ten Things Y'all Didn't Know About Bob Dylan's Never Ending Tour

On three decades — and about 3,000 shows.

Bob Dylan. Photo-Illustration: CBS/Getty Images

Bob Dylan. Photo-Illustration: CBS/Getty Images

The music manufacture will gloat an anniversary of simply about anything — there was a 20th anniversary edition of Joan Osborne's Relish — and the compliant music printing will help push a little product to mark the occasion. As what has come to be known as Bob Dylan's Never Ending Tour has proceeded year in and twelvemonth out, 1 remarkable affair is that no benchmarks accept been noted. The tour began in the summer of 1988 — more than on that below. The 20th and 25th yr came and went with not so much as a press release, and stories about this endeavor are rare. (Equally on simply about everything Dylan-related, his management company declines comment.)

So anyway, it'south 2018, and Bob Dylan'south Never Ending tour has now been going on for 30 years.

The summertime tour in 1988 began with Dylan appearing with a minor bankroll combo. He stepped to the front of the stage and played songs from his catalogue. The band was dressed in black. The set list changed night to dark. He nigh never said annihilation to the audience; he didn't say things like, "We'd like to play a few songs from our new album," or "Hither's one yous might recall!" He didn't say cheers or expert night.

And that's how it's been, for 30 years now. There have been a few tweaks hither and there; now and once more, a band member drops in or out, particularly guitarists. But correct now, for example, he'south playing with three guys who have been with him more xiii, 16, and 29 years, respectively.

The big changes? The overall size of the ring has gone upward once in a while. And Dylan in the 2000s began playing a keyboard.

That's information technology.

And for the tape, it's unusual, basically unique, for a star on Dylan'southward level to tour like this. While of course the music manufacture has inverse much over the concluding 30 years, as a rule, superstar tours take months and sometimes years of preparations. Tour caravans are created — sometimes massive ones — and 1000000- to gazillion-dollar deals are lawyered out with Live Nation or AEG, with sponsors, merchandisers, and PR weasels circling round as anthology releases, Boob tube appearances, gift live albums, and DVD films are negotiated, all the mode to later cable broadcast.

Bob Dylan just tours, yr in and year out, and doesn't talk about it.

Many years ago, in the liner notes to Earth Gone Wrong, Dylan wrote, "At that place was a Never Ending Tour but it ended." But read on and you lot tin see it'south another of his mordant jokes, as he shares a list of what he said were the succeeding tours — a listing that you lot tin quickly see is of the sort favored by postmodern novelists:

[T]hither have been many others since then: "The Coin Never Runs Out Bout" (Autumn of 1991) "Southern Sympathizer Bout" (Early on 1992) "Why Do You Look At Me So Strangely Bout" (European Tour 1992) "The I Deplorable Weep Of Pity Tour" (Commonwealth of australia & Westward Declension American Bout 1992) "Burst Of Consciousness Tour" (1992) "Don't Allow Your Deal Get Downwardly Tour" (1993) and others, as well many to mention each with their ain character & design.

And once in a while, in interviews, Dylan would become positively heated when the field of study of the bout came up. Characterization publicists discouraged coverage of the Never Ending Tour, and one time in a while I'd talk to a critic who seemed to think information technology was uncool to phone call it that.

But at this point information technology's clear that the summer of 1988 was a decisive turning point in Bob Dylan's career, and that, 30 years on, we're still seeing the wheels turn in the single virtually consistent affair this almost mercurial of stars has e'er washed.

Nosotros know this because Dylan himself has actually confessed as much, in his autobiography, Chronicles Volume 1. At the very end of the 1970s he started out on the bout that accompanied his first album of religious songs, Deadening Train Coming. Fans streamed out when information technology became articulate than Dylan and his gospel backup singers actually were going to spend the unabridged evening singing ditties similar "God Gave Names to All the Animals. " A follow-up the side by side yr, after the fifty-fifty less fun Saved album, mixed in some quondam standards and even some moments of magic, but the feeling was overall sour.

