Lenny Kaye's Opening Act Tour Diary

1998-09-12, Christchurch Event Centre, Christchurch, New Zealand:

In 1998, Patti Smith and Her Band opened for Bob Dylan and His Band. This is not their famous tour together with the “Dark Eyes” duets that I explored in depth here. That was December 1995. Two-and-a-half years later, they did it again, down in Australia. Patti Smith didn’t sit in with Dylan this time, which is the big reason it’s not known as well (also: Australia).

Smith’s longtime collaborator Lenny Kaye wrote a tour diary at the time. He published it in Crawdaddy, the original rock magazine that founder Paul Williams (the same one who wrote the brilliant Performing Artist Dylan books) had bought back after decades away and resumed publishing as a stapled newsletter in the ‘90s. I recently got my hands on a stack of them and found, amongst a bunch of other cool Dylan content that exists nowhere else, Kaye’s piece, subtitled “diary notes of an opening act guitar player summer 1998.”

I got a kick out of reading it and, given it doesn’t seem to be available anywhere else, figured I’d share it here, augmented with some of the specific song performances Kaye writes about (bolded). There’s not a ton of behind-the-scenes scuttlebut in this—if Lenny even spoke to Bob once, he doesn’t let on. Rather it’s him wearing his music-critic hat (he was one back before the Patti Smith Group took off, writing for some of the earliest issues of Rolling Stone, Creem, Jazz & Pop, and, of course, Crawdaddy) sharing his take on Bob’s sets, standing right there on the side of the stage.