Vintage Dylan Writings Update!

I’ll be heading to Iowa City on Wendesday, then hitting the three Michigan shows. Saginaw will be #100 for me, if all goes according to plan! I’m thrilled to be seeing it with friends and excited about the setlist and new arrangements that have kicked off this spring tour.

If only to have it all in one place, today I added about 60 of my old reviews onto this site, going all the way back to the 1990s. I’ve back-dated them all, usually to the day after the show, and kept from sending out alerts to subscribers every time a new one came up. Some were written for an ebook, some for Bill Pagel’s site, some for Ray’s site, some just for message boards. I haven’t found them ALL yet. But this covers most of them, including the shows from last spring and the UK 2024. Some of the more significant are the Atlanta Lightning Storm of 2003, my very long reviews of the 2001 shows, and Newport Folk Festival 2002, the show with the fake beard.

I’m reminded of the scene in Almost Famous where Lester Bangs reminisces about how he used to stay up all night writing thousands of words of goobledygook about the phases of Coltrane, “Just to fucking write, you know?” That’s what a lot of this stuff was!

As the years go on my reviews often became as much travelogues and road diaries as concert reviews. After all, in this day and age, most people can get the tape faster than than anyone can write out a whole review, so the function of reviews themselves has sort of changed. For me, I tend to focus on “wherefore this concert is different from all other concerts,” plus rambling travelogues of the towns we visit to see these shows, who I hang out with, and what sort of adventures we have in those towns. This is such a great hobby! I get insufferably snarky about small towns sometimes, but I’m also glad Dylan plays places like Peoria, Wolverhampton, and Swansea - places I’d never think to visit. Now and then I find one I love.

Some of these are definitely the work of a younger man, though I haven’t outgrown being snarky about small towns. Now and then I’ve written in an “Edit to add” note, but have generally just left things intact. Even the stuff I wrote a few years after the fact is about 20 years old now! How did that happen?

Anyway, poke through the archives here if you like, and I’ll be coming at you with some new reviews very soon!