After that came … aimlessness. In that location was a bout of Japan with Mick Taylor, fan-friendly outings with Tom Piddling and the Heartbreakers in 1986 and 1987, and the stadium-sized turds that were the Dylan and the Dead concerts.

But permit's let him tell it, not without melodrama:

I had no connection to whatsoever kind of inspiration. Any was there to begin with had vanished and shrunk. … I couldn't overcome the odds. Everything was smashed. My own songs had become strangers to me. I was what they chosen over the colina …The mirror had turned around and I could see the future — an one-time actor fumbling in garbage cans exterior the theater of past triumphs.

A moment in clarity at a bar in San Francisco was a turning betoken. For better or worse, Dylan's tours were e'er events, sometimes sensations. That forced him to think about how to get off that treadmill. The solution: denature the tour itself. Go play and play and play, until it wasn't a novelty any more than.

Dylan came back from the final Petty shows in Europe and told his tour manager he wanted to play 200 shows the next year, and keep going dorsum to the same towns the next two years after that. He would build himself a new audience from scratch.

"I'd have to start at the lesser," he wrote, "and I wasn't even on the bottom yet."

In 1972 he'd toured with the Band, scorching arenas beyond with country in different acoustic and electric sets, and with a set by the Band itself in the mix as well. On the Picayune and Dead tours, he was using his partners every bit feints, or crutches, or something. He'd created his own nighttime carnival and even performed in whiteface in the fabled Rolling Thunder outing later on Blood on the Tracks and Desire. And on the Budokan tour, in 1978, he dressed in sequins with a troupe that might have backed Neil Diamond. In most of those, he could cast himself as a ringleader or a master of ceremonies, farther distancing himself from the performing artist he supposedly was.

The tour that began in 1988 stripped information technology all away — facades, crutches, and makeup. Even the band was small, leaving nothing for Dylan to hide behind or lose himself in. On guitar was G.E. Smith. Smith, known for beingness the bandleader on Saturday Dark Live, is dismissed past some, but he had played with the cleft Hall & Oates ring for years, and it's hard to believe his time at SNL hadn't given him some useful insights on how to bargain with stars even as big every bit Dylan.

And the outcome was … a normal concert tour, featuring a stone star of some renown playing tunes from his repertoire backed by a musical ensemble there to back up his vision. For Dylan, this was something new.

No, not electric as opposed to acoustic. They were exciting. The closest comparison based on the remaining filmic evidence would of form exist his 1966 or 1972 outings with the Band, where he was young, feral, and adamant. Of course, 1988 was nil similar that. He was a much unlike person in his classic era, leading his fans and (some would say) a generation into a new era of electrical folk in the face of (some would say) screams of derision from his audience.

But 1988 was different. He was not humbled, exactly. But he was a star with essentially no living equal who had to figure out how someone like himself, approaching 50 and apparently by his songwriting prime number, could deport his career forward.

Dylan started his gospel tours in Northern California, and he started the Never Ending Tour at that place besides. I saw the first of the 4 original shows in Concord, at a suburban shed east of San Francisco. Dylan played ii nights later in Sacramento. I missed that, which I've always regretted; a friend went and said Dylan had played a brusk set, and fans had booed when he left the stage. I saw the next show at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, and then the following i the side by side night, in another shed south of SF. (That show, at Shoreline Amphitheater, was perhaps a third total, another humbling moment.)

Fifty-fifty by then I'd seen him many times: twice on the Budokan tours as a teen, at least a dozen of the gospel shows (I ushered for Nib Graham Presents at the Warfield in San Francisco); a couple of the Piffling outings; and a Dylan and the Dead bear witness in Oakland. I was already a writer, and already writing dismissively about him. The Petty shows seemed particularly pointless; why did Bob Dylan need a stringy-haired sycophant onstage with him?

Anyway, I would say nosotros weren't expecting much, but one had to admit we didn't know what to expect either.

