Anyone who has seen Bob Dylan live recently should know that he doesn’t give his audiences what they want, he gives them what they need. And what they need is no witty banter, no interruptions, and no huge stage production. It’s just Bob Dylan, plain and simple. Anything else would feel inauthentic.
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So, fans have been delightfully surprised by the addition of city-specific covers during the recent run of his Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour. The covers are either titularly city-specific, or the artist is from that particular city or state. This is something Dylan has done a few times before, but not to this scale.
According to a report from The New York Times, he began on October 1 in Kansas City, Missouri with a rendition of “Kansas City,” made famous by Wilbert Harrison. He then played “Johnny B. Goode” a few nights later, an homage to St. Louis-born Chuck Berry. In Chicago, he opened with “Born in Chicago” by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.
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“It’s crowd-pleasing in a way we don’t expect,” author Ray Padgett, who writes a Bob Dylan concert newsletter, said to the NYT. “It’s almost unprecedented.” Additional covers by Dylan include “Longest Days” by John Mellencamp in Indianapolis (Mellencamp is from Indiana); “South of Cincinnati” by Dwight Yoakam in Cincinnati and Akron, Ohio; Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love” in Montreal (Cohen was a Montrealer); and in Manhattan he played the first few lines of Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind.”
Dylan has been focused on his 2020 Rough and Rowdy Ways album for his regular setlist, playing the album almost to completion. He notably omits the 17-minute track “Murder Most Foul,” which is about John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The covers are an interesting design choice, though, as they serve to ground the show in the present while also showcasing the past: the covers are mostly by deceased musicians, many of whom were Dylan’s contemporaries.
The New York Times posits a similar theory: is Dylan paying homage to the cities hosting him, or to the people who made the songs famous? Is it something new and fun for the fans (doubtful), or is there a deeper meaning behind the covers? Perhaps Dylan wants to bring past and present aspects of his life together for this tour, or maybe he just wants to play songs he likes. Either way, fans are pleasantly surprised by the new additions.
(Featured Image by Christopher Polk/Getty Images for VH1)
