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.

I deposited my teen in his balcony seat and headed down to my own on the floor. Before you accuse me of parental selfishness, understand that my Row G seat was just about as far to the left side as you can get, and when word of the new stage setup trickled out earlier this month, the Ralph Wiggum “I’m in trouble” meme flashed in my head. Sure enough, with Bob’s piano positioned as far back on the stage as possible — practically part of Anton Fig’s drum kit — the “obstructed view” warning on my ticket was very much in play. If my son wanted to actually see Dylan when he saw Dylan, the balcony was the better bet.

Fortunately, when the band took their places with zero fanfare at 8:03, I found that I could just barely see the behoodied Bob, framed by the stage-right speaker tower and the gaps in the tripod of the adjacent floodlight. By recent standards, that’s pretty fair visibility. But it also meant I could only see the power trio of two Bobs and an Anton; if Doug or Tony did anything interesting last night, you’ll have to find out from another reviewer.

And hey, the sound was great, though the mix may have been skewed at my sharp angle. After a couple of years where it was the dominant instrument, I could barely clock Dylan’s keyboard unless he was soloing. Instead, it was the dual acoustic guitars that took precedence, as crisp and polished as advertised by Ray’s earlier correspondents.

Maybe, at times, too polished? The unplugged approach is a dramatic shift for sure, and this was easily the biggest sonic outlier of the four Rough and Rowdy Ways tour stops I’ve seen. But it also sacrifices some of the roughness and rowdiness. I felt it the most on the opening oldies trio. Like any Dylan snob, I was over the moon to hear “Man in the Long Black Coat,” but couldn’t shake the intrusive thought that it would’ve worked much better during the more gothic early phases of the tour. And while I adored the Van-swiping new arrangement of “Watchtower” on last summer’s tapes, in all-acoustic form it bordered on “highly competent wine bar cover band.”

But when it worked, it worked. This year’s “I Contain Multitudes” is spectacular, a completely refreshed song with a lilting, recurring guitar melody. “False Prophet” sounded emaciated, but its cousin “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” gets a nice punch-up; I always thought it was a misplaced afterthought near the end of the standard R&RW set, but it works brilliantly in the middle, with some space for the band to jam. “Crossing the Rubicon” gets the strangest rework, with a tightly wound, fittingly martial rhythm that explodes on the blues breaks, but it’s a welcome detour in a mostly laid-back set. And the “Istanbul” arrangement of “Masterpiece” has never sounded better than with the dueling acoustics.

“Crossing the Rubicon”:

Of course, any danger of the show drifting into easy-listening is sabotaged by the eccentric frontman. The Waukegan stop continued Bob’s hilarious war on microphones, though thankfully not in a show-killing way. For a couple songs, I almost convinced myself that the constant adjustments are an intentional, artistic decision; he started moving the lower mic away during “Black Rider,” and it fit the mood, like the song’s narrator was pathetically singing from the bottom of a ditch the titular character knocked him into.

But a few songs later, Bob had turned the mic so far away from his mouth that I swear it was fully facing the audience instead of him. The upper mic ended up so far away by the end of the set, it was almost like a field recording. Yet you could still always hear him — and not just on the floor, my son confirmed — and there wasn’t significant bleed from the drums despite Bob practically sitting in Anton’s lap. Give the sound guy a big bonus and a nice relaxing beach vacation when this leg is finished.

It’s foolish as ever to speculate on Bob quirks. But after years of it being customary to observe that “his voice has never sounded better,” I did detect some extra strain and rasp this time around. Nothing too distracting, but enough to make me wonder if the constant fiddling isn’t an attempt to hide sonically in the same way he’s tried to obscure himself visually these last couple years. Or maybe it’s all a James Brown-style fake-out, adjusting the mics to make himself sound more feeble before climaxing with another jaw-dropping “Every Grain of Sand,” punctuated by some harp-blowing that’s as powerful as ever.

“Every Grain of Sand”:

The harmonica solo was the first thing my son mentioned when we met back up in the lobby; he loved seeing the ripple of excitement across the audience when Bob merely picked up the instrument. It’s also the part of the night where you least have to squint your eyes and ears to realize that’s Bob Dylan up there, the guy from the movie, one of the great cultural figures of the last century. My minimum hope was that my son would appreciate just being in that presence and being able to say for the rest of his life that he was in the same room as him, like seeing The Pope, or Michael Jordan.

We achieved that goal, and then some; he generally liked the show. He raved about “Masterpiece” — like most kids, he knows his They Might Be Giants — but thought “Black Rider” was a snooze. He was also happy to hear “Long Black Coat” but complained that Bob sang it differently; welcome to the show, kid.

I may have even overprepared him, making him a playlist of the Omaha setlist and telling him to study up but not worry about being spoiled since nothing was going to sound the same live. He came away disappointed that Bob didn’t play “Key West,” of all things. He also scoffed at the older lady behind him complaining when the lights went up that she didn’t get to hear “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Forget being out of touch with his generation, my kid’s already snarking about the boomers.

On the drive home, his conclusion was “I’m so glad I saw him…now I don’t have to again.” He was joking (I think), but either way I didn’t mind — I don’t really expect him to become obsessed with music that’s as old to him as “Stormy Weather” was when I was 14. Instead, he spent most of the ride back scheming in a group chat about an emo band he wants to see with his friends, a more age-appropriate night out. If I had a stretch goal for the evening, it was to show him that true artists don’t always give their audiences what they want, they do what they want. Whether he applies that rubric to someday appreciate Dylan or some band I’ve never heard of, I’ll chalk it up as a parental success, far more meaningful than merely exporting my taste into his brain.

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Thanks Rob! Find him on Bluesky. Encouraging to know that Generation Alpha is growing up loving “Key West.”

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

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Catch up on all our tour dispatches so far (with more to come!)