Touring is something you either love or hate doing. I’ve experienced both. I try to keep an open mind about it. Right now, I’m enjoying it. The crowds make the show. Going onstage, seeing different people every night in a combustible way, that’s a thrill. There’s nothing in ordinary life that even comes close to that.
– Bob Dylan (Edna Gundersen interview for USA Today – April 1999)
Never Ending Tour 1999
Start date
January 26, 1999
End date
November 20, 1999
Legs
5
No. of shows
98 in North America
21 in Europe
–
119 in total
Every N.E.T. junkie seems to agree that 1999 was a wonderful Dylan year. Strong performances in all 5 legs.
Pavilhão do Atlântico
Parque das Nações
Lisbon, Portugal
7 April 1999
Bob Dylan (vocal & guitar)
Bucky Baxter (pedal steel guitar & electric slide guitar)
Larry Campbell (guitar)
Tony Garnier (bass)
David Kemper (drums & percussion)
Tryin´ To Get To Heaven
The air is getting hotter
There’s a rumbling in the skies
I’ve been wading through the high muddy water
With the heat rising in my eyes
Every day your memory grows dimmer
It doesn’t haunt me like it did before
I’ve been walking through the middle of nowhere
Trying to get to heaven before they close the door
How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
Yes, ’n’ how many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, ’n’ how many times must the cannonballs fly
Before they’re forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
Gran Teatre del Liceu
Barcelona, Spain
March 30, 2018
You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked and you say, “Who is that man?”
You try so hard but you don’t understand
Just what you will say when you get home
Because something is happening here but you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?
National Auditorium of Music
Madrid, Spain
March 28, 2018
Of the virtues, I suppose I think integrity is the most essential. Not dignity – a thief can have dignity.
~Bob Dylan (to Barbara Kerr, Feb 1978)
–
‘Dignity’, which describes so resourcefully the yearning for a more dignified world, would have been the album’s [Oh Mercy] ideal opening track. It scorches along musically, declaring its allegiance to the timeless appeal of the blues, while sounding, above all things, fresh. Its lyric, meanwhile, though ‘Dylanesque’ in that it sounds like no-one else’s work and sounds like a restrained, mature revisit to a mode of writing you might otherwise call mid-1960s Dylan, is fully alert and freshly itself, admits of no leaning on laurels, and has the great virtue that while not every line can claim the workaday clarity of instructional prose, the song is accessible to anyone who cares to listen, and offers a clear theme, beautifully explored, with which anyone can readily identify.
~Michael Gray (The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia)
Dignity was originally recorded for “Oh Mercy” in 1989, but Dylan wasn’t satisfied with it… and left it.
Officially there are 5 different versions available:
