Bob Dylan, 06-09-26 Cuthbert Amphitheater, Eugene OR
I took my daughter this week to see Bob Dylan live in Eugene. Originally, I had purchased a ticket for myself but when I mentioned I was going she wanted to go as well. Of course, this made my heart grow three sizes that day. I've never wanted to push my music on my children: when they're young you can't help but play what you like for them in the car, unless you want to live in some hell of children's songs. I'll never forget the time my oldest developed an obsession with a very atonal live recording of Robert Fripp and Brian Eno in 1975. But two years ago they made a Bob Dylan bio-pic with her favorite movie star (her option was mixed on the movie) and she started listening to Dylan. Young people who discover Bob Dylan in 2026 are in a very interesting position. They have no knowledge of Dylan's eras (and, yes, that is explicitly meant as reference to Taylor Swift) and, therefore, have no pre-conceived notion of what is and is not a "good" era for Bob. They are listening to Bob based on what his "top tracks" are on streaming services. On both Spotify and Apple Music, "To Make You Feel My Love" has more plays than "Highway 61" and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." "Things Have Changed" has more plays than "Maggie's Farm" and "Ballad of a Thin Man." Before she had heard all of Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde On Blonde, she had heard "Most of the Time" because of the Bear. To her, and to most of her cohort I imagine, good Bob Dylan music is whatever songs she vibes with. Unlike her father who had to understand Bob's entire catalog to really, certainly, think about what might be my favorites, my daughter hears a song on her music streaming apparatus, decides whether she wants to skip it or not, and then continues on.
I think this appreciation of Bob's music serves a fan well in these most recent years. The versions of songs (some more than 60 years old) that he currently plays are aren't faithful to the originals. They're riffs on the originals, they vibe with the originals, they fuck with the originals without ever being copies of the originals. I'm not the first to point out that this sets Bob at odds with many of his contemporaries for decades who have felt that they need to reproduce their famous songs as faithfully to the originals as they can. As recently as last month this aspect of Dylan's uniqueness was brought up by none other than Sir Paul McCartney:
"I've been to see a couple of shows of Bob's, and I couldn't tell what song he was doing. Now that's a bit much because I know his stuff. I get it if he doesn't want to do 'Mr. Tamborine Man.' Maybe he's fed up with that, but I would like to hear it. And I've paid."
We can debate whether or not Sir Paul McCartney needs to pay to see Bob Dylan or if he might be able to score a comp. Even so, I believe the current price of $80--120 a ticket to see Bob might not break Macca's bank. Certainly not compared to the $122-570 per ticket he charges his own fans. But, Macca's not wrong in that many people who go see Dylan shows these days don't really know the songs he's singing: either because they are more obscure than his most streamed songs, or the songs they would know have radically different arrangements now.
Take, for example, "All Along the Watchtower." According to bobdylan.com, Dylan has played this song 2,376 times including his most recently played date of this writing. I agree with the music critic Steven Hyden that there's the version of the song on John Wesley Harding and then there are most live versions of the song. Hearing this song live has, again for the most part, has been hearing Bob Dylan and his band do some variation of Jimi Hendrix's cover of the song. Honestly, I can't blame them because, you know, it's arguably the greatest cover of any song. Between 2018-2024 Dylan didn't play the song, so it was a surprise when he brought it out during the Outlaw Tour. Listening to that version, he sticks very closely to the Hendrix version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cmqK1prgHY&list=RD2cmqK1prgHY&start_radio=1
However, when he brought it back for the 2025 Outlaw Tour he completely rearranged it: most of the song (the verses before the "businessmen they drink my wine" verse as well as "but you and I have been through that" verse) follow the melody of Van Morrison's song "I Forgot That Love Existed" from the excellent Poetic Champions Compose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toq0wiBsMlA&list=RDtoq0wiBsMlA&start_radio=1. You can hear the similarities https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlKbyPvVWww&list=RDqlKbyPvVWww&start_radio=1. He played "All Along the Watch Tower" at my show as well, but he's tempered the Van influence a bit, although he's kept the kick drum entrance of the two aforementioned lines that really enliven the song.
It's fascinating to think about the history of this song: it's 59 years old. Bob Dylan originally wrote it as a man in his mid-20s. It's a fragment of a story: a conversation between two characters who we'll soon never hear from again. Did they find a way out of their predicament surrounded by people who feel that life is but a joke? Are they the two riders who are approaching at the end of the story? The whole thing also feels like a parable: the only names we're given are "joker" and "thief." The great irony, of course, is that the thief tells the joker that there are "many here among us who feel that life is but a joke," excepting the joker apparently. Given that the joker is a figure who will follow Dylan either wittingly or unwittingly ("Jokerman"; he appears allegorically as "the jester" in "American Pie") it's significant that his (i.e. the joker's) fate is to not feel that life is but a joke. In the long history of the jester being the one who, forgive me, speaks truth to power, he cannot ironically feel that life is a joke. And you can argue that as much as Dylan loves to perform "the song and dance" man, the carnival barker, in the early days "the little tramp," he has never treated life and the musical as well as lyrical meditation thereupon as a joke. But it's clear that he has always known that we shouldn't talk falsely because the hour, every hour, is getting late. Yet, it's one thing for a 20 something year old to write and sing those words, it's something completely different for an 85 year old man to sing those words to me and my daughter.
