Last Night in Charlotte (by Adam Selzer)

2024-06-22, PNC Music Pavilion, Charlotte, NC

Last night, the surprises kept coming on the second leg of the summerlong Outlaw Tour. After a wild first night (which I wrote about here), Bob brought in nine new songs in Charlotte, both originals and covers. Friend-of-the-newsletter Adam Selzer was at both, and he writes a travelogue about his experience, first Alpharetta night one then Charlotte night two.

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ALPHARETTA, GA

Though Dylan has been confounding expectations for decades, most of the time you can have a general idea of what to expect; you know who’s in the band and the general tenor of the set list; even in the days of the wildest surprises you had a pretty good idea how much of it would run. It’s very rare to go into a show with no idea; the first RARW show was a rare exception. And what a surprise Alpharetta was!

Last winter, word filtered around that the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour would wrap in the spring, and in summer, Dylan would play a tour with Willie Nelson in which they’d asked him to play the hits again. There were later some band shakeup rumors. 

You can never expect miracles at a summer stadium show; at best you’ll get a nice, casual night out. I knew from my time living in Atlanta that Alpharetta was a subdivision and strip mall town, no adventure in itself. But I couldn’t resist a trip to a Dylan show without any clear idea what he’d do. Would he stick with the same set? Maybe half of the same set, plus some chestnuts common in the 2010s? That’s where the smart money seemed to be. 

And yet. They moved my gate to A-11, like the song Dylan used to cover. I don’t believe in omens, but if I did…

Met Ray at the airport, wandered through a stairwell that smelled like cigarettes and tinkle to the rental car, and headed off into the retail wasteland of suburban Atlanta. 

Job one at the venue was to check the merch for signs of what sort of tour this was. If it was still Rough and Rowdy gear, that’d be a sign that the set wasn’t changing much. Instead, we found a “Tempest Tour 2012” shirt onsale. Strange.

The crowd was a Willie crowd, and all seemed understanding as word got around that he wasn’t up to playing that night. Celisse, the opener, had one song on Spotify, and every song she played was better than it. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss were great; the medley of “Matty Groves” and “Gallows Pole” was a killer. 

Now, as for Bob…

Do you ever have those weird Dylan dreams? Where you’re at a show and Megadeth is backing him and you don’t recognize anything? Stuff like that?

This is what that show felt like. After expecting a “greatest hits” sort of set, he opens with a Little Walter song and “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’?” Then more covers? Is this the “Philosophy of Modern Song” tour? And then came a total of four songs from Tempest?!