2021-2025: The Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour - Bob Dylan
Things aren't what they were
This tour has always had an air and sense of finality about it.
How could it not have when Dylan was 80 when it started, and will be 84 when it next resumes in October, but even the album it is named for came to us at the end of the world. In those early days of our locked-down planet, a world with no certainty in sight and no way of knowing whether we'd ever get to see our hero again or if we would only be able to keep his liminal voice as a comfort from a distance whilst the world closed down and crumbled all around us.
When finally he returned to the stage, late in 2021, the beginning of the tour could easily have been the end of the road, as well. As I made my way to New York—so recently and uncertainly reopened to foreign visitors—to sit in the Beacon Theatre and catch one more stolen moment with the king, there was no way of knowing how long the tour would be able to go on for, such was the unlikeliness of even being in a room with that many people in the post-COVID 19 world. In reality, this really wasn’t only the beginning, but the top of the end.
Fast forward a year and whilst Dylan hadn't yet left America, he had continued to bring his songs to the people. Perhaps his days of leaving his home continent were to be curtailed by travel restrictions and public health precarity, instead forcing him to stay home and play out his Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour in a similar vein to the America-only baseball World Series.
But he did make it to Europe, eventually, and I made it to Amsterdam, before we both returned to London for four wonderful nights at the Palladium. The last one had that sense of finality, again, where Dylan returned improbably for one, two and then three curtain calls to an adoring audience who had no way of knowing they weren't saying “thank you, we love you” and “goodbye” for the final time.
As the tour was slated to run from 2021 to 2024, there was no sense of closure at the end of the 2023 legs of the tour, except that which will always be at the back of your mind when sharing a room with a performer who is comfortably into his 80s and not getting any younger.
After a few months off the road at the start of 2024, Dylan picked up where he left off and then some. His shows through the American south, of which I caught performances in Orlando, Nashville and Memphis, were thunderous, ungodly and yet godlike in all their calamitous power, and their raging glory. Over the last few years I had, improbably, been there to witness so many shifting shows on this Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour, in New York in 2021; Amsterdam, London, Oxford and Dublin in 2022, Tokyo and Carcassonne and Philadelphia and Newark in 2023 and then in Orlando, Nashville and Memphis in 2024.
Then, without any fanfare or statement of closing, finality or conclusion to the long run of shows, Dylan was announced as a headline act on Willie Nelson's summer Outlaw Tour and it seemed that the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour was over. Those of us who are inclined to doing such things eulogised the tour and wrote of its importance in the context of Dylan's career; spoke in reverent tones about the breadth of the arrangements and the malleability of the songs, if not the setlist and mourned the performances of songs such as Mother of Muses or I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You.
At the end of the Memphis show, I leaned against the stage whilst the crew packed up the piano, guitars, amps and drums, ready to get on to the next city and the next show, and thought about these musical friends I'd made over the last few years. Surely, now that it was all over, Dylan wouldn't be bringing all of these songs back to whatever he did next.
But, great endings usually have a twist in the tale before the final finishing end is at hand. So many plots and tales feature shock resurrections and rebirths, and so too, did the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour. As I took my seat in the front row of Prague's O2 Universum in October, it was with a mix of excitement and comfort. The poster said Rough and Rowdy Ways but, after all the surprises and revivals on the Outlaw Tour, who knew what to expect? Whilst all of Dylan's most recent songs remained, it was out with the old and in with the otherly old as in came songs like All Along the Watchtower, Desolation Row, It's All Over Now Baby Blue and, most surprisingly, Dignity, making their Rough and Rowdy Ways debuts.
Ironically, the one show where the rumours persisted beforehand that this was it, the end of the line and the end of the road entirely, was the performance with the least feeling of farewell hanging over the evening’s proceedings. Before Dylan took to the stage for the last time at London's Royal Albert Hall last year, the air was thick with rumours that he was retiring. The whispers had started in Prague and built up to a roar by the time the tour rolled into London town. No one seemed to have told Dylan, though, as he didn't seem to treat his final show of 2024 like anything other than just another gig in his schedule.
