Bob Dylan at Starlight and in Context: A Recap and Tribute

This piece was first published in an email newsletter produced by my friend Lonnie Shalton, a Kansas City political historian and baseball fan since the 1950s. As I mention, he asked me to present a take on Bob Dylan pegged to his tour stop at Kansas City’s Starlight Theatre, an outdoor showplace where I’d previously seen Dylan nearly a decade ago. Lonnie’s interest is in the music—see his affiliated website LonniesJukebox.com—and I attempted to share some highlights from Dylan’s 65-year career. — sbp

By STEVE PAUL

Bob Dylan turned 85 years old on May 24 this year, just a couple of weeks before setting out on another concert tour. For nearly five years, Dylan has been traveling to highlight many of the songs from his exceptional album Rough and Rowdy Ways, released in 2020. He has racked up close to 300 concerts over several legs of that tour and added dozens more by participating in Willie Nelson’s annual Outlaw Festival in recent summers.

This summer Dylan has fashioned his own version of an Outlaw tour, by inviting the likes of Lucinda Williams and John Doe (of the LA band X) to open the shows. In these Dylan summer shows, Dylan presents setlists with fewer songs from Rough and Rowdy Ways and a growing number of songs from his back catalog plus occasionally surprising covers.

As the July 4 concert at Starlight Theatre in Kansas City approached, your Hot Stove host asked me to step in to pitch some heat and curveballs about Dylan. (I included a photo I’d taken a few years ago of a baseball bat, signed by Dylan, at the Louisville Slugger Museum in Kentucky.)

The Starlight concert followed the pattern and the set list of Dylan’s most recent shows even after he downsized his band to include just one electric guitarist to replace two departed long-time sidemen. The songs have been a bit slower, his own piano playing restrained, and his voice has been placed nicely up front in the sound mix. One significant and strange difference was the unexpected accompaniment of holiday fireworks erupting outside the theater throughout much of Dylan’s show. If he noticed, he and the band didn’t seem fazed. The songs included five tracks from Rough and Rowdy Ways, covers including the Bo Diddley-related “I Can Tell” and recent additions from Dylan’s back catalog, notably “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and the closing number “I Shall Be Released,” which hammered a dominant theme of mortality. Audience members erupted in glee when Dylan pulled out his harp on that song and earlier on “Under the Red Sky,” an under-appreciated story song, with a sweet guitar line by newcomer Joel Paterson, that might have been one of the lovelier highlights except for the surprise explosions under the open Swope Park sky. (Confirmed by a bootlegged and remastered recording of the concert that suppresses much of the fireworks action—the remastered concert audio is now findable on YT.)

As for the Dylan overview, I’ll spare you the recap of his career and the rich intellectual details of Dylan thought and Dylan music that I’ve gathered in a relatively deep immersion in recent years. Suffice to say that I’ve had my ups and downs with Dylan’s chameleon and magpie moves since the mid-1960s, but my regard for him and his place in US cultural history has grown immensely.  

Besides, what Lonnie really wanted is for me to get straight to the music and offer some choice Dylan listening.

With giant new releases of alternate takes, rediscovered recordings, and variations on just about everything over the last six and a half decades, zeroing in on a timeline of Dylan’s history has become extremely difficult. I’ll skip some of the well-worn and cherished tracks (“Tambourine Man,” “Blowin’ in the Wind”) in search of some lesser-known takes representing several periods in Dylan’s ever-evolving career.

To appreciate Dylan’s early appeal, it’s instructive and goosebump-inducing to listen to his 1963 Carnegie Hall concert. “Boots of Spanish Leather,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”—this is peak early Dylan with various emotional threads stemming from his love life and the anxieties of the times. Want to think about Dylan’s timelessness? Here’s “With God on Our Side.”

Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks (1974) is often considered one of his best ever, steeped in the breakup of his marriage and other tales of love and life gone awry. In our current political environment, I can’t ever refrain from hearing the refrain from “Idiot Wind” (concert version from the mid-‘70s).

The 1980s present a problematic period for Dylan followers as he emerged from his so-called Christian period, revved up his rocking sound, flailed for new identities as he toured with the Grateful Dead and Tom Petty, took, apparently, too many drugs, and yet still recorded no small amount of memorable music. At the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa I have been mesmerized several times watching a restored video of one track, “When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky,” a rather vivid and complex breakup song from his 1986 tour with Petty, complete with sizzling backup singers and the man in black leather vest with a dangling earring. The link is to a different but still thrilling take of the same song from that tour.

