Last Night in Troutdale (by Dave Depper)

2026-06-04, McMenamins Edgefield, Troutdale, OR

Photo via @marchibeth

Last night, Bob Dylan kicked off what is officially called—according to a t-shirt on sale in the merch booth at least—the Long Hot Summer Tour. He played alongside openers Lucinda Williams and John Doe (who I interviewed last year) in an outdoor venue in Troutdale, Oregon, near Portland. The setlist featured a number of songs returning from last summer’s setlist as well as, for the first time, a few Rough and Rowdy Ways songs played at a non-“Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour” show.

The big news though was the debut of an extremely deep Basement Tapes cut: “Baby Won’t You Be My Baby.” I crunched the numbers and this is the longest gap ever between Dylan recording a song and playing it live. 59 years! That easily tops the previous record-holder, “Outlaw Blues” at 42 years (I did a whole list if you wanna see more).

Dave Depper was on hand to report in for us. Depper is a member of the iconic indie-rock band Death Cab for Cutie, who have a new album out today, I Built You a Tower. (I also highly recommend his solo album covering the entirety of Air’s landmark electronic record Moon Safari.) Since he had a million other things on his album release day to-do list, Depper called me on the phone a couple hours ago, and I pulled his remarks together into this piece.

(This will be the first of many show reviews from this summer’s tour, including a few by me when the tour heads east. Most go out only to paid subscribers. Sign up here if you want to get them all.)

---

I’ve seen Dylan twice before. I saw the Time Out of Mind tour in ’98 when I was 17 in Eugene. The setlist that night, I had no idea how lucky I was. Then I saw the Love & Theft tour in Bend. It was the first tour where he started playing keyboards a lot. I have not seen him since then. Part of the blessing and curse of being a touring musician myself is that pretty much any time that all these acts are on the road and coming to my town, I’m not home to see them. Because I would have seen Dylan like 15 times otherwise.

I have been checking in with those setlists, and I’ve dipped in here and there to listen to some bootleg recordings, so I had a sense of what I was in for. But like everybody, I didn’t know what he would do in the context of this no longer being the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour. That was really my only regret about last night. I did not get to catch a Rough and Rowdy show. I adore that record, and I adore the live versions of the songs I’ve heard from that, and we only got two Rough and Rowdy Ways songs last night. I was a bit sad about that.

The all-acoustic band really flatters what he’s trying to do right now. You can hear every single note everyone’s playing, and it really centers his voice and his keyboard playing in a powerful way. His keys led everything. I remembered the last time I’d seen him feeling like he was just kind of diddling around on the keys, coming in and out, and some of it was more amateurish. But he was completely leading the way on every song last night. And his voice was just pristine. It was like the Shadows in the Night croon, just really loud and cutting through the mix. My last experience with him, he wasn’t in quite as in command of his voice as he is now. He’s done so much work around his vocal instrument, and his piano playing has come so far since then, that I was just stunned.