The Only Article Ever Written About Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson.

There’s a new Bob Dylan movie coming out this Christmas, and you couldn’t pay me to see it unless you’re a magazine editor who can pay me to see it. Even if it were executed perfectly, the whole idea is pointless. First because Walk Hard, the greatest comedy of the 2000s, exists. Second because it so clearly leans into a selfish, romantic conception of Bob Dylan, where he’s an album cover, a song you remember from college, a tool for your spiritual awakening, a nostalgic totem of the boomers, an answer to the question of what America means, stranded in time. 

And that’s fundamentally bullshit. Check with your local library or news desk and you will find that Bob Dylan recently had his first #1 hit on the Billboard charts and he is a demonstrably living man. He gets out of bed, has coffee, sits at a table, writes for awhile, does a show that night, all sorts of alive stuff. 

He’s a legend, yeah. But treating legends through the veil of hagiography is boring. It’s almost masturbatory; making it about you. (For this reason, Love & Mercy is maybe the only big musician biopic I really like, because it’s about Brian Wilson, not how Brian Wilson makes you feel.) I wanna know about the actual guy. Even at its most mundane, life is compelling. You know what I’d rather see than yet another movie where I’m reminded that Bob Dylan wrote The Times They Are A-Changin’? Bob Dylan making toast in the morning at his place on Point Dume. 

Which is why I was so excited to see the Outlaw Music Festival at the Hollywood Bowl this summer. Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson sort of co-headlining. You can look at them as two legends, or you can look at them as two men who are objectively amazing at the jobs they do for money. Going to their show is the only way to do that. They want you there. They want you to see them do their jobs. 

Got to the show a bit late because it is impossible to get into the Hollywood Bowl during events, even though it’s three miles away and takes me about nine minutes to get there during work hours. It’s harder to get to Costco during work hours. But getting inside the venue during an event is like trying to get on a ride at Disneyland on Labor Day; just this confusing crush of humanity and $20 beer. 

But the magic trick of the Bowl is that once you fight your way through the labyrinth and get seated, it’s actually relaxing. And the giant crowds, in this case around 20,000 people, seem cool. Because this thing is bigger than you and you’re so unremarkable that you’re invisible. It’s not like being at McCabe’s with 60 people and the guy sitting in the folding chair next to you is Jackson Browne. 

I found my seat midway through an opening act, this guy John Mellencamp. I’ve gotten some grief from Midwesterners for not caring about his set, or not taking him seriously. Not gonna argue about that though, because the reason I don’t care is almost interesting: I’m not from the Midwest at all. Never been there. And I’ve never heard a John Mellencamp song. Never seen him play. All I know about him is he used to go by Cougar, he “discovered” the brilliant James McMurtry, and he’s got that one about sucking on a chili dog. Whatever. Seems fine. I just totally missed him.

In a world trash-compacted by the internet, he’s still regional, and my blind spot is at least somewhat because of geography. Reminds me of when my mom’s Northeastern husband played a burned CD in the car and a Bon Jovi song came on. I wasn’t remotely familiar. Couldn’t have identified him in a billion years. Walking into Mellencamp’s set was like showing up for the final of a class you never enrolled in.

He was good. Came off like an Indiana Bruce Springsteen who either smoked the entire Philip Morris factory or is really good at faking it. Excellent sound. The guitar was especially potent. And I’m a sucker for something he did and I don’t get to see much: lead electric guitar and violin interplay. I loved it when Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros did it and I loved it when Mellencamp did it. Still don’t know his songs though.

Time for Bob. Get ready here comes Bob.

I’ve seen him a few times, the last being the Rough & Rowdy Ways tour. I was thrilled by the promise of how different this show was going to be. The last one was dominated by new material. This one promised to a) ditch all of it and b) get a bit loose. Nothing from the new album. The set is half covers. And not covers people at a summer festival are likely to know. In the merch area, he was selling shirts advertising a tour for the Tempest album that didn’t even happen, complete with fake tour dates. (Yes I bought it.) This is the crotchety, antisocial Bob Dylan who likes screwing with people. He’s a natural troll and it powers him.

Set was pretty much as-advertised. The band was tight and never got in the way of the songs and Mickey Raphael, America’s only harmonica player, sat in for a few numbers. Bob spent the whole thing behind the piano and as my pal Molly Lambert pointed out, was definitely on a Jerry Lee Lewis kick. I’m not trained on piano but I like what he does with the piano. It’s like he’s talking to you with it. I like the bass emphasis and the directness. If he was “better,” I wouldn’t enjoy it as much. It’s ragged. The songs are ragged. It works.