On his current tour, Dylan reached back to his underappreciated 1989 album Oh Mercy to add the vaguely religious and portentous “The Man in the Long Black Coat” to his setlist. I heard it last March on its tour debut in Omaha and again Saturday night at Starlight. The link is to a bootleg from Omaha. I posted a little take on the Omaha show here.

Robert Polito’s new book, After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace, is an impressive, thoughtful performance but probably goes a little too deep into the literary underpinnings and mysteries for casual Dylan fans. His take essentially is that Dylan’s second 30 years as an artist and performer, beginning in the 1990s, are just as vibrant and important, perhaps more so, as his first three decades.

 The decade began with two acoustic albums—Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong—in which Dylan resets by covering old blues and folk songs as he did at the very beginning of his career. Then his songwriting begins to solidify again, and his albums, including a second one (after Oh Mercy) produced by Daniel Lanois, become startling fresh and essential. See especially Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, and Modern Times, which ends with “Ain’t Talkin’”.

A decade ago, Dylan produced three consecutive albums paying tribute to Frank Sinatra (and perhaps secretly to Billie Holiday, as I suggested in a conference paper and recent Substack post). And when the pandemic year began disrupting everything, Dylan startled the music world with the release of “Murder Most Foul,” a 16-minute meditation on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the tapestry of American culture that unfolded ever since. He soon followed with Rough and Rowdy Ways, which included “Murder Most Foul” on one disc and 9 new and fascinatingly Dylanesque songs on the other. I happen to think it stands with Dylan’s very best albums, and Robert Polito certainly argues something similar. He suggests the record can rightly be seen as a more worthy Nobel Prize lecture on his art than the pat speech he submitted to Stockholm three years earlier. (See, or hear, the Whitmanesque “I Contain Multitudes” and such classical nods as “Crossing the Rubicon” and “Mother of Muses.”)

After touring on the record for so long, Dylan is now mixing it up, and I was sorry he dropped one of its highlights from the setlist—“Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” Then again, his varying performances of the song in concert rarely approach the sound he recorded for the record. Still, it’s epic (9 minutes) Dylan at his peak as a surrealist poet grounded in literary allusion and personal meditation.

Speaking of long Dylan tracks, I’m always impressed to discover new and established artists taking on Dylan’s work as if it’s a rite of passage. I loved a pandemic-era record of Dylan covers—the Australian-Nashvillean Emma Swift’s Blonde on the Tracks, which was so up to date it included “I Contain Multitudes” from Rough and Rowdy Ways. I’ve been fortunate to attend a couple of Dylan tribute concerts in Tulsa, both of which included Emma and her hub Robyn Hitchcock, another formidable Dylan stylist. In February, the concert was devoted to the 60th anniversary of Blonde on Blonde, one of my gateway Dylan albums. I was able to capture a lovely version of  “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” delivered by Natalie Merchant. Listen to this and just tell me that Dylan no longer matters.

Dylan Hits the Road Again and Mixes up the Medicine

This article first appeared on my Substack site, March 23, 2026.

By STEVE PAUL

(c) 2026

To feed my late-in-life obsession with Bob Dylan, I drove up to Omaha (three hours straight) to catch the opening night of the latest leg of his Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour. I’m a relative piker in Dylan World, having experienced only five previous concerts since he began this “never-ending” sequence in November 2021 and one Dylan appearance in the Outlaw Festival (summer 2025), in which he has headlined with Willie Nelson.

Still, like many Dylan fans with several Rough and Rowdy shows chalked up, I approached the concert warily. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to hear it, especially if it offered little more than what we’d heard already, new arrangements and the odd cover or back-catalogue dip notwithstanding. Dylan has played nearly 300 of these shows, and along with the concerts I’ve caught in person an untold number of bootleg recordings can be found in numerous places online. Some shows have been more thrilling than others, but all of them provide an opportunity to pay tribute to the octogenarian (he’ll turn 85 in May) Nobel Prize laureate who has shaped the vital soundtrack of at least three generations of audiences over the last 65 years.

So, of course, I talked myself into it and settled early into my seat, second row center of the loge, nicely overlooking the stage and the grand, ornate trappings of Omaha’s Orpheum Theater.

I’d already met a couple of first-time Rough and Rowdy attendees, Lance, from Boulder, Colorado, who’d brought his teenage-son, Dylan (!). On my recommendation, after encountering them on the sidewalk earlier, they listened to the Rough and Rowdy Ways album before returning to the theater for the show, so they were prepped and eager (though, sorry to say, I didn’t see them after for their reactions).

Dylan opened the show with “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” (yes he will, you might want to say), which has been a typical opener for a while now. The song dates back to Dylan’s “John Wesley Harding” album of late 1967, with which I’ve been spending some quality time lately.

