Watching The River Flow part 6: “Life is so transient”

Previously in this series…

by Jochen Markhorst

VI “Life is so transient”

“If I’m here at eighty, I’ll be doing the same thing. This is all I want to do — it’s all I can do,” Dylan says in May 1986, in the month he turns 45.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is rather silly, a bit insulting even, but Dylan has been asked since the 1970s how long he plans to go on – suggesting that he is now getting too old for rock music. “I’ll just be doing this until the fire’s burnt out. Muddy Waters is still playing, he’s 65-66. If those people can do it, I don’t see why I can’t,” he says in April 1978 in Australia – he then is 36.

It’s true, as we now know. Dylan will start the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour 2021-2024 November 2021 when he is 80, in April 2024 interrupting the tour for 27 shows with Willie Nelson and the Outlaw Music Festival Tour, June to September 2024, and returning for the last leg of the R&RW Tour, October and November ’24 in Europe, as an 84-year old.

The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour is a special tour. The addition “2021-2024” in the announcement is already unique – we haven’t seen that in 60 years of Dylan tours. Equally remarkable is the setlist, which is more or less fixed for all 230 concerts, all nine legs of the four-year tour.

We remember the times when setlists changed night by night, depending on the mood of the day. Even on days when Dylan does two shows, he usually radically flips the playlist. March 2000 in Anaheim, for example: the late show has nine different songs from the early show. A week later in Reno, he takes only four songs from the afternoon to the evening, replacing 11 songs. And we know plenty of stories of band members telling how Dylan decides on the spot, on stage and without consultation, which song will be played. “We did work off a set list, but they were more suggestions than locked in. Instead of the Ten Commandments, it was the Ten Suggestions,” as Gary Burke says of the Rolling Thunder Revue (in Ray Padgett’s unsurpassed Pledging My Time, 2023).

Deeper into the twenty-first century, however, the setlists become more static. Roughly until Tempest (2012), Dylan runs the shows with about 30 songs in his suitcase, from which about 17 to 18 songs are taken each night. Around the “Sinatra records” (Shadows in the Night 2015, Fallen Angels 2016 and Triplicate 2017), the evenings become longer (usually more than 20 songs), and even more static. A tour’s setlist is fairly fixed, Dylan and his band working through virtually identical playlists over two months during concert series like the 2016 US Fall Tour or the 2017 Europe Spring Tour. The indispensable Olof Björner neatly keeps track of everything, providing statistics as well – including data like “2 new songs (9%) compared to previous concert. 1 new song for this tour”. Data showing, among other things, that as Dylan’s age and the twenty-first century progress, the percentages of “new songs compared to previous concert” become lower and lower.

Of flexibility, then, there will be virtually nothing left in 2021-2024. Roughly 90% of the songs are fixed, an average setlist usually looks like:

1              “Watching the River Flow” (performed 226 times, mostly as the opening)
2              “Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine” (200)
3              “I Contain Multitudes” (230)
4              “False Prophet” (230)
5              “When I Paint My Masterpiece” (229)
6              “Black Rider” (230)
7              “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” (200)
8              “My Own Version of You” (230)
9              “To Be Alone with You” (229)
10           “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” (230)
11           “Gotta Serve Somebody” (198)
12           “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” (230)
13           “Melancholy Mood” (74) or “That Old Black Magic” (81)
14           “Mother of Muses” (230)
15           “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” (209)
16           “Every Grain of Sand” (224)

… plus in between two varying songs – almost every night has 18 songs on the programme. “Early Roman Kings” comes along 21 times, for example, and “Simple Twist of Fate” one single time, for the last leg “It Ain’t Me, Babe”, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “All Along the Watchtower” are unexpectedly reanimated (all 28 nights), and otherwise mostly covers.

A total of 29 different covers, of which Johnny Cash’ “Big River” is the winner with 21 performances, and Grateful Dead is the number one supplier (five songs, played a total of 27 times – their signature song “Truckin’” with the classic line “What a long strange trip it’s been” is Dylan’s favourite with seven renditions).