Then, the roar returned to a whisper, but a much more certain one. It was spoken in knowing, hushed and certain words: Dylan was finally retiring from the road for real, this time. Word was leaking out from those in the know, and there was just time for one more farewell show, in Tulsa, OK. That was it. The end of the line. One date and one date only was announced, under the Rough and Rowdy Ways banner, and we were told to get ourselves there by hook or by crook. To either get ready for elimination or else we must have the courage for the changing of the guards.
But, just like the year before, talk of Dylan’s retreat from the state was premature. Before he stepped out in front of his audience for the first time in the year, he had not only announced a full slate of Rough and Rowdy shows to run through North America in the spring, but also been booked back to another summer of Outlaw duty with Willie.
Starting in Tulsa and rolling through places that other artists of his stature have never even heard of, like Eau Claire and Kalamazoo, IL or Mankato, MN, Dylan could be heard bringing his apocalyptic songs to the stage again before long, and asking the question that “are these not songs for times like these?”
And indeed they are. Dylan, so famed for his topical songs of the 60s, that spoke so directly to their time, now writes songs more for the ages. He has taken a step back, stepped outside of time almost, and begun to write songs about all mankind. His lyrics weave in narratives that are hundreds or thousands of years old and blends them with images from the relative present day. He's no longer the spokesman of his generation, but for all generations. These are not just songs for our time, but for all time.
And so, once more, after a summer spent on the Outlaw Tour, it seems that Dylan will be back for another Rough and Rowdy round and, much like in the spring, he is bringing the show to places he has either never been before, or to places that rarely play host to quite such major artists anymore; Swansea, Leeds, Brighton, Belfast and Coventry.
The three nights in Swansea, his first in the city, have sold out before they have even gotten to general sale. As Bob Dylan makes his first recorded visit to the city that gave us his namesake Dylan Thomas, he is not merely raging against the dying of the light but emitting a supernova brightness all of his own.
Dylan has lived long enough to see his work eulogised and canonised in his own time—although, it seems, this was something which started almost as soon as he began the work—and most recently in the form of the ever-popular West End jukebox musical Girl From the North Country. Another hero of mine, and one of Britain's bravest, most honest and reliable MPs, Zarah Sultana was recently in the audience for a performance of the play. Perhaps she'll again be in attendance as Dylan plays a show in her Coventry constituency for the first time since she was two years old. If he does, hopefully he'll perform a song that is perhaps more apt for times like these than any other in his arsenal, and one that Sultana herself so often invokes in speeches and pleas to the House of Commons, Masters of War.
With all the sense of finality that has circled around the skull of the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour from the start, from the false goodbyes and “thanks for everything”s, and “who knows if we'll be passing back this way again”s, over the years, this time, there is a less of a sense of all that, and more of a sense of triumphant celebration. Of comfort and contentment. We're beyond the end of the road, now, and every further turn, every further twist and bend and bump is a blessing. One to be enjoyed; to be cherished and accepted, rejoiced upon, to be loved and nothing more. As Dylan himself sings, night after night, “I've already outlived my life by far”.
For over thirty years before this Rough and Rowdy Ways de-tour, Dylan had been on the so-called Never Ending Tour. That one was ended by the Pandemic, cut down in its prime, but this one truly feels like it might just roll on forever.
Tickets for Bob Dylan’s upcoming leg of the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour go on sale on Friday morning, at various times depending on where you are in the world. Check bobdylan.com for ticket information, and keep an eye on this thread on Expecting Rain for pre-sale codes and links. There are plenty out there already, with sales happening for the shows in Helsinki, Amsterdam, Paris, Belfast, Dublin and Glasgow.
So far I’ve got tickets for my 30th and 31st Rough and Rowdy Ways shows, in Paris, and hope to add tickets in Brighton and Coventry this week, too. See you on the road in the winter, and then, who knows where Dylan will take us in 2026. Hopefully South America or back to Japan.