What can we expect from Bob Dylan’s latest tour leg?
Bob Dylan recently extended his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour once again, announcing 26 more dates in Europe from Helsinki to Dublin across October and November.
Tickets for each of the shows sold out in minutes, indicating that, even though the tour is approaching the end of its fifth year, there is still a huge appetite to see Dylan perform live.
He first brought this tour to Europe in late 2022, playing the same selection of songs night after night, including everything from the album that gives the tour its name (aside from the 17-minute epic ‘Murder Most Foul’) and a handful of deep cuts conjured up from the Shadow Kingdom live stream.
By the time he returned in summer 2023, the basic blueprint was the same night after night, though Dylan started to introduce some surprising covers at a handful of the shows, including a gorgeous version of the Van Morrison classic ‘Into the Mystic’, the Grateful Dead song ‘Stella Blue’ and Bob Weirs’ ‘Only a River’, among others.
Dylan and his never-ending Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour was back in Europe in late 2024, and this time, the setlist saw its biggest shake-up in years. When Dylan returned to his own programme after a summer spent traveling North America as part of Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Tour, gone were rough and rowdy mainstays like ‘Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine’, ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ and the Johnny Mercer cover ‘That Old Black Magic’ and in came classics like ‘All Along the Watchtower’, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ and ‘Desolation Row’. On the opening night in Prague, Dylan even dug out the rarely played ‘Dignity’.
As is ever the case with Dylan, just reading the setlists can be deceiving, though. Sure, he played ‘My Own Version of You’ every night of the tour, but that doesn’t mean it sounded the same each time. The song took on about three different arrangements across the opening shows of the year in Japan in 2023, and in early 2024, could be heard being played in two radically different arrangements on consecutive nights at the Walt Disney Theatre in Orlando, Florida. Some songs have had more rearrangements than others, such as ‘Key West’, which is a shifting beast and is one of the greatest examples of the maxim that “Bob Dylan never plays a song the same way twice”.
When Dylan drawled from the stage in 1966 that “it used to go like that, and now it goes like this”, well, he wasn’t lying for once.
In fact, almost every single Rough and Rowdy Ways song sounds different now than it did at the start of the tour, so the poster tagline that “things aren’t what they were” is true every time you read it.
Though things have changed since the heady days of the true Never Ending Tour where Dylan could pull out one-off performances of songs long consigned to his touring history (or indeed, ones that hadn’t ever been played before and wouldn’t ever be played again) like ‘We Better Talk This Over’, ‘Romance in Durango’, ‘Handy Dandy’ and ‘Billy’ with such regularity that it was a surprise to go to a show and not be surprised by the song selection, his latest stint on the Outlaw Tour is proving that he is still capable of pulling a wildcard out of the deck when he feels like it.
Dylan shocked all of his fans by playing ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ for the first time since 2010 and followed that up with one-off covers of The Pogues’ ‘Rainy Night in Soho’, Ricky Nelson’s ‘Garden Party’ and, for the first time in 23 years, ‘Searching for a Soldier’s Grave’. He’s also brought back his own classic ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’ for the first time since 2009 and has been playing ‘Positively 4th Street’ for the first time in years, as well.
Though we can be sure that when Dylan heads back to these shores, he’ll have his Rough and Rowdy Ways songs in tow again, perhaps the Outlaw Tour can give us a clue as to what to expect him to play between things like ‘I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You’ and ‘Mother of Muses’. Last year, he carried over songs like ‘All Along the Watchtower’ and ‘Desolation Row’ from one tour to the next, so maybe we’ll hear things like ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35’ or, here’s hoping, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. As is always so exciting with Dylan, what we can be sure to expect is the unexpected itself.
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