Last Night in Waukegan (by Rob Mitchum)

2026-03-30, Genesee Theatre, Waukegan, IL

Marquee photo via @tombrandt71

Last night, the final(?) leg of the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour came to the Chicago suburb of Waukegan, a town Bob Dylan has never played before.

On the scene to report in was Rob Mitchum. Rob’s a longtime music writer. His archive of Pitchfork reviews from back in the day is vast, covering everything from Tom Waits’ Orphans to Weezer’s Raditude—hope he got hazard pay for that one. He currently co-hosts the recently-resurrected Grateful Dead podcast 36 From the Vault with Steven Hyden and writes the newsletter Phish Essays, about every Phish show 25 years later. In his day job, he’s the editor-in-chief of Kellogg Insight.

Rob took his son to his first Dylan show last night. The dad who popularized the term dad-rock tells us how it went:

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I have tried my damnedest not to be The Onion’s Remain in Light dad. Despite an “illustrious” “career” talking about bands on the internet, I’ve avoided pushing my tastes on my kids, knowing that any aggressive lobbying would likely only lead to backlash. If they ask questions about what’s on the speakers, I’m all too happy to subtly fan the flames. But mostly I just trust the power of osmosis, hoping that the constant background noise of Dad’s odd music will someday strike a nerve.

Dylan has been a great test case for this theory; my oldest, now 14, has been half-aware of him his whole life. A toddler-age mispronunciation forever renamed the artist “Bob Billins” in our household, and I fondly remember him asking me to turn the Rolling Thunder documentary off because Bob’s performance of “Isis” was “fo fcary.” It’s a treasured Mitchum family tradition when I sneak the Christmas album into the holiday playlist. But all that didn’t really cultivate an appreciation of Dylan beyond being a Weird Guy…accurate, but incomplete.

For that breakthrough, I got an assist from Hollywood. My older son turned out to be the exact A Complete Unknown audience that the Dylan fan community imagined, condescendingly or not — a teenager drawn in by Timothée Chalamet’s star power. I took him to see it and used him as a shield against my own biopic cynicism, grinding my teeth during “Judas”-at-Newport but noticing that the rebellious thrill of the moment, however ahistorical, still resonated with him. Afterwards, my son’s main two takeaways were pretty astute: that Dylan was a jerk to women (true), and that he did not like when people expected him to do something.

All that said, seeing Timmy Dylan didn’t lead to my son binging the discography and appreciating the finer points of Infidels and Tempest. So I was pleasantly surprised and unpleasantly guilty when he expressed disappointment that I was seeing Dylan this spring without him. Just two summers ago, he declined my offer to take him to the Outlaw Tour when my buddy backed out sick at the last minute. Now, he was eager to go to the outskirts of Chicagoland to see a show that he knew (because I constantly warned him) was going to be nothing like Dylan in the movies.

After one near-scamming and a whole lot of Ticketmaster refreshing, I found him a balcony ticket near face and we were on our way to Waukegan. Because I grew up in the southwest suburbs of Chicago, the northern suburbs have always been an indistinct blur of wealth and snobbery to me. But Waukegan turned out to not be that at all, more similar instead to Davenport, Iowa, where I last saw Dylan about one year earlier. Both are hollowed-out water-adjacent downtowns with some green shoots of cultural revival and a gorgeous century-old movie palace, miraculously preserved amidst the boarded-up storefronts and empty high-rises.