Bob Dylan – Truckin’, Indianapolis 2023:

Striking about the cover selection is not only the relative unfamiliarity of some of the choices (the Bob Weir/Josh Ritter song “Only a River”, Merle Haggard’s “Footlights”, Dwight Yoakam’s “South of Cincinnati”), but especially the ones that show a side of Dylan we don’t expect: Bob Dylan the Audience Pleaser. More than once, he adapts the setlist to his audience. On 6 and 7 October 2023, he opens in Chicago with “Born in Chicago” of his old friends from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the week before he opened in Kansas City with “Kansas City”. In Chuck Berry’s St. Louis “Johnny B. Goode”, in New York he plays a snippet of Billy Joel’s “New York State Of Mind”, and in John Mellencamp’s native Indiana Mellencamp’s “Longest Days”.

Apart from those varying surprises, about 90% of the setlist is pretty much fixed for four years. And it has every appearance that Dylan is weaving some kind of sub-theme into it. Main theme is – of course – the latest album Rough And Rowdy Ways, of which he plays all the songs (except “Murder Most Foul”, for obvious reasons). However, the songs around it seem to have been chosen with a particular intention. Theme: the Loneliness at the End of Life, or the Volatility of Existence; something like that. Put a bit more poetically:

“The long strange trip of the naked ape. Not to be light on it, but everybody’s life is so transient. Every human being, no matter how strong or mighty, is frail when it comes to death. I think about it in general terms, not in a personal way.”
(Douglas Brinkley interview New York Times, June 2020)

Indicated, this underlying idea, not only by the choice of songs, but by the changes in lyrics as well. After all, at first glance it is remarkable that from his vast repertoire, the Old Master chooses precisely these songs to shine in that Rough And Rowdy Ways setting. Nothing wrong, of course, with older songs like “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” or “Gotta Serve Somebody”, but they shine a bit less than, say, “Visions Of Johanna” or “Not Dark Yet”.

At second glance, however, the songs seem to have been selected on the tenor of the lyrics, which should fit such a sub-theme like “The long strange trip of the naked ape”. At least: the protagonists of songs such as “Watching The River Flow” and “When I Paint My Masterpiece” are lonely and reflective, and the lyrics even seem adjusted accordingly; in Masterpiece, for the first time in 50 years, the narrator is no longer in a hotel room with Botticelli’s niece or with a “pretty little girl Greece”, but rather all alone. Intentionally; “Gonna lock the doors and turn my back on the world for awhile”. Just as the narrator in “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” locks out the world (“Shut the light, shut the door, shut the shade”), and in “Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine”, as the title suggests, goes his own way.

The most radical lyric change also seems to have been inspired by the choice of that sub-theme. “To Be Alone With You” was back then, in 1969 on Nashville Skyline, a cloudless country anthem, but has undergone a complete transformation and is now a brooding, gothic thriller with gory undertones and a dark protagonist alone “in a castle high in an ivory tower”.

And concluding the portrait of the reflective old man is Dylan’s 80s masterpiece “Every Grain Of Sand”, the philosophical sister of “Watching The River Flow”, the dramatic monologue of the jaded man at the end of his life, realising that his journey is over, that bitter dance of loneliness, discerning forgotten faces in the broken mirror, concluding resignedly with it’s only me – the insight that we are all alone in the end, the proclamation of impermanence and existential loneliness from “To Be Alone With You”, “Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine”, “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, and from the motto that will be on every concert poster from 2021: “Things aren’t what they were…”, right above the allegorical depiction of the ultimate memento: Death.

The recognition, in short, that everything passes, the nostalgic lament from “Truckin’” (“What a long strange trip it’s been”) – the motif that drives Dylan to open almost every concert with

This ol’ river keep a-rollin’, though
Where it stop and where the wind might blow
I sit right here
And watch the river flow.

Bob Dylan – Watching The River Flow, Lyon 2023:

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

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