Information technology was obvious from the showtime that these shows were dissimilar. Smith's band was taut. At Concord, and then again in Berkeley and on the peninsula, Neil Immature sat in for a skilful part of the set, calculation some unbridled solos in the instrumental breaks. Even with Young playing a clearly subordinate part, the sight and sound of this pairing was wild. I will forever respect G.E. Smith because of one astonishing scene. I forget the song, just it was clear there was some sort of a break coming. Smith, watching Dylan and Immature intently, moved forward at one point — and reached out to clamp his hand downward on the cervix of Young's guitar at the correct moment.

How many people take done that to Neil Young and lived to tell the tale?

And … the shows went on like that. Song afterward song, from all over Dylan's career, with a number of covers, ranging from the goofy to the incredibly obscure, thrown in. On a throwaway concert album chosen Existent Live a few years previous, Dylan had redone the lyrics to "Tangled Up in Bluish," and delivered them in a rush. He insisted that this was the right version. At the Greek Theater, he played it in its original configuration, and it was cute. For an acoustic fix with Smith, the pair brandished gorgeous Martins. Over the rim of the Greek, before the lord's day had prepare, people on the sides of the amphitheater could see the Gilt Gate Bridge; for them, Dylan played Jesse Fuller'south "San Francisco Bay Dejection." Then came "Boots of Castilian Leather"; another gorgeous cover, a traditional ballad chosen "Lakes of Pontchartrain"; and so a ringing "The Times They Are a-Changin'." And just in example we all thought that his defiant Christian era had been forgotten, he spent virtually six minutes delivering the Biblical epic "In the Garden." So came "Gates of Eden," "Like a Rolling Stone" — and then a bizarre encore featuring an old bluegrass song, an obscure rockabilly number, and "Maggie'south Subcontract" to end.

Uncompromising and nonetheless unassailable, information technology all sounded like Bob Dylan reclaiming his career.

It seemed that, considering years went by betwixt his tours, and because so many of his outings were heavily overdetermined, Dylan really had never played many of even his notable songs live. By 1988, he had released about two dozen studio albums, totaling 250 or so songs. Information technology turned out that it just wasn't just the lack of opportunity. To Dylan, to hear him tell it, his sometime songs had go a millstone. He couldn't stand information technology when the Grateful Dead, as he began rehearsals with that august assemblage, started digging through forgotten tracks in his onetime albums to find songs to play:

I had no feeling for any of these songs, and didn't know how I could sing them with any intent. A lot of them had only been sung once anyway, at the fourth dimension they had been recorded.

At that bar in San Francisco, he had that moment of clarity. He was watching a jazz pianist unself-consciously play standards:

All of a sudden and without warning, it was like this guy had a window to my soul. It was like he was saying, "Y'all should do it this way." All of a sudden I understood something faster than I ever did before… I used to do this thing, I'm thinking.

He went back to the Dead, and and so finished his commitments with Petty. Indeed, when you lot become dorsum and look, this shortish final European tour with the Heartbreakers is the real first to the Cyberspace — Dylan began the leg past playing three shows with almost entirely unlike ready lists.By the time what would become the Never Ending Tour began, Dylan had looked back into his catalogue and come to terms with it. The opening song of the original shows was "Subterranean Homesick Blues." That's the one that begins, "Johnny's in the basement mixin' up the medicine" and one of his most quoted works. ("Y'all don't demand a weatherman to know which was the air current blows.") I was surprised to learn from Dylanologists at the fourth dimension that Dylan had never played it alive before. At the Berkeley show, the 2nd song was, bizarrely, "Joey," an interminable rant almost a gangster from Desire. He'd played that once with the Dead and, 1 expert I consulted told me, perhaps one time besides that. The tertiary song was "Absolutely Sweet Marie," from Blonde on Blonde, another live debut.

I can't tell you how many times I've been at a concert and seen the atomic number 82 singer getting all excited to tell the audience the grouping was going to play some semi-obscure song at one advisedly choreographed moment in the show. Over the get-go four shows of the Never Ending Tour, Dylan played threescore or and so songs alive; 41 one of them, past my count, were different. As the bout went on, he was sometimes introducing six or seven new numbers a nighttime.

