Don’t be bewildered by the Never Ending Tour chatter, there was a Never Ending Tour but it ended with the departure of guitarist GE Smith. [Smith played his last concert with Dylan on October 19, 1990]
~Bob Dylan (Liner Notes to 1993’s World Gone Wrong)
The Never Ending Tour 1990 started off with a leg called the Fastbreak tour where Dylan performed:
Jan 12, 14 & 15 – United States – one small club (Toad’s place) & two east coast colleges
Jan 18 & 25 – Brazil (two giant festivals)
Jan 29, 30, 31 & Feb 1 – Paris, France @ Theatre de Grand Rex
Feb 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 & 8 – London, England @ Hammersmith Odeon
He plays 98 songs in 15 shows, 56 of which were only played one or two times.
It starts in a small club with 700 people, where Bob plays 50 songs in five hours, many of them covers never heard before or since.
On January 12, as a warm-up for two stadium shows in Brazil and ten further dates in Paris and London, he played his first club gig in over twenty-five years, at Toad’s Place in New Haven. The seven hundred lucky witnesses saw this forty-eightyear-old man play for a total of four and a half hours.
Starting at a quarter to nine, with a cover of Joe South’s ‘Walk a Mile in My Shoes’ (‘before you accuse, criticize, or abuse I walk a mile in my shoes’), Dylan finally left the Toad’s stage at twenty minutes past two in the morning, after four sets, interspersed by three breaks of just twentyfive minutes each, having played fifty songs in total, only eight of which derived from his supposed halcyon days of 1963-66.
~Clinton Heylin (Behind The Shades)
Toad’s Place
New Haven, Connecticut
12 January 1990
November 3 is approaching… and we are really looking forward to the release of Dylan´s “Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series Vol. 13”
Here are all the seven teasers published on BobDylanVEVO.
Sometimes I feel so low-down and disgusted
Can’t help but wonder what’s happenin’ to my companions
Are they lost or are they found
Have they counted the cost it’ll take to bring down
All their earthly principles they’re gonna have to abandon?
There’s a slow, slow train comin’ up around the bend
Well, I’m stranded in the city that never sleeps
Some of these women they just give me the creeps
I’m avoidin’ the Southside the best I can
These memories I got, they can strangle a man
Bob Dylan visiting Rubin Carter in Prison, 1975 (Ken Regan)
@ Columbia Studio 1 in New York City, New York – 24 October 1975: Bob Dylan’s 6th and last Desire recording session, produced by Don DeVito.
In this session he tried Hurricane 10 times, no other songs were tried.
A splice of takes 2 & 6 was released on his great album “Desire” – 16 January 1976.
Pistol shots ring out in the barroom night
Enter Patty Valentine from the upper hall
She sees the bartender in a pool of blood
Cries out, “My God, they killed them all!”
Here comes the story of the Hurricane
The man the authorities came to blame
For somethin’ that he never done
Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been
The champion of the world
Down the street the dogs are barkin’
And the day is a-gettin’ dark
As the night comes in a-fallin’
The dogs’ll lose their bark
An’ the silent night will shatter
From the sounds inside my mind
For I’m one too many mornings
And a thousand miles behind
Long Marston Airfield
Stratford-upon-Avon, England
14 July 1995 Phoenix Festival
Bob Dylan (vocal & guitar)
Bucky Baxter (pedal steel guitar & electric slide guitar)
