1999 was a great year for Bob Dylan’s “Never Ending Tour”.
For all the splendours of earlier in the year [1999], this last leg was the most consistently triumphant. By the time Dylan brought the year’s touring to an end, with an extended set on November the 20th, he had played 121 shows – the most in a single year of his entire career. It had been a very good year, the best since 1995.
~Andrew Muir (One More Night: Bob Dylan’s Never Ending Tour)
A lot of concerts from this tour are in circulation (both video & audio) and this concert is (again) a great example from that last leg.
University Of Illinois Conference Center Pavilion
Chicago, Illinois
31 October 1999
Don’t let that scare you. It’s just Halloween. I have my Bob Dylan mask on. I’m masquerading ha ha.
~Bob Dylan (before If You Gotta Go, Go Now)
‘Live 1964 brings back a Bob Dylan on the cusp. . . . It brings back a time between his scuffling sets at the downtown clubs and his arena-rock tours of the 1970s and after. It brings back a long gone era of intimacy between performer and audience, and the last strains of a self-aware New York bohemia before
bohemia became diluted and mass marketed.’
~Sean Wilentz
Here is “It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding”:
There are…. Hey anything you say! Hope I never have to make a living. This is called It’s Alright Ma It’s Life An Life Only. Yes it’s a very funny song.
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum
Hoist the mainsail, here I come
Ain’t no room on board for the insincere
You’re my witness, I’m your mutineer
~Warren Zevon (Mutineer)
Uptown Theater
Kansas City, Missouri
28 October 2002
Bob Dylan (vocal & guitar)
Charlie Sexton (guitar)
Larry Campbell (guitar, mandolin, pedal steel guitar & electric slide guitar)
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
