Bob Dylan boasts far too many plumes in his leopard-skin pill-box hat to ever fall into true cultural irrelevance. That’s not to say, however, that the legendary singer-songwriter hasn’t left outsiders scratching their brows at times. After redefining the “breakup album” with 1975’s devastating Blood on the Tracks and closing out that decade with a string of minor studio triumphs, the ‘80s largely witnessed an evangelical Dylan either plunging headfirst into his faith (backed by gospel singers) or aimlessly wandering the musical desert—sometimes with friends like Tom Petty and the Grateful Dead in tow while sporting questionable sartorial choices, like that jacket from the cover of Empire Burlesque.
A celebrated stint as a Traveling Wilbury and return to form with 1989’s Oh Mercy rejuvenated his standing with critics and fans alike but offered little more than a weathervane’s guess at which way the wind would blow next for Dylan. By the early ‘90s, as Seattle exploded, Dylan dumbfounded the public by recording two acoustic albums of traditional covers, a move that might have felt rebellious had the actual performances not sounded like an exhausted retreat. As Dylan and friends gathered at Madison Square Garden in October 1992 to celebrate the first three decades of his career, a casual fan might have reasonably wondered if the legend’s best days weren’t already a thing of the past.
Of course, we now know what Bob Dylan had really been up to at that time: about 100 shows per year. After returning from Europe with Petty and the Heartbreakers in late 1987, Dylan and his band embarked the following June on what would come to be famously dubbed, to Dylan’s mild chagrin, “The Never Ending Tour.” This ongoing stretch of tour dates often gets reduced to a mind-boggling tally of years, legs, and performances, but mere number-crunching criminally short-changes the spirit of this journey. For nearly 40 years, Dylan and his band have bucked the trends of modern touring. Each night offers a chance to see the legend drop a bucket into a bottomless well of some of the greatest rock and roll songs ever composed, pulling in classics and deep cuts alike from across all eras of his career and often reworking how they’re performed between legs.
Stints in Dylan’s band, which has included famed players like G.E. Smith, Charlie Sexton, and Jim Keltner, among many others, are treated by fans like tours of duty are by military families. Die-hards frequently enter into good-natured, if not heated debate over the apexes and nadirs across more than 3,000 shows, dozens of which they may have actually attended themselves. While the Never Ending Tour cast nowhere near that daunting of a shadow at the time Dylan and his band rolled into Sony Music Studios in November 1994, it had already been established among his fanbase that any given Dylan performance had the potential to transcend into a singular experience.
Dylan and band headed to New York City to record their Unplugged session that November after closing out a marathon year of touring in New Orleans just two days prior. The musicians that traveled north with him included touring guitarist John Jackson, multi-instrumentalist Bucky Baxter, drummer Winston Watson, and Tony Garnier, Dylan’s longtime bassist and right-hand. Joining them on Hammond organ was none other than Brendan O’Brien, then best-known as a producer, engineer, and mixer for bands like Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots. After a closed rehearsal, the band taped live sets on back-to-back nights. The original Unplugged broadcast, which aired less than a month later on December 14th, as well as the subsequent 1995 UK and USA albums and eventual 2004 DVD release cherry-pick from across the two sets. In each case, the songs included (and their sequence) differ slightly or drastically from one another. For our purposes, we’ll consider the US CD release of Dylan’s MTV Unplugged as the document of choice, no doubt the format that’s received the most spins among both Dylanphiles and the Bob-curious alike.
The enduring principle of the Never Ending Tour is that it has never rested on Dylan’s unrivaled laurels as an artist or stature as a living legend. It’s all about hitting the road and bringing the show to anyone and everyone curious enough to click through the turnstiles. Still, there’s an undeniable moment when the audience comes to the realization: Fuck, that’s Bob Dylan. He took the stage those two nights in New York City dressed in all black, save for the floating, white polka dots on the dress shirt beneath his jacket. Atop a slight frame and spindly legs, we find a visage and profile familiar enough to be on a coin jangling in our pocket, his face etched and cheeks sunken from age but the hair as wild and untamed as ever above a pair of thick, black sunglasses Dylan won’t remove until finally exiting the stage. A guitar and harmonica holder dangling around the neck complete the iconography. It’s an almost paralyzing moment until the band shuffles into, in our case, “Tombstone Blues,” and we’re suddenly no longer gawking at Bob Dylan and instead bobbing along to the metaphorical exploits of character pairings as absurd as Belle Starr’s ghost and Jack the Ripper.
A bouncing beginning like “Tombstone Blues” sucks all the stuffiness right out of the room. It allows the band to find an early groove and flex as Dylan wraps his tongue around the song’s retinkered phrasing. The liveliness of the opener lingers as the band collapse into the delicate, sweet lament of “Shooting Star,” one of Dylan’s finest recent songs off Oh Mercy. Jokers and thieves alike would be taken aback by the sheer bluster of the foreboding “All Along the Watchtower.” Watson’s closing drums pound like the fists of Fate on an ancient city’s doors as the howling winds of O’Brien’s organ blow with portent. The laconic Dylan, flanked by Jackson and Garnier, then takes us back to the timeless “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” a gently rendered version that still manages to stir the soul as it acknowledges the winds of change forever at our doors. An audience member yells, “You rule!” And he’s not wrong. In these first four songs alone, Dylan has taken us from the chaos of Vietnam and the resignation of a regretful heart to an apocalyptic comeuppance and the eye of the tumultuous 1960s. Not a bad bang for your buck and a typical night on the Never Ending Tour.