Past the terminate of the 1988, nearly 75 shows later, he'd played 92 different songs, according to Olof Björner, who presides over a breathtaking overview of Dylan's career in his About Bob pages. And iii dozen or so of these were played just in one case or twice. (Some other secret of big rock tours is that even when a new vocal is folded into a show, it by and large comes from a minor pool of numbers prepared for that moment. Traditionally in Stones tours, for example, Keith Richards volition step up to do a waggish solo number — choosing from one of two or three prepared for the bout.)

In the Never Catastrophe Tour, Dylan was calling audibles — except he wasn't calling anything. He just started playing the vocal he wanted to play, and Smith & Co. had to figure it out. The demands on the musicians were formidable; Smith told me once that the band had to sentinel carefully what Dylan was upward to equally each song concluded. "He would do annihilation from old folk songs, Civil War–era songs, upwardly to standards," Smith said. "I call back once, we were playing in Hollywood, and he played 'Moon River."'

And other stuff was going on as well. Information technology took Paul Williams, the founder of Crawdaddy magazine and a serious writer on Dylan, to notice, for instance, that when at the Concord show Dylan did a run at "Man of Constant Sorrow," a folk anecdote from his kickoff anthology, Dylan was tweaking the song on the wing. (This was years before the Coen brothers gave the song new life on the O Brother, Where Art 1000? soundtrack.)

The first line, Williams noticed, was at present: "I'yard bound to ride that open up highway" — which it turned out Dylan would be doing for the next 30 years. ("Down the highway / Down the tracks / Down the road to ecstasy," Dylan sang on "Idiot Wind.")

Over time, Dylan kept at information technology, folding in songs from new albums as they were released but always digging upwardly onetime tracks to debut alive — classics ("Tears of Rage" in 1989), singles ("Tight Connection to My Centre" in 1990), and obscurities ("Drifter's Escape," from John Wesley Harding, in 1992, "Meet Me in the Morning," from Blood on the Tracks, in 2007).

At this point, leaving bated albums of covers, his Bootleg collections of unreleased tracks, and more ragtag albums like Dylan and Self-Portrait, the most notable omissions from his touring are significant parts of New Morning, Planet Waves, Street Legal, and Infidels, so at that place are still some songs for him to unearth one time once more.

Incidentally, the most famous, or notorious, of the songs from his '60s height he's never played alive is the 11-minute "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," which back in the mean solar day took up an entire side of Blonde on Blonde. Dylan's ain site, incidentally, has a definitive list of his compositions, his gear up lists, and notes on when the songs were offset played live.

Every bit of this writing, he is at almost two,950; side by side year, if he keeps going, he will play show number 3,000. That'south a lot, averaging merely under 100 shows a yr, and reflecting the fact that in the last decade or so he'due south regularly been playing fewer than 100 shows a year, whereas in the beginning decade or so of the tour, he routinely played 110 or more than. When y'all add in travel and weeks off for the band, that's a big chunk of time to be on the road yr in and twelvemonth out.

Hither's another style to await at information technology. Back in the 1970s and even in the 1980s, in that location were a lot of big bands that didn't tour regularly. In the last thirty years, all the same, ticket prices have gone up past an social club of magnitude — and now just about all the big names can regularly be found out on the road.

In other words, when you can make $4, $five, or $half dozen million dollars a night, in that location aren't reclusive superstars any more than. Still, since 1988, Dylan has played more shows than Bruce Springsteen, he's played more shows than the Stones, and played more than shows than U2.

Since 1988, Bob Dylan has played far more than shows than Springsteen, the Stones, and U2 combined. (You lot can almost throw Madonna or Paul McCartney in likewise.)

