Two Nights in Berkeley (by Ian Grant)
2026-06-13/14, Greek Theatre, Berkeley, CA
Bob Dylan has spent the last two nights performing at the famous Greek Theatre in Berkeley, California. Each night featured a slightly different setlist—the return of “I Shall Be Released” to close night one, and the perennial “Every Grain of Sand” to close night two.
Ian Grant attended both nights and reports in. Ian is probably well-known to many of you. He’s the co-host of two excellent podcasts, Jokermen and Never Ending Stories (and I’m not just saying that because I’m an occasional guest on both). Jokermen just finished their epic Beach Boys series (I talked about my favorite Brian Wilson solo album), and are taking a summer detour through indie punks Death Grips before revealing their next full series. Ian also writes for Aquarium Drunkard and GQ and has his own Substack, Hard Disk.
I’ll turn it over to Ian…
Here’s a theory I’m working on: the Serious Bob Show vs. the Unserious Bob Show.
The two are distinguished by a few key elements. At the Serious Bob Show, there are no opening acts. The performance will take place in a relatively small hall, typically between 2,000 and 4,000 cap. Ideally, the venue will be an old movie palace in a historic downtown, though municipal performing arts centers are also acceptable, and the setlist will be almost entirely static. Finally, with increasing regularity, the Serious Bob Show will likely take place in a far-flung town several hours from a major metropolitan area, often in the American South or Midwest. You know these places when you see them listed on the latest tour schedule: Huntington, WV; Youngstown, OH; Tyler, TX.
At the Unserious Bob Show, Bob will take the stage after (and in some cases before) a series of other artists. The performance will take place at a sizable outdoor shed, and occasionally major historical venues: Forest Hills, the Hollywood Bowl, the Gorge. Setlists will come and go, songs appearing, disappearing, then reappearing haphazardly. Some of these shows will occur in exotic corners of the nation, but others will take place in and around major cities—cities like San Francisco and its sleepy, uptight satellite Berkeley, where I just witnessed Bob’s two-night stand at the historic Greek Theatre.
The question I find myself asking here on Monday morning: were these shows Serious or Unserious?
To most in the audience, it probably wasn’t clear that they could’ve gotten anything else. They saw the strange, hunched figure huddled over a keyboard toward the back of the stage, they heard snippets of a few songs they recognized—the words at least, for the music sounded nothing like it did on the records—and they thought to themselves, “This is what a Bob Dylan concert is.” Descriptors like Serious and Unserious never even occurred to them.
For readers of this newsletter or subscribers to my podcast, the different phyla of Bob performances should be familiar. This year, however, the matter has been complicated with the so-called “Long Hot Summer Tour.” On its face, this current run has much in common with the Outlaw Fest, the site of almost all Unserious Bob Shows over the past several years: multiple openers, big outdoor venues, large cities. It’s tempting to understand these shows as Bob’s own miniature Outlaw, one that dials down the quotient of red hat jug-hooters in the crowd and instead replaces them with an equal number of greybeard “In This House, We Believe…” sign-types.
At the same time, there’s something undeniably Serious about Long Hot Summer. The two shows I saw this weekend featured nearly-identical setlists, indicating the potential emergence of the latest iteration of The Set, a hallmark of the Serious. Bob also seems to be returning, once again, to the Rough & Rowdy Well. Recent gigs have featured no fewer than four R&RW songs, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see others creep in over the coming weeks. This makes Long Hot Summer—the first non-R&RW headlining tour leg in seven years, per the official branding from Bob Dylan Industries—nearly as rough and rowdy as what came before.
For the past half-decade, the calculus had been simple: if you heard “Black Rider,” you were at a Serious Bob Show. If you didn’t, you were at an Unserious Bob Show. Now that equation is all fucked up.
To be sure, these performances would be better without “Black Rider”—and, for that matter, most of the Rough & Rowdy material. The current take on “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” is a beauty, lines tumbling out of Bob’s mouth like so many artfully arranged dominos, but “False Prophet” and “Crossing The Rubicon” aren’t in peak condition, and “Rider” is a complete momentum-killer. It’s the venue more than anything. Songs that fill high-ceilinged auditoriums with spectral visions of skeleton doctors and well-endowed reapers seemed to piddle away into the vast bowl of the Greek, swallowed up by the immensity of the Northern California night.
My sisters, attending their first (and presumably last) Bob show, both remarked that the middle of the set seemed to blend into one long song. I can’t blame them for feeling that way, especially considering the fact that both have listened to Rough & Rowdy Ways precisely zero times in their 31 and 14 years, respectively, on this earth. Bob’s penchant for confronting and confounding his audience is well-understood, but ideally he pursues that urge in service of a greater artistic project. I can’t say that was always the case this weekend.
