Flagging Down the Double E's

Bob Dylan mostly recorded his first two standards albums, Shadows in the Night and Fallen Angels, with his road band. The only other players on the albums are a small horn section, who appear on a few tracks on each. Today, we hear from a few members of that horn section. They operate in a different recording world than Dylan: working off charts, union-scale pay, strict three-hour contracts, knocking out multiple sessions a day for different artists.

Today’s show 37 years ago has a unique distinction: It is the only Never Ending Tour show I know of where Bob Dylan only performed songs from the 1960s! Look at this setlist: Visions Of Johanna Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat Positively 4th Street I Want You Ballad Of A Thin Man Highway 61 Revisited Love Minus Zero/No Limit Baby, Let Me Follow You Down (Trad.) It’s … Keep reading with a 7-day free trial Subscribe to Flagging Down the Double E's to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free...

A Traveling Wilburys tour could have been one of the greatest tours of all time. You can picture it: They each do a short solo set to start, two or three songs apiece, maybe with a few duets thrown in. Then it builds to the main event, all five of them together onstage doing eight or nine songs from their two albums. The show ends with, inevitably, “End of the Line.” It almost happened too. “There were plans,” Wilburys drummer Jim Keltner (a “Sidebury”) told me. “Big plans.

Bob Dylan just announced his first shows at London’s Royal Festival Hall since 1964! Inspired by that, I’ve dusted off a draft I started a while back, looking at a similarly-named iconic London venue he’s played much more often… The Royal Albert Hall looms larger in Bob Dylan lore than it perhaps should. As you may already know, his most famous “Royal Albert Hall” show did not, in fact, take place at the Royal Albert Hall.

Today, the belated second entry in my decade-by-decade series about Bob Dylan concert posters. The 1960s were a wild ride, poster-wise. The 1970s, though, are more straightforward, largely because the tours were more discrete: 1974 with The Band, Rolling Thunder #1, Rolling Thunder #2, etc. As I did with the 1960s entry, I’ll start with the standard poster formats—the ones that Dylan’s people used for many shows—then share some favorite one-offs at the end.

Two things struck me listening to this subscriber-requested show (thanks James!) from an era I haven’t visited in ages.

Flagging Down the Double E’s is an email newsletter exploring Bob Dylan performances throughout history. Some installments are free, some are for paid subscribers only. Sign up here: We’ve been deep into 1986 all year—first my Australia/New Zealand series in February, then Dead scholar Jesse Jarnow’s four-parter on Dylan & The Heartbreakers & The Dead ’86, plus a loosie subscriber-request in the mix too (catch up on all those here).

Last night, Bob Dylan played the final show of the Long Hot Summer Tour in Nashville. Though the setlist didn’t change, he had one last surprise up his sleeve: opening act Jimmie Vaughan, who last played with Dylan in 2024, sat in for three songs. You can see him standing next to Dylan in that grainy photo above. On the scene was Henry Bernstein, who hosts the monthly Dylan podcast Songs of Experience.

Photo by Steen Møller Rasmussen via Sydsvenskan A while ago, I had a question: What’s the best song Bob Dylan has never played live? Attempting to answer that question quickly steers you into a semantic roadblock though: How you define “best”? While I’ve been known to throw the word around in variouslists, we all understand “best” is being used loosely. To paraphrase Tom Friend, that’s just, like, my opinion, man.

2006, the only year Bob repeated two different setlists Recently, inspired by some discussion in our paid-subscribers Discord, the essential Bob Dylan setlist site Bobserve added a cool new feature. It’s called “Recurring Samesets” and it shows every concert where Bob Dylan repeated a setlist. Many years, this happened a lot. 1966 is a big one. The gospel era too. More recently, the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour. In recent years repeated setlists have become the norm.