The ‘Blonde on Blonde’ classics Bob Dylan has never played live
Bob Dylan has written a lot of songs over the course of his 60 year career, probably more than just about anyone else has in that time. He has also played a lot of concerts, and again, more than most have done in that time.
Since 1988, he has embarked on a never ending touring schedule and has only been briefly forged off the road by a bout of pericarditis and histoplasmosis in 1997, and then later for a longer stretch by the global shutdown caused by Covid-19. As soon as he was able to, though, Dylan was back on the world’s stages, bringing his Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour to North America, Europe and Asia between 2021 and 2024.
Dylan’s live work is legendary. An un-naturally restless and seemingly unlimitedly creative artist, he constantly re-works, re-imagines, re-explores and re-shapes his songs, and finds inventive new ways of playing them night after night. There is a perception among some that Dylan is a cantankerous, curmudgeonly performer – who rarely seems to be enjoying himself on stage – but this is wildly inaccurate, and a far cry from the man who giddily, playfully, joyously and wildly retools his greatest songs every time he steps out into the lights, always with a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eyes.
While others from his generation are happy to head out on small tours and play their greatest hits and most well known songs as closely as they can to the famous recorded versions, Dylan does the opposite. His show is a living, breathing, moving beast, with nothing sacred or set in stone. Songs might go one way tonight but tomorrow they could be radically different.
But that’s not to say he can’t please a crowd. He knows how to work an audience as well as anyone, and he knows what songs people want to hear. Over the course of his career, he has played each of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, ‘All Along the Watchtower’ and ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ over 2,000 times each, with well over 1,000 performances for all of ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’, ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’, ‘Things Have Changed’ and ‘Maggie’s Farm’.
But even having played so many shows, because he has written so many songs, he has not quite found room in his setlists for all of them yet. Some songs, like ‘Billy’, ‘Handy Dandy’ and ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?’ only ever got played once, but that’s one more than he has played songs like ‘Someday Baby’, ‘Sign on the Window’, ‘Narrow Way’ or ‘No Time to Think’.
Even on his most famous albums, you can often find a few songs that Dylan hasn’t found the time to play before a paying audience. Not every song from Blonde on Blonde, which many people argue is Dylan’s best album, has made its way to his shows, for instance. Neither the minor blues ‘Temporary Like Achilles’ nor the epic ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ have had a chance to bring their thin, wild mercury sounds to the stage.
The latter track, which takes up the entirety of the fourth side of the Blonde on Blonde double album, mystified the Nashville session players during the recording. Having arrived at the studio at 6pm, Dylan didn’t have recording in mind immediately but got to work finishing the lyrics to a song while the band waited around. Finally, at 4am he was ready to play. As they approached the second chorus, session drummer Drummer Kenny Buttrey recalls that “everybody’s just peaking it up, ’cause we thought, man, this is it. This is gonna be the last chorus, and we’ve gotta put everything into it we can. And he played another harmonica solo and went back down to another verse!” Buttrey said that later on in the song, he was thinking, “We peaked five minutes ago. Where do we go from here?”
It’s probably not the length of the song that has put him off from performing it, before – Dylan has never shied away from performing other long songs like ‘Desolation Row’ or ‘Highlands’ – but the subject matter might have been too personal for him to want to share in front of an audience.
‘Sad Eyed Lady’ was on his mind in 1975, though. While his marriage to his muse Sara disintegrated all around him, Dylan admitted that he had written the song for her with the lyric “staying up for days in the Chelsea Hotel, writing ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ for you” in the song ‘Sara’, and even worked up a version of ‘Sad Eyed Lady’ in rehearsals for the first leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue. It’s one of only a handful of recordings we have of the song from outside the initial Blonde on Blonde session, with another version recorded in an Edinburgh hotel room on acoustic guitar with Robbie Robertson circulating from 1966, as well.
The song never made it to stage, and probably never will, but a recording of the Rolling Thunder rehearsal did feature in Dylan’s 1978 fever-dream film Renaldo and Clara and gives a tantalising glimpse at what a live version might have sounded like.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Bob Dylan Newsletter
All the latest stories about Bob Dylan from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.