When I recognized that the second song was “The Man in the Long Black Coat,” from the “Oh Mercy” album of 1989, I began to suspect that we might be in for something special. This was a first for this tour, but I didn’t realize until later, that Dylan hadn’t played it in concert since 2013. With its intimations of death and deviltry, the song fits right into Dylan’s thematic darkness and actually serves as a precursor to “Black Rider,” which comes along 30 years later on the “Rough and Rowdy Ways” album and which we would hear just a few songs later.”

As it turned out, Dylan did mix things up in this show. He chopped a good 20 minutes off the usual length of prior outings, coming in at slightly under 90 minutes and playing 16 songs, down from a typical 17. He dropped three of the “Rough and Rowdy Ways” songs from the program – “My Own Version of You,” “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” and (one of my favorites) “Mother of Muses.” He also dropped some of the older songs that were regulars in the tour concerts, such as “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” “It Ain’t Me Babe,” and “Watching the River Flow.” In their stead, he melded in five songs he’d played in the Outlaw sets, four of his varied classics and one cover. These were “All Along the Watchtower” (another “John Wesley Harding” great), a standout “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Soon After Midnight,” “Love Sick” (sizzling) and Samuel Smith’s (via Bo Diddley) “I Can Tell.”

As has been reported elsewhere, Dylan, mostly sitting or standing at an electric keyboard rather than an upright or grand piano, had recurring issues with a microphone stand and occasionally his voice dropped out. (The problem reportedly got worse a night later in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.) But generally Dylan’s vocal sound in the Omaha show was forceful and reflected commitment to his songs. He’s not just going through the motions. He gave several of the “Rough and Rowdy Ways” tracks, especially “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You,” a kind of intimate-ballad treatment.

Overall, this was not a radical departure from what Dylan had been doing in these two separate tours of late. But all together we can appreciate the fresh program as another leg gets under way, a freshness spanning six decades of Dylan’s career and revealing the power and appeal of his inordinately vast songbook.

And I can guarantee that no one—absolutely no one—could have predicted that Dylan would introduce a new rocking number from the depths of his late-1950s favorites: Eddie Cochran’s “Nervous Breakdown.” He had never played it in concert before (according to the helpfully comprehensive database at bobdylan.com). And here it was in a climactic position, second to the last, before the regular closer “Every Grain of Sand.” 

Perhaps Dylan wants us to consider, at least ironically, the state of his head space as he makes his astonishingly vigoroous way through his ninth decade. In “Nervous Breakdown,” a doctor tells the song’s narrator that he’s “just gotta slow down/ you can’t keep a traipsin’ all over town.” The doctor calls him “a total wreck” and the narrator certainly agrees.

Dylan might have taken it literally as he messed with the microphone again during “Every Grain of Sand,” but he picked up the harmonica for the first time all night near the end of that closing song and gave some crowd-pleasing blasts announcing, “total wreck” or not, that he’s still here.

Dylan in Kansas City: The "Rough and Rowdy Ways" Tour

After the show, Oct. 1, 2023, in Kansas City.

October 1, 2023, Bob Dylan resumed the concert tour he started in November 2021. I caught him in Tulsa in April 2022, and now here was the first of two nights scheduled at the intimate and historic Midland Theater. It was the 138th show of the tour, which had extended across the U.S. and wowed audiences in Japan and Europe. The concerts tended to feature a relatively unchanging setlist built around the songs of the “Rough and Rowdy Ways” disc (minus the epic “Murder Most Foul”). The show weaved in a couple of Dylan classics, an occasional cover tribute to Buddy Holly (“Not Fade Away”) and others, and a frequent crooner special, such as “Melancholy Mood” or “That Old Black Magic.” In Japan, Dylan excited devoted followers by working in, one per show, several Grateful Dead and/or Bob Weir tunes, such as “Truckin’” and “Brokedown Palace.” One the new leg of the tour, Dylan kicked off Kansas City with “Kansas City” (first night only). In St. Louis he paid homage to Chuck Berry. In Chicago, audiences heard songs by the Butterfield Blues Band, Muddy Waters and more. I think we’re all expecting more surprises as the tour goes on. Now wondering what he’ll play in the Boston show I’m planning to catch in November.

So here is a report on the Oct. 1 Kansas City that I delivered to Ray Padgett for his great Dylan blog “Flagging Down the Double EE’s.” Find him on Substack. Ray is also the author of the informative and entertaining new book, Pledging My Time, a collection of interviews mostly with musicians who played with Dylan at one time or another over the last 60 years or so.

