My 10 Favorite Songs of the Dylan/Petty Tour
1986-02-15, Memorial Drive, Adelaide, Australia
Today will be the final day of this show-by-show series, at least for now. The next two shows, which took place across the country in Perth, have no known recording or setlists. So this Adelaide concert feels like a good time to bounce. I am intending to check back in on the tour two more times, including once for the final show of the tour, in Tokyo on March 10, to see how the tour evolved. And, as I mentioned in the first entry, I intend to visit the US Summer tour in a similar fashion. But, for now, this is it.
You can catch up on all seven entries in the Dylan/Petty True Confessions 1986 series here:
To round us out, I wanted to share some of my favorite music from the tour. Because I do love a list, I ranked my ten favorite songs of the tour below.
Fine print: I’m mostly not talking about specific performances. On this tour, one performance of a given song sounds fairly similar to the next, at least by Dylan’s standards, so it’s mostly a matter of which tape has the least hiss. Accordingly, I’ll just be embedding the best-sounding performance when I discuss it. (For many, that’s the two Sydney shows that formed Hard to Handle—particularly the amazing soundboard of February 24. I’ve written about that show before, but I threw a download link at the bottom here too. It’s the best-sounding tape of the tour by far.)
Okay, here are:
My Ten Favorite Songs of True Confessions 1986: Winter Leg
10. That Lucky Old Sun
“That Lucky Old Sun” was my favorite song of Dylan’s 2010s Sinatra period. For whatever reason, though, he only performed it three times at the time, compared to hundreds for songs like “Melancholy Mood” or “That Old Black Magic.” Neither of those songs, however, had he performed before. “That Lucky Old Sun” he’d sung in 2000, and 1995, and 1992, and 1991, and—more times than all the rest combined—1986. He’d been living with this song for decades before he actually put it on an album.
A lot of those “Lucky Old Sun” performances are soft and subtle and understated. 1986-era Bob doesn’t do “understated” though. This gets the full Heartbreakers + Queens of Rhythm treatment, with the backing vocalists taking a prominent role on the refrains. Benmont Tench, as he so often does, steers the train with beautiful piano and organ playing (it sounds like he switches from one to the other). It comes off like a gospel tent revival. The bridge—“Oh lord above, can’t you hear me crying”—is spine-tingling.
Feb 15, Adelaide:
9. Seeing the Real You at Last
As established extensively last year, I love Empire Burlesque. I consider its dated ’80s production a plus. But then again, I still listen to new Men Without Hats albums, so I have a high tolerance for this sound.
However, one can imagine an equally good—some might say better, but not me—album with the same songs performed live in a room with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. This tour, and this list, will offer a lot of evidence why that would be great too. Scrappy good-time rock-and-roll serves these songs wonderfully. “Seeing the Real You at Last” is the first of a few examples. (I’m not including “Clean Cut Kid” in this top ten because I don’t like the song as much, but that’s another example in this vein.)
Feb 24, Sydney:
8. Lonesome Town
This list is—spoiler alert—half covers. And it could have been all covers! This is one of his best covers tours ever, right up there with the early Never Ending Tour years. They’re great for opposite reasons though. In the G.E. Smith era, he was digging deep to resurrect dozens of old folk songs, seemingly a new one every night. The performances are raw and ragged, usually just an acoustic guitar or two, his increasingly weathered voice wringing out every drop of emotion.
True Confessions, on the other hand, featured the same half-dozen covers performed every night. They were rehearsed, polished arrangements honed to full-band perfection. Here’s another example. “Lonesome Town” was performed in tribute to the song’s originator Ricky Nelson, who Dylan shouted out many nights. Nelson had died tragically in a plane crash just a month before this tour began. Forty years later, Dylan’s still paying tribute to Nelson, as seen in his 2025 cover of “Garden Party.”
7. Emotionally Yours
We’ve already seen the Heartbreakers can crush an Empire Burlesque rocker. They’re just as good on an Empire Burlesque ballad! They played “I’ll Remember You” more often than “Emotionally Yours,” and either makes a fine example, but I prefer this by a hair. As I noted when it first popped up, Tench again makes it, giving a melodic bed for Dylan to croon over. If I’m counting right, the original recording had the most Heartbreakers of any single Empire Burlesque song—Tench, Mike Campbell, Howie Epstein—so it’s funny they didn’t play it live more.