It’s no secret that Dylan’s voice was largely shot by this point. And those who have never been able to look past the singer’s unconventional pipes won’t be converted by these renditions. However, longtime fans still have a soft spot for this era and these performances. Dylan’s voice had not yet matured into the gruff animal it would soon become on Time Out of Mind, and he’d moved beyond the shout-singing of earlier tours as well as, to some degree, the nasally buzzing that once informed every bad Dylan impression you’ve ever heard. There’s actually an incredible emotional range to Dylan’s voice here. He manages to conjure up a certain sweetness on the beautifully delivered “Shooting Star,” imbue every note of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” with a hard-earned weariness, and remain playful as ever on the snarky “Like a Rolling Stone,” even if he can’t quite deliver that emphatic “How does it feel?” as he once could.
What’s even more impressive is the fearlessness of Dylan’s singing on these recordings. He allows his voice to fully unfurl on “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” like a tattered flag flapping at full mast as he warns that the battle outside will “soon shake your windows and rattle your walls.” On anti-war anthem “With God on Our Side,” as vulnerable a moment as any here, Dylan clutches certain notes longer than listeners might expect at this stage in his career. And he full-blown wails through the final verse of “Desolation Row,” a powerful denouement as the accompaniment swells around him. For all his voice’s limitations and rough edges, the Unplugged sessions still mark some of Dylan’s most impassioned singing ever captured on record.
Those in attendance on these nights got to see history made beyond merely being present for Dylan’s Unplugged tapings. He rolled out the aforementioned “Tombstone Blues” for the first time since a slate of 1984 shows that yielded songs for that year’s forgettable Real Live album. Similarly, “With God on Our Side” had been shelved since ‘88 before Dylan and his band unexpectedly closed with it on night one. Though the feverish plucking of “John Brown” had worked its way back into sets in recent years, Unplugged may have been the first time many had heard this song, which had once been dormant for nearly three decades.
Audience members earned major bragging rights when Dylan shockingly debuted “Hazel,” a deep cut from 1974’s Planet Waves that nobody had on their setlist bingo card. Admittedly, it’s probably best that it never became a staple and remains an Unplugged outtake. On the other hand, Dylan and band also finally rolled out “Dignity,” a song that had eluded him during the Oh Mercy sessions a few years prior. Even as Dylan’s official Bootleg Series has shed light on the germination of the song, this rollicking take on the version O’Brien produced for a Dylan greatest hits compilation a year earlier still stands as the best recording ever laid down. As much as he and the band clearly enjoy delivering the classics in his canon, there’s another level of jubilation here as they breathe life into “Dignity” for the first time ever.
As Never Ending Tour regulars will attest, one of the novelties of Bob Dylan’s shows includes getting to hear songs, maybe one we’ve heard a thousand times before, performed in an entirely different manner. For instance, non-album cut “My Back Pages,” one of Dylan’s great early lyrical achievements, finds a lilting, countryish middleground between the austere original and the driving, poppier version from the aforementioned Madison Square Garden celebration. It’s a shame this version fell to the cutting-room floor. Another performance left off the album finds Blonde on Blonde rambler “I Want You” flipped on its head and transformed into a delicate, yearning ballad with Dylan slowing, pausing, and sweetly drawing out the titular plea of “I want you… so bad.” Dylan’s tinkering—some instances more successful than others—has helped keep the Never Ending Tour from growing stale for both fans and no doubt Dylan and his band, and occasionally he stumbles upon a truly beautiful, reinvigorating take on a classic.
Many fans might argue Dylan delivered a definitive performance of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” on Unplugged. It’s a version that shifts the focus onto Dylan, the original broadcast starting the song with a spotlight on him as the band waits in the shadows. As Dylan sings, we believe he could actually be the lawman protagonist in question, his straining voice dripping with fatigue as “that long, black train is pullin’ down” and his harp accenting the weight of that weariness and final hour. Rather than bog down the scene with harmonies, as most versions do, it’s just Dylan, a lone gunman at the end of the line, knocking out the song’s famed chorus as the band break into the evening’s most energetic jam.
Dylan’s trip to Sony Music Studios hasn’t gone down in the annals of Unplugged lore the way some other sets have. Though it resulted in his best-selling release in years, his band’s two-night residency neither broke the charts like Eric Clapton’s Unplugged album nor added to Dylan’s mythos in a profound way like Nirvana’s appearance had for Kurt Cobain a year earlier. These evenings were less about showing us another side of Bob Dylan and more about inviting a wider swath of listeners to join him on this new road he had been traveling down for some time already. It’s a highway that’s not only led to arenas, theaters, fairgrounds, and minor league ballparks, but one that’s taken surprise detours to an Oscar and Nobel Prize and even an onramp to a trio of the best albums of his career. The great irony of the Never Ending Tour ended up being that Bob Dylan ultimately found his direction home as a proverbial rolling stone.