Dylan was 47 when he initiated this belatedly journey, and he turned fifty, 60, and then seventy on the route. In April 2021, he'll turn 80. Probably because he's bored or perhaps because he's OCD, Dylan does things on bout other artists don't. It'south said he virtually ever travels by bus, and fifty-fifty that he likes staying in less-than-deluxe hotels. It helps him stay out of sight, and he can bring his dogs along.

He could make a lot more money than he does past being more than media friendly, playing the hits, developing coherent arena shows, and marketing himself sensibly. ("Come up run across Bob Dylan play his greatest hits alive!" [cue "Rainy Day Women"]). As it is, he seems to exist content to do his own affair and play smaller 5,000-ish-seat halls.

Here's the weirdest thing Bob Dylan does on tour. He wants to play in halls, and in cities, he'south never played before. Ten or 15 years ago promoters told me his management had been requesting unusual venues. It wasn't just things like the tour of AAA baseball stadiums he did with Willie Nelson one summer. He actively seeks out new halls and theaters. When I lived in D.C., Dylan in one case played iii nights in town … at 3 different venues. This adds a lot of unnecessary cost and hassle to a bout.

In New York over the years he's played at near a dozen different venues in Manhattan lonely, but in true Dylan style, he contrarily but does multiple shows at the Beacon when he hits town. He'due south likewise played in literally dozens of unlike cities and venues upstate, from Lake Placid to Elmira, from Erie to Saratoga Springs.

You get the feeling with Dylan that he'southward not touring and then much as wandering. I saw the first ii shows on the U.S. leg of his fall tour a few months ago, in Phoenix and Tucson. After that he went on a meandering path across the southern office of the U.S. He headed to Albuquerque, where he'd played before, and and so on to Midland, Texas, which is in the middle of nowhere, and played a small venue he'd never played earlier. He moved on to Irving, almost Dallas, to play a newish hall — and so went to Tulsa, where he played at an Indian casino. According to his website, it was the eighth dissimilar venue he'd played in Tulsa alone merely on the Never Ending Tour. (For the record, information technology'southward possible certain venues have changed their names.)

… and so continued like this for more than a month, playing metropolises similar Huntsville, Alabama; Roanoke, Virginia; Fort Myers, Florida, and on and on. Once y'all start delving into the information it often takes a while to find places, besides the odd casino, in which he has appeared on previous tours.

Overseas, where you'd expect all involved would want to brand things as easy as possible, it gets weirder. In 2008 he played 11 shows at various cities in Spain, and then i in Portugal and one in Andorra, which is a land ane-6th the size of Rhode Island and has a population of nearly 75,000. He and then went to Croatia, Estonia, and Lithuania. In 2010 he played Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia, Republic of croatia (in a different city than he had played two years earlier), Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia earlier heading to play six shows in France, including the small and remote cities of Nantes and Carcassonne.

By the way, Eric Jaffe,  writing on Urban center Lab five years agone, put together a listen-boggling Google map of all the venues Dylan had played to that point, and added an insightful essay as well.

In just about any given year, even as Dylan approaches 80, y'all tin find searching journeys like this; this summertime he's already played in small towns in well-nigh of the countries of Western Europe — not to mention a side trip to Brno, Czech republic — before playing in Republic of korea, Nihon, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore … and then doing the Oceania shows I mentioned above. (In 2010, he played shows in Beijing and Shanghai.)

There were country artists dorsum in the twenty-four hours who toured for a lifetime, and more recently people like Willie Nelson, B.B. King, and Leon Russell, as well, who spent their lives on the route. I take the bespeak there'south a lot of juke joints out there. Notwithstanding, I retrieve I'd bet that, correct now, Bob Dylan has performed live on the stages of more than different venues in more different towns — and more different countries, too —  than any other performing creative person.

"Expert" with Dylan is a fungible term. It's fair to say, however, that, for many people, over these concluding 30 years, the concertgoing feel has been hard. In those first shows, Dylan was singing his songs with strength, and each functioning, given the novelty of the setting, was memorable. But you could also discern, in the singing, the beginnings of something that would become an aesthetic outcome.

