The songs Bob Dylan has played over 2000 times
Half of the legend Bob Dylan has cultivated has been about him constantly being on the road.
No one likes the idea of an artist staying stagnant, but even when he started his Neverending Tour, there’s a good chance that people didn’t expect him to live up to that promise every single time he pulled into town. He was the traveling poet that he had always wanted to be, but after many years on the road, there are bound to be a few songs that have racked up major numbers.
Then again, what’s included in the setlist these days is a bit more subjective depending on when you’re seeing Dylan. He was never one to play by the rules that everyone else set for him, and while he wanted to give his audience a good time whenever he performed, he knew he couldn’t get onstage and please the audience without thinking about whether he was happy playing what he was playing.
Hell, that’s the whole reason why he bothered going electric in the first place. He simply couldn’t fathom the idea of being a folkie for the rest of his life, and even though ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’ was a mainstay in his catalogue, Dylan knew it was better to give the audience what they didn’t know they wanted when he started making albums like Highway 61 Revisited back in the day.
If anyone else were in Dylan’s shoes, though, they would have to have known that they were going to piss some people off. Bringing It All Back Home did straddle the line between being acoustic-driven and having the odd electric song thrown into the mix, but when that opening crack of the snare came in on ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, the message was clear. Dylan was a different artist at this point, and it was up to the rest of his fans whether they wanted to embrace or go in a different direction.
So it’s not shocking that both the title track and ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ have been two of the three songs that Dylan has played upwards of 2000 times, both getting played live on 2068 and 2011 times respectively. But the song he’s performed the most came when he saw what other rock stars could do with his music.
Because as much as Dylan may have been going for a tranquil mood when writing a song like ‘All Along the Watchtower’, there’s no real reason to think he owned the song after Jimi Hendrix did his version of it. Whereas Dylan’s original sounded like a long-forgotten fable that he’s telling everyone on a stormy night, Hendrix’s version captured all of the dysfunction going on in the 1960s and channelled it into his guitar.
And after hearing what Hendrix could do with it, Dylan eventually made the tune a permanent fixture in his setlists. Despite varying the kind of songs that he plays every single night, Dylan has spent multiple years playing ‘Watchtower’ almost every night, equating to 2295 performances of the tune since he originally wrote the song.
But while anyone would have grown tired of having to listen to those tunes every single time they went up onstage, the reason why Dylan’s have resonated so much is because of the truth that’s behind every single line. Not everyone has to like his voice or even hold the same opinion that he does whenever he gets onstage, but Dylan’s way of writing has some sort of universal feeling that no one can deny.
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