By STEVE PAUL

(c) 2023

So many questions, so much anticipation, hovered around the launch of another round of Bob Dylan’s “Rough and Rowdy Ways” shows. His surprise turn at Farm Aid last weekend, when he slung a Strat from his shoulder and did old Dylan—“Maggie’s Farm,” “4th Street,” “Thin Man”—with Tom Petty’s band gave many Bob watchers pause. Would he pick up a guitar again on the new tour? Would he mine his deep catalogue to freshen the set list? What new Bob baubles await?

            I doubt that I was the only person wondering if Dylan would pay tribute to the late Robbie Robertson. What song from the Band or JRR would we hear? (None, as it turned out.)

            It never occurred to me, however, that the only new spin we’d hear at Kansas City’s Midland Theater, in the first of two concerts leading off this leg of RARW, would be—who saw this coming?—“Kansas City.” Yes, Dylan rode the local war horse, with its “crazy little women,” and he and the band served it up with gusto.

            Almost every traveling band blurts out the obligatory number, few with the sincerity and verve Dylan brought to it Sunday night. Even Dylan’s previous and apparently only other version of it, with Petty and the Heartbreakers as long ago as 1986 at an outdoor amphitheater in the Kansas City exurbs, had a kind of slap-dash informality to it. (As we now can hear in the recently released soundboard recording from that show.)

            Here, 37 years later, Dylan opened this gig with the Lieber-Stoller classic, giving it a force that seemed to ignite the capacity crowd of nearly 3,000. The audience stayed on his side the rest of the way. I was struck by the enthusiasm of younger listeners, some hearing Dylan for the first time, as I learned on the way out.

            Dylan spent the entire concert standing or sitting at a baby grand piano in the center of the stage, the band arrayed around him against a backdrop of red curtains and the hall’s ornate elegance. He seemed engaged and in great spirits, offering numerous “why thank yous” to the repeated ovations. There were no changes in the recent sideman lineup: the guitarists Doug Lancio and Bob Britt; Donnie Herron on fiddle and pedal steel, which never seemed to rise enough in the mix; the bassist Tony Garnier; and the solid, unflashy drummer Jerry Pentecost. 

            After “Kansas City,” the setlist reverted to the basic tour template more or less. Gone was “Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine),” which has usually followed the usual opener, “Watching the River Flow.”

            The songs from “Rough and Rowdy Ways” took their places in the familiar tour sequence, intermingling with Dylan classics—the shifting dynamics of “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” which Dylan accented with a few mouth-harp verses; a typically sinister “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”; and a sweet “To Be Alone with You.”   

            This was a strong concert, at least equal to and at times better than what I’d heard in Tulsa in 2022 and comparable to some of the high points I’ve caught on numerous tour bootlegs.

            The guttural guitar lines and spoken, splattered vocals of “False Prophet” put Dylan’s demonic, noirish themes in memorably high relief. A sparely arranged “Black Rider,” with Garnier becoming more aggressively present on upright bass, and an energetic “My Own Version of You,” with its late-night stroll on “Armageddon Street,” re-emphasized the infernal landscapes of Dylan’s darker visions. “Crossing the Rubicon” elevated Dylan’s long devotion to the blues.

            The “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” I’d heard in Tulsa serves as the ideal baseline for this surreal outlaw epic and Sunday’s version nearly matched it. The loping pace, the shaded humor, the masterful phrasing add up to a complete package and perhaps the most powerful performance of both the record and this particular show.

            After “Key West” and some band noodling, Dylan tossed another local bone to the audience: “I’m trying to get it together,” he said. “I just had too much Kansas City barbecue.” I can’t imagine the Erie, PA, crowd, to pick on one forthcoming tour stop, getting such friendly attention.

            From there Dylan launched into a rocking, cheer-inducing “Gotta Serve Somebody.” 

            It’s hard to resist the abiding tenderness of “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You.” Or the Nobel laureate’s slant tributes to poetry—“I Contain Multitudes” and “Mother of Muses.” (After two years on this tour, it seemed odd to me that Bob Britt needed to dial up the iPad for the latter.)

            Another tribute: Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” which so far seems to be Dylan’s most often played cover on the tour setlist. 

            Along with its bright look at love, that song suggests a subtext of the inexorable passage of time. From “Watching the River Flow” to the concert closer, “Every Grain of Sand” (an awkwardly rendered version here), one could marvel at Dylan’s time-resistant vigor. For many of us, it seemed almost urgent to catch this concert. Would it be our last chance? At the end, Dylan stepped out from behind the piano to the front of the stage, took a bow, and shambled away.

P.S.: Bootleg audio recordings quickly surfaced of Dylan’s new version of “Kansas City” and of the whole Kansas City show (findable on YouTube). Close Dylan watchers have also distributed bootleg recordings of at least two of the Chicago shows and more to come.