Bob Dylan's Long Hot Summer: What Is This Show?

“That’s how you want Bob Dylan, right? You don’t want him to be all cheesin’ and grinnin’ with you. You want him to be a little skeptical about the whole enterprise.”

- Barack Obama

What is this Bob Dylan’s Long Hot Summer 2026 tour about? All me a bit of a ramble.

Going into the first Outlaw tour two years ago, the rumor was that the promoters had told Bob that he had to play his early stuff, not his new album. On the opening night in Alpharetta I wondered if that that was why he’d played five 50s covers and four songs from his previous album of originals, and not one song from the 60s. In two years of thinking about it, I’m sure that’s what happened. The next night he brought in a couple more classics (or at least staples), but it still seemed like an absurd way to do a summer festival set. Which was part of what was great about it. Very few artists popular in the 60s and 70s are still bringing back album tracks from the 1990s.

Summer Stadium Shows are a genre unto themselves, and most every artist out there playing feel-good sets full of hits. The Long Hot Summer tour shows certainly stand apart from the archetype. And unlike the last two years, Bob is the headliner, the person most of the crowd has paid to see. People who’ve never seen Dylan or heard anything about his shows assume they’re getting a night full of songs from the 60s and 70s; in a given night there are two or three of his songs from the 60s; some nights when he opened with “Watching the River Flow” and closed with “Every Grain of Sand,” there was only one. When the opener is “To Be Alone With You” (as it has for the last week or two) “When I Paint My Masterpiece” is the lone 70s Dylan tune. There are several covers of oldies, but none of them are the kind where most listeners can join in and sing along, like when Lucinda Williams closes her set with “Rockin’ in the Free World.”

What’s he trying to say with this set? Michael Glover Smith called it a mix of “the last song you hear before you die and go to Hell, and 1950s high school dance songs.”

A few themes emerge when I look at the setlist and listen to the shows, and the first one is Men in Black. We’re getting “Man in the Long Black Coat” and “Black Rider,” two songs of mysterious men with the same fashion sense, right in the same set. Are these the same guy? Even if Bob wasn’t thinking of anything like that when he wrote “Black Rider,” are they the same guy in the context of this setlist? It makes sense if the man in the long black coat who left with a woman who didn’t even leave a note is also the guy being told to “go home to your wife, stop visiting mine.” (And maybe this pairing is why “Black Rider,” a song I never pictured as an outdoor stadium sort of song, is working so well).

There are a number of songs about a mysterious man traveling through strange terrain, battling the odds, meeting people named “Miss Pearl” and “Miss Mary Jane,” searching for something. “Trying to Get to Heaven” and “Crossing the Rubicon” could both be songs from the point of view of the Black Rider in this context. So could “I’ve Made Up My Mind…” where he’s traveling the long road of despair.

And mixed with the 1950s high school dance songs are two of his own dance tunes, “To Be Alone With You” and “Soon After Midnight.” These have something in common, at least in the 2021 rewrite of TBAWY: Murder. The rewrite goes from a dance number to “what happened to me darling? What was it you saw? Did I kill somebody? Did I evade the law?”

“Soon After Midnight” pulls a similar trick; after sounding like a lovely lilting tune, he’s singing about dragging Two Timin’ Slim’s corpse through the mud. The more I think of it the more this song seems of a piece with “Black Rider.”

I can imagine the Black Rider making short work of Two Timin’ Slim.

And if we want to go WAY off the deep end, this could even extend to “Trying To Get to Heaven.” Graley Herren sees the Time Out of Mind album as being full of murder ballads in which the speaker is awaiting execution for murdering his lover. I’d certainly never though of that, but I fully believe that there endless “correct” ways to interpret these songs, and in one of the early handwritten lyric drafts I saw in Tulsa, the first line in the song is “The air is getting hotter, the hangman’s hand is near.”

I could absolutely see most of the Dylan originals in this set as all being about the same man in black who can’t remember when he was born and forgot when he died, traveling on as he escapes the law, finally reaching contentment through love and commitment with “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself to You,” and settling down to a street named after a saint and reminiscing about how he fought his way out in “Goodby Jimmy Reed.” “Jimmy Reed” is an “I’ve finally won - I did amount to much and I had what it took when they threw everything they could at me” song. The alternating closing songs, “Every Grain of Sand” and “I Shall Be Released,” are both benedictory.