This month as Bob was coming to a town near you to sing and play piano, the NYT published an op-ed penned by Bob (perhaps while sitting in the very tour bus he might be sitting in right now) about turning 80. The momentous occasion for such a request was the 80th birthday of our great, dear leader Donald J. Trump. The paper of record, whom the great leader is currently suing, would like to win the leader's good graces (or at least a greatly reduced settlement) by offering sage wisdom by a bevy of well-known octogenarians. I have no idea what the people at the NYT told Dylan to get him to write this (Dylan's been notoriously cagey about his politics) but, regardless of the cause, I'm glad they did. I'm just going to reproduce it in full:
"The best thing
The best thing about being 80 is that you outlive the clocks that have been chasing you. It’s freedom from that lie that anything was ever under control. You don’t chase the parade anymore. You’re an old king from some vanished country. You’re harder to program. You’re not rushing to become anything and you’re not haunted by things that you did. You’re haunted by how little of it really mattered in the way you thought it would.
The worst thing
The worst thing about being 80 is that you still want to say yes to everything, but the world moves without asking. The old fire in your heart still tells you to do this and that, but your body says we already did it. Also, nothing surprises you. It sounds like a luxury but it’s not, and also you’ve run out of illusions. People treat you like either you’ve solved something or you’ve lost something, and you haven’t. You see life repeating itself everywhere.
The really worst part about being 80 is that you find, at last, you’ve got an understanding of something that might have altered everything in the past, had it come at a time when something could still be altered. When you’re young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn’t, it stands still. We’re the ones that move."
If anyone tells you that Dylan didn't deserve the Nobel Prize for literature just share this with them and then cut them out of your life for good. Dylan's "the old king from a vanished country" now, evoking the same world as "princes" "barefoot servants" and unnamed riders. For the characters in "All Along the Watchtower" the hour might have been getting late, but it doesn't matter now: the country, along with the wildcats, jokers and thieves, are all vanished. Those are just clocks from a world long gone that are no longer chasing you. Finally, there never was such a thing as an hour getting late: we were the ones always afraid of the movement of time while all the while we were moving through time. And while that realization affords the speaker/writer/singer of such wisdom some clarity, it only makes the unalterable events of your life that much more painful.
Dylan ended the show with another 59 year old song: "I Shall Be Released." These aren't the only 59 year old songs Bob's been playing on this leg of his tour: "You Ain't Going Nowhere" and, everyone's favorite Basement Tapes deep cut, "Baby, Won't You Be My Baby." I was shocked to discover that Bob hasn't played this song in 18 years. Although it's not a cover, I would say that the author's version of the song (in all its performances) is only the third best version of the song at best. My favorite version of "I Shall Be Released" is Nina Simone's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV8KskUf3lQ&list=RDYV8KskUf3lQ&start_radio=1 It goes without saying that Simone is one of the greatest interpreters of song to have ever lived so it's hardly controversial to say her's is the superior version. Also, clearly, the titular phrase has a much different valence coming out of Simone's mouth. The other version that beats Dylan's is, of course, the Band's with Richard Manuel's haunting falsetto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpiXfumGf9k&list=RDbpiXfumGf9k&start_radio=1
Listening to the 85 year old Dylan sing the song with my daughter sitting by my side on a blanket in the grass, dear reader, I did indeed get choked up. It wasn't the first time I cried seeing Dylan. The first time was hearing him sing "Every Grain of Sand" also in Eugene in 2022. I got choked up again hearing him cover "Stella Blue" in Rochester, NY 2023. Also when he played "Under the Red Sky" in 2024. I guess I do it a lot. But this time it had a kind of poignancy that those other times didn't in my memory. All of those other times I was moved because I never thought I'd hear Bob play those songs. Now I know (having seen him many times live) that, frankly, I could hear any number of Bob Dylan songs I imagine I never would (including some, like "Baby, Won't You Be My Baby" that I didn't even know existed)!
This time, hearing "I Shall Be Released" I was moved because I don't know if I will hear Bob sing this (or any) song again. On the one hand, Bob seems to be in fairly good health, with a decent voice, and he seems game to go out and tour whenever he can. But 85 is 85. My grandmother swam every day in her pool in her 80s until one day she had a stroke and never swam, or saw, again. Bob wants to still say yes to everything but the world is moving without asking. "I Shall Be Released," now in 2026, sounds like the illusion of life is coming to an end. Bob isn't worldly now, as if he ever was, he no longer has to become anything (not that he won't continue until his dying breath because what is life if not a constant state of becoming while time stands still), rather he simply is.
