‘Baby, Won’t You Be My Baby’: Bob Dylan debuts ‘Basement Tapes’ rarity on tour opener in Oregon
This week in Troutdale, Oregon, Bob Dylan kicked off his first non-Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour under his own banner since 2019.
Following a Covid-19-enforced break from the road in 2020, his first year without at least one live performance since 1983, Dylan has been touring his latest album to rave reviews across North America, Europe and Asia. Though there have been notable changes, tweaks and additions to the show over the years (user Dayshift Nightbird of Dylan super-fan forum Expecting Rain recently listed each of the 108 unique songs the artist has played since the start of the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour), the majority of the tour has been about showcasing his most recent material.
Though for the last two summers he has joined Willie Nelson, with whom he recently co-wrote the song ‘I Can’t Read Your Mind’, on the Outlaw Tour, where he played a selection of older hits, one-off surprises and obscure covers, Dylan returned to performing mainly songs from his 2020 opus Rough and Rowdy Ways when touring by himself. So there were a lot of questions about what he was going to play on the first night of what has now been revealed to be called the Long Hot Summer Tour ’26.
Most guesses would have played it fairly safe. It wouldn’t have been a shock to see old warhorses like ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ or ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ come back into the fold, and equally wouldn’t have been surprising to see some more new 1950s rockabilly covers, like he’s been playing lately, enter the set. Maybe Paul McCartney would even get his wish and hear a true-to-the-recording version of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’.
But nobody in the world expected Dylan to dip into The Basement Tapes for the live debut of a one-off, made-up-on-the-spot and long-forgotten song from 1967. Though he mainly veered away from Rough and Rowdy Ways material, the setlist was largely made up of songs that he’d been playing across the last few years.
Having opened with ‘To Be Alone With You’, once a rarity but now a mainstay across each of his last three tours, Dylan and his band then ran through Bo Diddley’s ‘I Can Tell’, his own ‘Forgetful Heart’, ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’, ‘Early Roman Kings’ and ‘Under the Red Sky’, before playing another cover, this time of Jerry Lee Lewis’ ‘I’ll Make It All Up to You’.
‘I Contain Multitudes’ became the first Rough and Rowdy Ways song to make an appearance in the evening (the other was closer, ‘Crossing the Rubicon’, make of that what you will), but the real talking point was the 13th song of the night.
Dylan is no stranger to surprising his audiences. Nobody in the Berns Club in Stockholm expected to hear him debut and perform ‘Billy’ for the one and only time, from the 1973 Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid soundtrack album, in March 2009, just like nobody expected him to play a one-off ‘Handy Dandy’ in Vigo, Spain a year earlier, but that’s exactly what he did. Equally, the audience heading into London’s Hammersmith Apollo wouldn’t have expected to hear the only performance of ‘Romance in Durango’ since 1976, but that’s what they got.
Last night, in Troutdale, OR, even the most optimistic, or foolish, of gamblers wouldn’t have put any money on Dylan debuting something as obscure as ‘Baby, Won’t You Be My Baby’, a Basement Tapes deep-cut which was recorded once on a whim, several lifetimes ago, but again, that’s exactly what he did. Actually, out of all the songs he’s been singing in recent years, ‘Baby, Won’t You Be My Baby’ isn’t the only one which first appeared during The Basement Tapes. During his first stint on Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Tour, Dylan played a gorgeous cover of The Fleetwoods’ ‘Mr Blue’, a song he first recorded in the Basement with The Band way back when.
Dylan expert Ray Padgett has pointed out in his excellent newsletter Flagging Down the Double E’s that the 59 years between the singer recording the song and its live debut make this the longest gap between recording and performance in his career. And by accounts, it was the best song of the night. Long-time bassist Tony Garnier certainly locked into a groove on the song straight away, and Dylan’s singing is clear, true and sounds surprisingly similar to how he sounded back in that Big Pink basement in Woodstock, 60 years ago.
In a sense, McCartney really did get his request. Here was Dylan singing one of his ’60s songs, like he did back in the day. It’s just not the song that anybody expected. He takes his tour across North America for the rest of the summer, and it’ll be interesting to see if he dusts off any more old, unexpected songs.
Looking through the list of songs he has recorded but never performed live, some further surprises that would suit his current voice and band, include things like ‘Sign on the Window’, ‘Narrow Way’, ‘Shake Shake Mama’, ‘Someday Baby’, ‘Black Crow Blues’, ‘No Time to Think’ and ‘One More Weekend’. Alternatively, maybe he’s going to stick with The Basement Tapes, in which case, don’t be shocked to hear the live debuts of Odds and Ends like, well, ‘Odds and Ends’, ‘Apple Suckling Tree’, ‘On a Rainy Afternoon’, ‘Goin’ to Acapulco’, ‘Sign on the Cross’ or ‘I’m not There’.
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