Bob Dylan in Detroit, 2026 (and his incredible new Patreon posts)

Last month, the composer Bernard Rands passed away. His gravestone was already in place at Graceland Cemetery several months ago, and was instantly added to my walking tours, even though he wasn’t dead yet. Normally I don’t feature graves placed pre-need, but this one I couldn’t resist, because I love the epitaph he picked for himself: “Composer Now Decomposing.”

Years back, Rands gave an interview in which he said “Beethoven didn’t know everything that was in his music. How could he?” Dylan is the same way. Liz C. and I were discussing how playing “Man in the Long Black Coat” in the same set as “Black Rider” makes for a whole new context for those songs. Is the man in the long black coat the black rider now?

Anytime we go on like this, people ask if we think Dylan planned these things. Who knows? Did he intend for “To Be Alone With You” to be changed by having it come right after “My Own Version Of You?” Some nights it felt like he was singing to the creature he’d created in the last song, sometimes it was to the “You” who was about to be replaced by Bob’s own version. Some of this sort of thing I imagine he does consider when he puts a setlist together, or while he’s singing the songs, but whether it’s what he really has in mind is anyone’s guess, and he’s not going to give us an answer key. But even he doesn’t know everything that’s in his music. How could he? The first thing on the back of the album is “I Contain Multitudes,” which after this tour began I started to see as a label, like “Drink Me.”

Anyway, to check an item off my rock n roll bucket list, I “hitchhiked” from Saginaw in a car with Graham from the UK, Sergi from Barcelona, and Selena from Canada. (By coincidence I will be at the New Jersey turnpike in four days). It’s fun to travel with Graham; he asks everyone he meets if they’ve heard of Bob Dylan. It’s like he’s an evangelist, asking “Have you heard the good news about Bob?” I keep thinking he should print up some cartoon booklets.

Speaking of evangelists, the Michigan landscape is dotted with billboards about abortion and sheriffs. We passed one that said “Caged by Lust? Jesus can help” with a picture of Jesus’s hands and no real hint of how he was going to use his hands to help with your lust. It’s a true gift for one’s inner seventh grader.

The show in Detroit was in an old Masonic temple where people in the hall can see right into the stalls in the womens’ bathroom, which is probably a sign that the freemasons didn’t have women in mind when they built it. But the theater portion is a lovely auditorium. I took a seat with Graham and met the Adam from Toronto.

The show opened as before, with Anton on stage first, and Bob walking out in his white hoodie, unleashing a rager of a “To Be Alone With You,” followed by a “Man in the Long Black Coat” with no lyric flubs (the houselights again went down right after the first verse).

It’s hard to write a new review, because the show was very similar to last night in Saginaw. Wildly inventive and particularly energetic work from Bob. I can only really name the highlights: a wild “I Can Tell” (which Adam from Toronto pointed out sounded like “Odds and Ends”), a great “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” a delicate and gorgeous “I’ve Made Up My Mind,” and some of the most creative and thoughtful singing on “Every Grain of Sand” that I’ve ever seen. “Goodbye Jimmie Reed” started out seeming like it might be a momentum killer, but was rescued by some really imaginative takes on the vocals mid-way and beyond. It was barely a week ago in Iowa City that I felt as though the new show was still coming together. Now we are witnessing “the firepower of this fully armed and operation battle station.” Bob is standing up more, even bopping to the music. The mic issues persist, in that occasionally one line will bill notably quieter than the previous one, but they’re always fixed very quickly.

In Saginaw the harp solo on “Masterpiece” whipped the audience into a frenzy, so of course Bob didn’t play any harp on it tonight. Instead, he waited until the end of the last song to break out the harp, as he often did in Fall of 2023. Just like it did then, finally playing harp prompted a thunderous roar from the audience, arguably the first thing a casual fan would really recognize as a Dylan trademark, like he’s finally peeking out to say “Yep, it’s been me, Bob Dylan, this whole time!”

The show was the equal of last night’s Saginaw banger, and the crowd was particularly responsive, shouting out and cheering after many individual lines and verses. But people who travel to a lot of shows (like, a lot more than i do) are always saying Michigan crowds are particularly uptight, and that’s about been my experience. The practice of waving lighters at concerts is often said to have started on Dylan’s 1974 tour, but in Detroit a woman was ejected for it. No one told me that nodding my head was giving them an anxiety attack, as someone did last night, so it was easier for me to relax and get into the show, but the people dancing on the floor were told to sit down by security early on, and no garage rock icons were walking around telling people about all their past lives, at least as far as I know. So to compare Detroit to Saginaw, we had was a similar (great) performance in a more ornate venue, but with a somewhat less interesting atmosphere.

After the show, while wandering the sidewalks of Detroit with Liz and Jacob, we saw a fight break out in a liquor store, and a man dragged out of a club with his pants pulled down. He stood there, propped up by his friends in his black briefs, too drunk to operate his trousers. You really do have some adventures when you travel to Bob Dylan concerts.

Back at the airbnb we talked about Dylan’s recent Patreon posts, the short story “The Bull Rider” and the imaginary letter from Mark Twain to Rudolph Valentino. At the airport the other day I’d tried asking some AI bots to write a story about a bull rider “in the style of Bob Dylan’s prose works,” and got a few stories that were similar in style to (but not as good as) the “Bull Rider” story.

