The 1986 tour that saved Bob Dylan’s career
There was precisely one icon of the 1960s that the 1980s weren’t kind to. Pretty much everyone else, from George Harrison and The Rolling Stones to Roy Orbison and The Beach Boys, had banner decades, riding the first genuine wave of boomer nostalgia as the generation born in the 1940s began to turn 40. Even The Monkees got back together for a slice of that particular pie. However, despite playing the biggest venues of his career, this decade was a rough old time for one Bob Dylan.
Which kind of makes sense. The ‘Bobfather’ always took to stardom poorly and took to being told what to do even worse. It was a decade where he was probably being begged on bended knee to release something, anything that sounded like Highway 61 Revisited. So, it makes a perverse amount of sense that he’d turn around and hand them clunkers like Empire Burlesque and Knocked Out Loaded.
However, Dylan had a devotee in his corner who, little did he know, would go on to completely turn the tides of his career with two slam-dunk moves. The first came from an idea that sprang forth from Dylan’s brief set at the Philadelphia concert, Live Aid at JFK Stadium in the summer of 1985. During his set, he mused, “I hope that some of the money that’s raised for the people in Africa, maybe they can just take a little bit of it…and use it, say, to pay the mortgages on some of the farms that the farmers here owe to the banks.”
While Bob Geldof fumed about Dylan going off script, the first steps of what would later turn into Farm Aid were taken. Mere months later, Dylan found himself playing at the inaugural Farm Aid concert while being backed by Dylan die-hard Tom Petty and his band, The Heartbreakers. Dylan clearly appreciated this because the following year, he embarked on a full 60-date world tour across Oceania, Asia, and North America, backed by Petty and his band.
This was no co-headlining jaunt as well. Petty and the Heartbreakers only played a few songs a night while Dylan took a quick break; this was very much a Bob Dylan concert with The Heartbreakers playing the role of, in all senses of the phrase, The Band. It was also notable for having Dylan and Petty dig out a number of classic covers that would change most nights. These songs included Frankie Laine’s ‘That Lucky Old Sun’, Ry Cooder’s ‘Across The Borderline’ and the deathless standard, ‘House of the Rising Sun’.
The tour saw Dylan playing some of the biggest shows of his career at that point, including a few stadium dates co-headlining with the Grateful Dead, and the steady wane of his popularity hit a stop. However, it wouldn’t be until the second part of Petty’s rejuvenation project that he’d really find his commercial mojo when the two of them joined George Harrison, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne for a new band called the Travelling Wilburys.
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