Dylan obviously didn't feel comfy singing many of those early on songs with the same meaningful fervor. After all, a dissimilar person wrote, and sang, the songs originally. It might have seemed an issue of falsity or fakery to pretend that the contempt and derision fueling, say, "Similar a Rolling Rock" nonetheless burned.

As the tour went on, and pretty quickly at that, he began to interpret his songs in ever-more mannered ways. By 1989 or 1990, when his reputation could withal detect him booked at 20,000-seat sheds, he was delivering some of his nearly notable songs in ways that literally made them unrecognizable. ("Was that 'Hollis Brownish'?") Reinterpretation is of form corking; but as I said, it more often seemed mannered, particularly when his vocalization, capable of great power soft or loud, reverted to its most abrasive fallbacks.

Dylan has a lot of them: the bleat, the besides-gruff whisper, the caterwauling, the high reedy screech. This last, particularly, was used to force out the words to famous compositions at a high, abrupt speed. The result — think of lines like "howdoesitfeel…. Tobeonyourown… likeacompleteunknown?" delivered like a whiny car engine revving — rendered songs that once transfixed a generation non just hollow, only nearly off-putting, and that'due south when the audition could recognize them.

A lot of critics are highly respectful of Dylan'southward 21st-century piece of work; I don't think I'm one of them, only information technology must be said that unlike a lot of stars from his era, he has never pretended live that his most contempo work didn't exist. On the Never Ending Bout he has always peppered his shows with songs from recent albums — more than a handful of them many hundreds of times but in the years since their release. Dylan said that he wanted to go back on the road to find the people who would bring their ain new desires to the shows, non the expectations of the audience from his get-go two or three decades as a star, who had concluded up putting him in a trap. To exit of information technology, he had to not only break gratis, but act like he was free of the barbarous pressure he and a lot of other 1960s and '70s holdovers endured. It's the mark of a nostalgia act to play only old songs, only … who wants to hear even "Mixed Emotions" at a Stones show, much less a deep cut from Steel Wheels?

The smart (and richest) ones ignore the complaints and deliver the (nostalgic) appurtenances. Dylan'due south finessed it a different way, laying low, playing what he will and letting those who volition buy into his complex aesthetics come to him. This is a noble endeavor on paper, a trivial more than challenging on the ground, so to speak. I've seen terrible, terrible Bob Dylan shows on the Never Ending Tour. (I don't actually keep track, just I've seen him 25 or 30 times during the course of it, in virtually equally many dissimilar venues in a full of 8 or 9 states, the most remote of these a depressing Indian casino in upstate Michigan.) Sometimes he does things that are just challenging to the audience. At the Peoria Civic Center in '89, the first U.S. show of the yr, he opened with Townes Van Zandt's "Pancho and Lefty," a cosmic song only I think one non well known to near of the people in the audience. Then he played Van Morrison's "Ane Irish Rover"! And then segued into …"I Believe in You," one of the more obscure songs from Slow Train Coming.

This might non have been the most audience-friendly opening of a concert I've ever seen, just all three tracks were done beautifully, and the balance of the prove was almost a greatest hits affair. But during the '90s and 2000s I saw him many times bleat his mode through songs well-known and obscure, and more times than not saw audiences sit on their hands.

At the showtime, he was still a lithe and hateful 40-something. Over the years, of course time has had its style; he is now a ladylike old human being, ofttimes sporting something like a also-big tuxedo that drapes a body that can seem frail. His facial hair gives him an almost Spanish cast, and an odd mode of standing, a bit stilted, a bit mannered, equally if he is playing a part in an old movie, making feints at an odd dance the music to which only he hears. There are echoes of Alias, his graphic symbol in Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, in this stance, perhaps bits of the deceptively passive Jack of Hearts, many decades on; and, now that I think of it, of Lefty from "Pancho and Lefty" too — a gunfighter you find in a remote locale notwithstanding alive, but compromised and holding secrets.