So is that the story in this set? The trials and tribulations of a Man in the Long Black Coat who hangs around old dance halls, occasionally kills people, and has to stay one step ahead of the people coming after him?

Of course, the songs that fit this theme are mixed in with those covers that don’t really fit this theme, and his summer favorite “Under the Red Sky,” and the two “hits,” “It Ain’t Me Baby” and “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” (They both fit the theme too, if I squint, but I do have to squint pretty hard at that point).

Any way you cut it, it’s a bold set to be playing on a summer stadium tour.

Many of us the Dylan community have social media pointing us right to the bad reviews this year - stuff the algorithm knows will get under our skin (many of us were pointed to the same bad review of a Paul Simon show, too). One person after another saying that Dylan doesn’t understand that people come to concerts to “vibe” to the hits while they scroll on their phones. They whine that he doesn’t talk, that he doesn’t have big video screens, that he keeps his hood on, doesn’t play “a single song anyone knows,” and that he doesn’t sound like he’s 23 anymore. In short, they don’t get the oldies show they expected to get. Yesterday I saw a person who said she had to google to see why “he looked like Adam Sandler’s grandfather.” (Did Google AI tell her that people often look like grandfathers when they’re 85?)

Now, there’s some truth in their claims about “what people expect.” If you didn’t realize that Bob Dylan has a 60+ year history of not doing what people expect, and didn’t trouble to look at recent setlists, you might go in thinking you were getting a nostalgia fest, like most every other show playing at the same venues this summer.

And it’s true that Dylan has seemed relatively grumpy ever since Outlaw began; I hadn’t seen him grinning like he did in Cincinnati since Austin 2024, the end of Rough and Rowdy Ways v1. (The resumuption that fall was a different sound and setlist, really Rough and Rowdy II). By the end of last summer he had a hoodie up and was hiding behind the piano completely. He’s hardly said a word onstage since last spring, when he said things like “We’re playing all the hits tonight” in a show that had just one song from his 50 most-played on Spotify.

And now we’ve had the band and crew drama this tour. While I imagine that if we all knew the whole story we’d probably sympathize with Bob Britt and Doug Lancio, it seems quite possible that since the first 4 year leg of the Rough and Rowdy Ways ended (it’s not been the same show since Outlaw), Bob has been frustrated with the band. He didn’t keep the 76 band for 78, after all.

I didn’t see the show where new guitarist Joel Paterson played all the guitar parts himself, but I’ve seen him with both Julian Lage and Jad Tariq. And what was most apparent in Cincinnati was the Dylan was really enjoying Joel’s work, with more guitar pyrotechnics than I’ve seen in a Dylan show since the Freddy Koella days in 2003-4. Does this point to a new era of Bob music, perhaps a new album where jazz guitar plays a prominent role? I’ve been trying to explain that seeing Dylan is like seeing Miles Davis for year; he uses his voice the way Miles used his horn.

I couldn’t guess what’s next, any more than I can guess whether Dylan really had any intention of a theme when he put this batch of songs together. Trying to guess what’s going on in his mind is a fool’s errand, and he’s never going to give us the answer key.

But what is apparent is that this is the show he wants to put on right now, and he’s never been one to “pander and play to the crowd,” as he sings, perhaps by way of explanation, in “Goodbye Jimmy Reed.” Much as I’ve loved shows by other acts who play all the hits recently, those shows haven’t made me look at the songs in a new light. They haven’t felt like I was witness an artist engaging in his craft in real time, creating something that adds to their canon. Even Bruce’s utterly fantastic “Land of Hope and Dreams” show, with its very explicit theme, didn’t bring out anything new in the songs. I didn’t feel like i was watching Bruce create and explore (he does that more in shows without the E Street Band).

Honestly, I’d personally love to see some more Basement Tapes songs in the Dylan set, or some different covers, or more of the songs that might fit this same set (“Moonlight,” maybe? “Where Teardrops Fall?” “Ain’t Talkin?”). But as a paying customer, I am paying to see Bob Dylan up there doing his thing, creating new art from old material. I can’t wait to see it again next week in Forest Hills.