The R&RW holdovers were all the more disappointing because of how wonderful everything else was. Most thrilling was “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven,” back after seven years in the mothballs. The mellow warmth of the current band suits the song perfectly, draining away all the swamped-up sturm und drang of the recorded version, leaving behind a perfect finished plan of a song. Also stunning was “I Shall Be Released,” which brought the house down at the conclusion of the Saturday show. Despite the fact that it returned for the first time in nearly two decades at last week’s Eugene show, I chose to read it as a bit of sentimentalism from Bob, who concluded another show just across the bay in San Francisco half a century ago with the very same song. “Lotta people gone, lotta people I knew,” indeed.
The latest batch of Theme Time Radio-type covers provided some welcome texture to the evening. “Nervous Breakdown” was a killer once again—this band can really rock, even if they don’t often get the opportunity—and “I Can Tell” continues to seem like a not-so-subtle jab at the audience and their expectations. There’s something intriguing about this current suite of covers: lots of tunes about love and lost love and wanting love and having had love but no longer having love. The pacing isn’t quite right—“Black Rider” > “Share Your Love With Me” > “Masterpiece” > “I’ll Make It All Up To You” > “Rubicon” was a particularly bumpy stretch, whipsawing between any number of emotional registers—though most numbers work well enough on their own. I’m inclined to believe these covers are indicative of a new direction Bob may be headed in his own work (it’s been over six years since Rough & Rowdy Ways after all…), but that’s a conversation for another day.
Quick hits:
“Under The Red Sky” continues to be a standout. Dig that harp solo.
Black North Face rain shell > white North Face rain shell.
“To Be Alone With You” is so completely rewritten it’s essentially a new song. That “My eyes are still blue” line is a hoot.
He should bring back the “I Forgot That Love Existed” version of “Watchtower.”
For that matter, Poetic Champions Compose is the perfect companion for the post-show BART journey back across the bay.
Doug Lancio is back on electric guitar. Probably a necessary move for the sheds, but I miss the warm, grassy sound of the spring tour.
Merch continues to be almost entirely dogshit (who is designing these shirts???), although I do appreciate the return of the eye logo. I couldn’t say no to this tote:
It’s tempting to interpret the Serious Bob Show as more “important” than the Unserious Bob Show. It’s only logical; after all, the Serious Bob Show begins and ends with Bob Dylan. He is the Alpha and Omega of the evening, the absolute center of gravity. The experience is, presumably, a reflection of his—and only his—artistic vision. At the Unserious Bob Show, on the other hand, Bob shares the stage. The show is influenced by factors beyond his control: the weather, other artists, the phones that people are told to put away but which they do not put away. Bob is forced to compromise at these gigs.
Lest this reading come off as pretentious, let me clarify that Serious Bob Shows are not ipso facto superior to Unserious Bob Shows. In fact, the best Bob show I’ve ever seen was Unserious—August 10th, 2024 (which I also wrote about for Ray). Just for the hell of it, a first thought/best thought power ranking of all Bob shows I’ve caught since Jokermen began in June 2020:
8/10/2024 (George, WA)
11/20/2021 (New York, NY)
6/14/2022 (Los Angeles, CA)
3/25/2025 (Tulsa, OK)
5/1/2026 (Abilene, TX)
6/15/2022 (Los Angeles, CA)
4/29/2026 (Tyler, TX)
6/13/2026 (Berkeley, CA)
10/12/2023 (Milwaukee, WI)
6/16/2022 (Los Angeles, CA)
6/14/2026 (Berkeley, CA)
6/11/2022 (Oakland, CA)
5/16/2025 (Los Angeles, CA)
As you can see, this weekend’s shows weren’t the best I’ve ever seen. I’m still not sure whether to classify them as Serious Bob Shows or Unserious Bob Shows, either. Maybe that means the whole theory is bunk in the first place. In any case, it doesn’t really matter.
What matters is that I brought my whole family to the show and cajoled them into recording a shambolic installment of Never Ending Stories with me (my own Unserious effort, to go along with the Seriousness of this one). What matters is that my wife and I heard the lines engraved on the inside of our wedding bands sung to us live as we sat together arm-in-arm: “I knew you’d say yes/I’m saying it too.” What matters, in other words, is that I saw Bob Dylan live in show and concert once more.
What a time to be alive.
Thanks Ian! Check him out on his podcasts Jokermen and Never Ending Stories and his Substack Hard Disk. He’s also on Twitter and Instagram.
2026-06-13, Greek Theatre, Berkeley, CA
2026-06-14, Greek Theatre, Berkeley, CA
Check out the opening night report by Death Cab for Cutie’s Dave Depper (and, if you don’t already, subscribe for more next-day Dylan show reports all summer):
Last Night in Troutdale (by Dave Depper)
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
On night number one his vocals were as strong as they have been in the last two decades. Slow in the middle? Perhaps but still moving. Serious or unserious? Quien sabes and no matter. Another night of wonderful gifts.
This is brilliant. Ian's Serious/Unserious Bob show distinction is something I've been thinking for a while but never been able to articulate.