint, playing phenomenal gigs, too. Shortly after the current (and presumably final) leg of the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour 2021 – 2024, erm, 2026 ends, he will be 85 years old. His career as a professional musician now spans a mind-boggling 66 years, 40 studio albums, and 4,000+ live concerts. I’ve been fortunate to see 101 of those shows—the first being in Charlotte, North Carolina, way back in 1989 when I was just a kid, and the last being last night in Rockford, Illinois. After all this time, what does anyone, including me, still have to say about Bob Dylan? Well, a lot, actually.

Dylan’s insistence on having the audience meet him on his terms, making us focus on what he’s doing in the here and now, a philosophy that puts him in a league of his own among musicians of his generation, means that seeing the man live is always a new experience. Some claim that Dylan’s set lists have become “static” in the RARW era. Perhaps they have in comparison to earlier incarnations of the Never Ending Tour. But he’s still played, by my count, an impressive 66 different songs since the RARW tour kicked off in late 2021 (and that’s not including a lot of the surprising song choices he made at Farm Aid '24 or Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Tour over the past two summers).

The arrangements are, of course, what’s really a-changin’. I’ve seen “Key West” 18 times. I’ve seen it done at a slow tempo, a medium tempo, and a fast tempo (shout out to Washington D.C. ‘21!). I’ve seen it done electrically, with Bob Britt on a Flying V guitar, and acoustically. I’ve seen it in full-band versions, augmented by Donnie Herron’s pedal steel or accordion, and I’ve seen an arrangement so skeletal that it might as well have been Dylan playing it all by himself. Tracking the evolution of a song’s arrangement like this is a big part of the fun of seeing Dylan across multiple shows.

Having said all that, the big news about the first few shows of Dylan’s spring '26 tour is that he has shaken up the setlist. It was the first RARW show I’ve seen with no “Key West” at all. The number of RARW songs has been scaled back from nine to six, and one can imagine him dialing that number down even further (say, from six to three) when the summer tour, whose advertising does not include any “Rough and Rowdy Ways” branding, kicks off in June. But he hasn’t replaced them with “greatest hits.” He’s doing “Man in the Long Black Coat,” “Love Sick,” and “Soon After Midnight,” songs originally recorded between 1989 and 2012, plus covers of Bo Diddley and Eddie Cochran, instead. How did the Rockford crowd respond?