By Tony Attwood
If you have been with Untold Dylan for a few years you’ll know about our Never Ending Tour Series. It is the first item highlighted on this site, just under the picture of the rising sun on every page. Click on the link and you will find yourself taken to an index of a staggering 142 articles published between February 2020 and January 2024. Click on the January 2024 article and at the end, you’ll find a link to those aarticles that made up the series.
So, given that the series is still online, and given that it costs you nothing to come and visit this site (and you are always welcome to leave comments too), why would you even think of buying not just “the book” but actually “the books” – three volumes containing the reviews of gigs that have made up this extraorindary series?
And indeed I wondered that, when Mike first told me of the project, and I kept wondering until I got my copies of Mike’s books, and then I realised: of course, he is right. We need the series in book form, not least because with the books, the Never Ending Tour is with me, always. I can pick the books up, look up a particular song and find Mike’s articles about it and relive that moment from this incredible, extraordinary world-musical-adventure.
But more, I can read the book as a book, in the way that I never read things (not even things I’ve written) on the internet. There is something much more satisfying about holding the book.
And, I have to add, I have already had the experience of sitting on a tube train (The Underground, The Metro, The Subway – whatever you call it – the electric railway that runs under London) and had a fellow traveller say, on seeing the book, “Hey where did you get that????”
Mike’s coverage of the tour via the 144 articles on the series, which appeared on this site over a four year period is utterly complete, and so yes, one can say about the tour, “but I can read this on the internet”. But having the books, and reading the words printed on paper, is different – and I say that as the guy who runs this website!
So why, even before I have read the whole of volume one, let alone, all three volumes, am I writing a review which in essence says “Buy these books!”
One very good reason for buying the books that comes to mind at once is that the series contains a brilliant index of all the songs performed and where and when they were performed. That’s not on the internet copy and is worth a lot in itself.
But beyond that, proud though I am to have seen the value of the series and thus published it on Untold, there is a lot to be said for having the books and going back through articles while not sitting at a computer. So far I have found myself not just reading volume 1 on the train, but also while waiting patiently for a dance to begin (for even at my advanced age, dancing is still one of my more mentionable hobbies), and because even now, with all my engagement with Dylan on this website and my own writing, I am still discovering ever more about Dylan, his music, and how I feel about his music. The book gives me that bit “more.”
For example, no I didn’t know that Bob was 47 years old when he first hit the road on what became the Never-Ending Tour. And there’s also the point that each concert is separate, and one can enter the world of the Tour at any point, to suit one’s enquiring mind as it meanders through history. (Or at least that’s what mine does).
But more than anything, although Mike and I have never met (we do after all, live literally a world apart) we do share certain feelings about Bob and other people’s reaction to Bob. Mike, for example, says, “I got about halfway through Clinton Heylin’s compendious ‘Behind the Shades” but gave up on it. I’d rather spend the time I had listening to the songs.”
And I felt, yes, I could have written that line myself. Perhaps for different reasons, but when I saw Mike’s citation of a comment from a 13th-century Persian poet of whom I had not heard, which read, “Study me as much as you like, you will never know me,” I thought yes, that is how I feel about Bob Dylan. And from my perception, that is exactly the opposite of how Heylin sees writing about Dylan.
For me, and I think for Mike (although we’ve never even spoken on the phone, at least not as far as I can remember, so I might be wrong on that point – but his day is my night, so it is unliely), the line, “I have chosen to dwell in a place you can’t see” is exactly how Dylan sees himself, and is exactly the opposite of how Heylin views Dylan.
The fact is my copy of volume 1 of the “Never Ending Tour” trilogy, now published by Mike, is already covered in underlinings, sometimes to help me remember facts but sometimes because of Mike’s insights, which I often feel everyone else is fully conversant with, but I have somehow missed. As he points out, we have been encouraged to believe that Bob was at the start of the tour, “lost and in search of directions,” But that is absolutely not reflected in the performances of 1982. And not for the first time do I find myself thinking, “I’ve been misled by all these other commentators, but never by Mike”. And indeed not just by other writers when commenting on Dylan, not just by the Dylan’s regular changes of direction, but by myself and my false memories. And then I think, thank goodness for Mike, always there putting out the other way of seeing things reminding me where I have gone wrong.
I have felt since the 2020 to 2024 period in which Mike was writing the reviews of the Never Ending Tour, how, if there were to be a god, which I don’t believe there is, and if He then, despite my disbelief, took a moment to smile down on me, and get Mike to write to me with the idea of his first unique series, how I could repay this god. The series incidentally can be read in full via the links found here – ) and then, as I ponederd how to fill the gap left by the end of that series, I got Mike’s proposal for the Never Ending Tour series.
Why he chose me to receive the series and have the honour of publishing it, I can’t say, but I remain eternally honoured. To be chosen as the publisher of the definitive, total, complete NET series is most certainly one of the ultimate high points of my work as a publisher.
Time and again Mike’s commentaries that we have published on Untold Dylan have led me back to the essence of Dylan’s performances, reminding me that it is one thing to know the song as a song (which I would argue I can do fairly well as a musician myself), but it is another thing altogether to express in words the meaning and the essence of the song and what is going on around it and to make that commntary of interest to non-musicians.
Maybe it reflects my own inadequacies as a publisher (a role for which I was never trained – it just happened) but I knew, yet had forgotten, that at the time of the start of the Tour, the media were full of highly misleading tales about Dylan being lost and in search of a new direction. Somehow that thought had got into my head too, and remained there even though I doubted its validity, until I read, early on in volume one of Mike’s masterpiece, that any sense of being lost was most certainly “not reflected in the performances of that year, which are full of power and vigour.”
I got that reminder on page 15 of volume 1 of Mike’s now published 3 volume series andand immediately flicked to the NET index on this site and was playing Forever Young from the very start of the tour.
It was indeed, as Mike said at the time, “Wonderful, to hear the way the voices of the girl chorus come floating in as we reach the end of the verses.”
That was just the start, and if you will stay with me I am going to write some more about this staggering three-volume collection of articles on the “Never Ending Tour”. If you can’t buy it for yourself, at the very least, put this book at the top of your Christmas list. But if you do, I’d be tempted to ask, “how can you bear to wait??”
———————-
The three volumes of “Bob Dylan’s Never Ending Tour” together cost £34.50 plus postage at £7.50 within the UK, totalling £42.00; although of course the three books are available separately.
The publisher is Lasavia Publishing and their website, wherein the books are of course listed, is https://lasaviapublishing.com/ If you have a query, you can email them directly at meggan@lasaviapublishing.com
I shall be writing a little more on the series as I continue to read, but it will take a bit of time, as I keep stopping to play the music.