Bob was in fantastic voice for Bob. Straight-up robust. He did an extremely faithful Little Queenie and sounded like he enjoyed Six Days on the Road more than any of his own stuff. I was positive he’d turn off the cameras for the big screens on the sides of the stage. I was shocked when he didn’t. I was not shocked that they were so distant and static it looked like surveillance footage from a 7-Eleven.

But again, there’s that gulf between legend and reality, which for Bob is huge. The sound was a bit too quiet. Just a bit. Everybody by my yes-I-spent-too-much-money-on-this seat talked over the majority of the set. Like he was a lounge piano player. They weren’t even talking about Bob. They just weren’t paying attention at all. Drove me nuts. He’s 83. He did speed and coke. He could die in 30 minutes. This is like seeing Woody Guthrie in 1995. Don’t you care? Don’t you want to see this, whatever it may be?

Answer for a lot of people is nah, but if you’ve seen him before, you know that. Luckily, he did get around to a jaw-dropping performance of Simple Twist of Fate, which made a bunch of the crowd shut up and left several people in my aisle in tears. Then, after about an hour, he did I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight and left the stage like a ghost and that was it. No refunds.

It was one of the most interesting Bob Dylan shows I’ve seen. He was fully himself, there to play music, and that was all. It actually was about the music.

But Willie was something else. If seeing Bob Dylan is as fucking nuts as seeing Woody Guthrie in 1995, seeing Willie Nelson is as fucking nuts as seeing Hank Williams during Obama’s second term. He’s 91. That’s 350 in country music years. And he just canceled a lot of East Coast dates. He can’t or isn’t allowed to play standing up. He could have talked through the songs for 30 minutes, do that B.B. King thing where you stretch out a few numbers until you run out the clock on the contract minimum, and you’d be lucky to be there. But he didn’t.

Willie’s longevity is a miracle, but his quality control in recent years is a miracle too. He puts out an album or two every year and they’re all really good. His latest, The Border, is properly excellent and one of my favorites of 2024. Excellent without a handicap for age (Many a Long and Lonesome Highway knocks me out). His understanding of what his voice can and should be doing is nonpareil. I’ve never even heard of a 91 year old singer having an excellent new album. I dunno if they got him on experimental drugs or what, but it’s unbelievable.

Willie got to the stage. Sat down. The cameras shot him from all kinds of cinematic angles, and he didn’t look like Bigfoot at all, but a movie star, and he kind of is. Everybody was suddenly paying attention. Total crowd control. He did an excellent survey of all his classics, but I truly think he’ll be able to do that for at least a few hours after his death. What was impressive was the new stuff and the stuff he doesn’t play much. Bloody Mary Morning drove the LA crowd insane. I Never Cared For You was the contemporary Lanois version, which sounded sick. And he did his new single, The Border, totally successfully, which I’ve never seen happen at his age. 

He told jokes. Introduced guests. Cracked wise. Absolutely relished saying “bullshit!” during his kid’s song Everything is Bullshit. Sang at the top of his ability the whole time. Took guitar solos. The actually diverse audience sang along to everything, laughed, cried, and generally acted like this was the greatest concert of all time. I saw a teenage girl completely break down during Always On My Mind. That’s powerful stuff. This guy had 20,000-ish people in the palm of his hand. 

He also did a Billy Joe Shaver song. There was a lot of cognitive dissonance in seeing him play Shaver material at this enormous, world-famous place, because I remember seeing Shaver play that song for maybe a hundred people at a dive bar downtown shortly after he shot that guy.

Willie closed out the show with his usual Will The Circle Be Unbroken/I’ll Fly Away rave-up, a perfect, cathartic way to end a concert that also makes it feel done, like you got your money’s worth and it’s okay to go home. It was like going to the most awesome church of all time; sends the dopamine levels off the charts. 

It was a hell of a time. Reminds me of that Letterman quote about Levon Helm, that everybody who isn’t here should be jealous of everybody who is here. I appreciate how fortunate I am to see these guys play, and as often as I have. But it’s weird too. A monster of a show in Los Angeles and the headliners are 83 and 91. That didn’t used to happen. Musicians didn’t live that long. This show was barely possible and it’s historically unusual that it happened. And it feels like the live music industry is ignoring that (see: Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney), clinging on to 20th century monoculture as long as they can. What’s the plan when these people are gone? Hologram tours? What abomination are they gonna come up with? Trust me, nobody’s replacing Willie Nelson when he’s gone. He’s it. He’s one of the inventors of what we think of as country music. That’s the end of the line. 

He’s got another new album out later this fall. Try to enjoy how profoundly unlikely that is. If there’s one thing I want to get across here, it’s that it’s actually not possible for these guys to last forever. One day soon it’ll just be over and we’ll be left thinking how peculiar it was that these historical figures were still here. We’re a bunch of lucky bastards.