6. House of The Rising Sun
Most of the songs on this list were played pretty much every night. This is the only one they only played once.
Which is surprising, because this doesn’t sound like something tossed together at the last minute, or winged entirely onstage. Once it gets going, it has an arrangement as tight as these others. Dylan sings it energetically, propelled by Tench as always and the great Stan Lynch, whose drums really shine on this one. It builds to a magnificent peak with Bob belting his head off. Thankfully, it got a few more outings on the summer tour.
5. Tie: Riff-tastic new half-songs
I wrote about these four new songs (“songs”) here. Short summary: These seem to all be Dylan originals that were never heard anywhere else. They also don’t seem to have been completed. The common ground among all four is super catchy riffs, and fairly half-assed lyrics (or barely any lyrics at all, in one case). They’re a lot of fun live though! For instance:
4. Ballad of a Thin Man
Benmont Tench told me when we spoke how much he loved playing some of the iconic parts on songs he’d grown up with: “He wasn’t deconstructing the songs at that point. We played songs a lot like the record. These were songs we’d heard our whole lives, and we liked the way it was.”
“Thin Man” is a great example. It’s not some dramatic new arrangement. It’s played fairly straight (with the exception of the added backing vocals) to stadium-rock perfection. It’s one of my favorite performances of the song, because of the sheer energy and passion everyone delivers it with.
3. Across the Borderline
Most of the tour’s many covers were golden oldies, but “Across the Borderline” was only a few years old at this point. Dylan actually got to it before co-writer Ry Cooder recorded it himself (the first released version was performed by Freddy Fender, on the soundtrack to a 1982 Jack Nicholson movie), and even more years before Willie Nelson titled an album—the same one with “Heartland”—after it.
However, it’s one of those songs that sounds like Bob’s been singing for years. I spoke earlier about how the Heartbreakers could have backed Bob on Empire Burlesque. But, really, maybe they should have backed him on Knocked Out Loaded (beyond the one song) and Down in the Groove. Dump half the songs on there and just blast through covers like this for an album or two. It woulda been great. Bonus points for a killer guitar solo from Campbell.
2. I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know (About Her)
When I picture this tour, I’m picturing this song. It’s one of the few where Bob and Tom just strap on acoustic guitars and sing together on the same mic. How this wasn’t in Hard to Handle is a mystery. You can see grainy audience footage here and imagine how good hi-res pro-shot would look.
But it’s not so high on this list because it looks good. It’s so high on this list because it sounds good. It’s the song Bob always introduced talking about how it’s the sort of song he and Tom heard on the radio when they were kids (never mind that they were not kids at the same time). Every night, they sing the hell out of it.
(I think that’s Bob’s ‘Hearts of Fire’ co-star Fiona in that thumbnail there. Did the uploader think she was Petty? Whoops.)
1. When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky
It’s my favorite song on Empire Burlesque, and it’s my favorite song on these shows. What can I say? They crush it. This is what the True Confessions tour is all about: High-voltage rock and roll played by the best band in the land, with a quartet of gospel-trained singers belting their heads off as the cherry on top. This is Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” for the ’80s (it even has a similar chord sequence), and has the same effect that song does in concert.
Wanna know what’s crazy? Great as it already is, “When the Night” would get even better later in the tour! Check out the vocal intro on this summer version from Red Rocks:
We’ll get there this summer though. That’s it for our show-by-show coverage of this first leg, though as I said I’ll check in one or two more times before the tour ends in Japan.
1986-02-15, Memorial Drive, Adelaide, Australia
Bonus (the best-sounding tape of the tour):
1986-02-24, Entertainment Center, Sydney, Australia
I need to find me a girl who loves me like Ray loves the 1986 Tour :)
I saw the Irvine and LA shows on the '86 tour, and for me the best moment was "We Had it All" at the Forum. Just a stunning powerful performance.