Dylan's puzzling puzzles

Touring, Patreon-ing, Instagramming

He’s on the move. Still. A well-received show in Boston, the other night. Then he headed up to Gilford, New Hampshire, a little bit north of my old stomping grounds, bringing back a song from “Time Out Of Mind” that he should have been playing all along, “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven.” Hey, man, add that to the set, why don’t you?

Then the guy heads to Virginia. North Carolina after that. Heads to Georgia and finally, Nashville to end this part of the tour on August 1. It’s tiring just writing down the dates, ain’t it?

After a couple months off, he starts a 30-date tour in Europe starting in October where he’ll visit Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Slovenia, Luxembourg. Then Switzerland, Italy, Austria, winding up in the UK with stops in Bournemouth, Birmingham, Sheffield, Blackpool and five closing dates in London, finishing December 8.

There really is no reason to worry. At 85, Bob Dylan seems to be defying age, logic, fans, maybe even gravity. He’s on what seems an endless tour, just added a whole bunch of shows overseas, all the way into December. Why? You wonder.

At 85 years old, Bob Dylan remains on an endless tour - now headed for Europe!

Now, we should be clear about this. Yes, I’ve written three editions of a comprehensive book on Bob Dylan’s career, the records, the books, the interviews, the speeches, the movies, the performances (Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography) but I am about as far from trying to figure out or explain the guy as anybody.

Where does he get the energy? The motivation? Is his goal to make every single person who was alive in his lifetime see him in concert?

If it was just the concerts, that’s one thing. He shows up, plays an hour and a half of whatever the hell he feels like. Hires and fires guitarists if and when he feels like it. That’s not all. For some inexplicable reason, he’s started a Patreon pay site where he (or somebody) posts things like “Letters Never Sent” - a letter from Soupy Sales to Phil Silvers or one from Mark Twain to Rudolph Valentino or one from James Baldwin to Walt Disney. Quite a clever - if somewhat twisted - idea, isn’t it?

There are a bunch of them and these name drops - Huey Long, P.T. Barnum, Jack Johnson, Rocky Marciano, Gene Vincent, Charles Darwin - are daring, imaginative and out of this world. There are short stories, too. The site is advertised as “A living archive of lectures from the grave, letters never sent and original short stories curated by Bob Dylan.”

Curated? We know he’s welded gates, painted pictures, created whiskey and who knows what else? But a Patreon website? Why? And there’s also an Instagram site (@bobdylan) with odd, unexplained videos, over a million followers and even more unexplained items.

As we know - I’m one of them - there are all sorts of authors writing all sorts of books about Bob Dylan. I’ve got another one ready to go. And you wonder what it is about the guy that gets under everybody’s skin so?

I listened to some of a podcast the other day with author David Hajdu, who wrote “Positively Fourth Street” a book about Dylan’s formative years in Greenwich Village and on the podcast, Hajdu explains that when he heard Dylan say that the first time he’d really heard The Beatles, he was in Colorado, Hajdu didn’t think that was true. (Imagine Bob telling a lie!)

So he found out about a cross-country trip that Dylan had taken in 1964, when Hajdu says, The Beatles held the top four spots on Billboard and that on the trip, there was nothing but AM radio available in the car he rode in. So he went to the trouble of tracking down the actual playlists from the radio stations that Dylan would have been able to get on the car radio, just to confirm that he had to have heard The Beatles before Colorado.

Really. I’m not making this up. Compared with the rest of America, I suppose someone who’s written three editions of a book and all sorts of Bob Dylan posts on my Substack since I cranked this sucker up in May of 2024 would qualify as Dylan-obsessed. I plead guilty.

But I’m not in Hajdu territory. Or even interested in all that Patreon stuff. Who knows if it’s really from Bob or if he has some A-I hookup, just having a big laugh on all of us?

I’ve been very critical and skeptical of those Dylan Dissectors who insist Dylan stole sentences from Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London and F. Scott Fitzgerald and all sorts of other writers in “Chronicles, Vol. 1” And looking at this mind-bending flurry of stuff on Instagram and Patreon along with this endless tour, how can you take any of this seriously?

Is Bob just linking his name to all this stuff just to blow everyone’s mind. Sort of the same attitude John Lennon had with writing “I Am The Walrus.” Remember when Lennon learned that his old teachers at Quarry Bank school were having students pick apart Beatle lyrics, he thought he’d really give them something to work on and came up with “I Am The Walrus.” What if Bob Dylan is doing a broader scale version of that? Will we ever really know?

Is he ever going to explain or comment on his intent with all this? Does he get a secret sort of kick sending some of his fans and writers down these rabbit holes? We will likely never know. Bet he likes that, too.

Here’s the third edition of “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography,” which covers all of Bob’s studio albums, his recordings, films, books, you name it, it’s probably in here. I’ve written a similar volume on Neil Young’s work, due later this year. I’ve also written two books on baseball - my son is a former major-league first baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals and Pittsburgh Pirates. “Diamond Duels” is a look at the game’s historic matchups - Hank Aaron was 1-for-23 against Don Drysdale before hitting 17 HRs off the guy. “Last Time Out” is a collection of stories about the final games of some of baseball’s all-time greats. All my books are available on Amazon.