Now, whether this makes it more likely that these “curated” stories involve AI or more likely that they don’t is one of those things like saying “Everything I say is a lie” that makes computers explode in cartoons. One possibility is that Bob started the bull rider story by asking a program to write in his style, then fixed it up. And again, we have to ask wether building a story from lines designed to imitate his own style, having been trained on his own works, would be better or worse than using lines from a Henry Timrod poem. All I know is that it would be funnier. (Some people have suggested that the word “Bull” in the title might be a clue, and that Dylan is using the same “riding/ writing” pun he seems to employ in “All the Tired Horses.”)

Trolling has always been a skill of Bob’s, after all. I think there’s some of it in the current setlist. Most artists his age end up dropping “the new songs” after a tour or two, either to make room for the next batch of new songs or to have more room for old classics. After five years Dylan has cut back the number of Rough and Rowdy Ways songs, but he also cut most of the 1960s and 70s songs he was playing and replaced them with songs from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2010s. Now there are even fewer old classics in the show, arguably the least he’s had on any tour in 45 years. Maybe it’s trolling, and maybe it’s just him doing exactly what he feels like doing, which is what I hope he keeps doing.

But as I turned that all around in my head on the drive home, new stuff was added to the Patreon that changes everything.

ON THE NEW PATREON POSTS:

The morning after the show I listened to Goose with fan club founder Caroline at the airbnb, and to Geese with my longtime partner in crime Michael Glover Smith in his car as we started the our trek back to Chicago. We were almost finished with the drive when some new Patreon material was posted, including a “Letter Never Written” from James Baldwin to Walt Disney and a short story credited to “Anthony Swilly.”

While I could probably be convinced that “The Bull Rider” had some AI use in the chain someplace, these ones seemed like pure Dylan.

The letter, in particular, comes off as a voice from the mountain, like one of the “finger pointing” songs he said he was going to stop writing in about 1964, as “Baldwin” points a finger at Walt’s sanitizing and whitewashing of history and reality. “You have taken the oldest American impulse - the refusal to look at what one has done - and given it a soundtrack, a color palette, and a procession of smiling animals….. no past interrupts the perpetual present of your cheerful mythology. You have not created fantasy so much as you have embalmed reality.” In the end, the letter says “You have chosen comfort over confrontation, myth over memory, and in doing so, you have helped sustain a national dream that cannot survive being awakened. The trouble is that awakening will come, whether invited or not. Reality is patient in ways fantasy cannot afford to be. And when it arrives, it will not sing.”

This is probably the most blatantly political thing Dylan has written in years. I gotta say, I didn’t think that when he came back to finger-pointing songs he’d be pointing at Walt Disney. But you would have to do some real acrobatics to say that the letter isn’t saying exactly what Dylan thinks of the current state of affairs.

By contrast, the short story, “Frozen Pizza,” is a poignant, Sherwood Anderson-style slice of life in a small Minnesota small town with some great humorous touches. It begins: “In the town of Larkspur—population 2,143 if you counted the Lundgren twins separately, which most folks did except on Sundays when they dressed alike and confused the ushers—there was a small grocery store called Halvorson’s Market, a place where time moved at the speed of conversation and the freezers hummed like a choir that had given up on perfection but not on faith.”

Of interest here, to me, is that in the Tulsa archives is a small notebook from the late 60s in which Dylan wrote out a list of town characters, such as Cousin Billy Pinkerton, who works in scrap metal and plays in a local “rockabout” band. There are a few snatches of song lyrics about these characters, but no real hint as to what he was planning to do with them. A book? A musical? And album?

What I do know is that no AI engine has access to those notebooks, and that, even though it’s 60 years later, “Frozen Pizza” sounds exactly like what he was taking notes for.

Now, does he even remember those notes? I have no idea. I didn’t transcribe much of them, so I’m not sure there’s any overlap here. While I didn’t bother to look up whether “Anthony Swilly” is a real guy (you’d have to get up pretty early in the morning to convince me he was), I wouldn’t see any more reason to suspect the use of AI in its creation than I would in any other short story. But it’s a part of reality now: ANY piece of writing can be accused of using generative AI. In some corners of the internet it’s generally assumed that anything with an em-dash or a simile is AI now, as if those haven’t been in use before.

(There is also a new 59 minute audio post in the voice of Jack London but damn it I’m too tired for that).

BACK TO REALITY:

I am now at home after a three day run that felt like three weeks, minimum. Right before embarking I spent a week in New York with an enormous school group, taking them to see The Great Gatsby musical, where Eva Noblezada has returned as Daisy, playing her as about five years and fifty-thousand cigarettes older than Sarah Hyland’s excellent rendition last year. In the opening number the revelers sing “Where’s the party and can you take me there? And when the party’s over can you find another party somewhere?”

Those lines lived in my head from Thursday to Sunday. I suppose that’s how we always live when we’re following a tour, but I feel like this particular road trip vacillated between feeling like Almost Famous and Wonder Boys and I’m not sure which character I was in the whole thing. It was downright disorienting. Maybe it’s because I’d already been on the road a week, maybe it’s the major shakeups in my career and personal life that were happening at the same time, or maybe there was just something in the Michigan water.

Naturally I’m checking my calendar and my pay checks, seeing if I can work in another show somewhere this spring. I want to see this show continue to evolve and I want to see more of my friends and have more adventures, wandering in strange cities and taking rides from strangers to places with plaid carpet on the walls where we can talk about the implications of putting one song next to another in a setlist. 101 concerts and nights like this could never be enough, even though I had to see that one guy’s underpants. The world is large. It contains multitudes.