Among the myriad insane things about Bob Dylan shows these days is that when he delivers standards from the Keen American Songbook — he's released 5 albums' worth of them in the last few years— he really tries to sing the songs in classic fashion, which, given the nature of his own vocalisation, not to mention his phrasing tendencies, generally comes out as outlandish every bit it sounds. All the same, we listen and once in a while something connects: At that prove just later the Nobel Prize was announced, he seemed to take his time, and seemed to care. The last song, done with feeling, was i of those Sinatra tracks. He sang it like he meant information technology. These were the last words of the evidence:

Allow people wonder, let 'em laugh, let 'em frown

I'll always love ya till the moon's upside downwards

Don't you remember I was e'er your clown?

Why try to change me now?

At that show, Dylan didn't mention the Nobel Prize, which for anyone also Dylan yous'd say was the crowning achievement of a career nearing its 60th year. The advent was just 1 of nearly 80 he did that yr, start with sixteen shows in Japan; he took in the ii Desert Trip festivals at Coachella and took a detour to Las Vegas before slipping off into another quixotic journey beyond America, with stops at Wood Hills and Wolf Trap simply also the Toledo Zoo Amphitheater and the CMAC Performing Arts Center in upstate Canandaigua, which is somewhere betwixt Rochester and Syracuse and Buffalo, and which for some reason he has visited some half-dozen times earlier on the Never Ending Tour.

His schedule is clear for the residual of the year, merely for 2019 dates have already been announced in eight different European countries, including Republic of finland, Norway, Sweden, and the Czech Commonwealth. There are no fewer than 9 shows marked down for Germany. There is nonetheless much to do. He has non all the same played Roswell, New Mexico; or Ogallala, Nebraska; or Thule, for that affair. (For some reason, actually, Dylan has apparently never played Alaska.) And while in that location are few major songs he has not played live, there are still major songs he has not played on the Never Catastrophe Tour. (Like "Isis," for chrissakes.)

Sometimes I remember Dylan's like any elderly uncle, but wanting to exercise what he did yesterday. Yours or mine might just want to sit around and lookout man Trick News. For Bob Dylan, daily life is different. He gets on a bus and drives to a new boondocks. That's what he does.

Other times I call up — Jesus, this is a guy who doesn't like beingness home much. Who or what is there? He married once more, in the 1980s, and had a child now in her 30s, but the couple apparently divorced in the 1990s. He was stricken with a heart infection in 1997, which slowed him down for a few months, merely at that place'due south piffling sign of that now. Official maps of the Malibu burn down that ravaged the hills northwest of Los Angeles this year show that the flames came within a block or then of Dylan's famous Zuma Embankment compound, but information technology was obviously ultimately spared. He may exist indestructible.

Many of his public deportment take plainly been feints over the years. He is consequent near being inconsistent. Other messages hide in plain sight. Think of that list of tours on the liner notes to World Gone Incorrect. Those names he listed—they were all separate tours, he was saying, not part of i long Never Ending Tour.

To tell the deviation, he says, "check the prepare lists."

That'south another Borgesian joke: a new listing. Since but about every night had its own new set list, every dark was its own tour, which in a mode they might take been and that might accept been Dylan'south indicate. Peradventure Dylan is in search of the musical equivalent of the Library of Babel, in which he keeps playing shows until every possible combination of his songs, and so everybody else's songs, are performed. (It gets even weirder if you call the shows "tours.") Like the polished surfaces of the Borges library, the Never Catastrophe bout deliberately represents and promises the infinite, fifty-fifty though it technically isn't. Promising the infinite! Information technology's an audacious and ridiculous programme — almost every bit airheaded as leaving your small town to find your phonation and decisively marking a generation and a society, if not a civilisation in the process. Bruce Springsteen's Springsteen on Broadway show is all about going domicile. That'south the one identify the odds are that if and when the Never Catastrophe Tour does end, Dylan won't be.

10 Things to Know Nigh Bob Dylan's Never Catastrophe Tour