Last Night in Syracuse (by Stewart Wiseman)

2024-06-28, Empower Federal Credit Union Amphitheater at Lakeview, Syracuse, NY

Last night, the Outlaw Tour made its way to Syracuse, NY. The surprises continued, with what has to be one of the only guest harmonica players Bob Dylan has ever had.

Montreal-based music journalist and band manager Stewart Wiseman was on the scene and reports in. All photos and videos are by him too.

After three years of the same Rough and Rowdy Ways songs every night, I have been eagerly anticipating this Dylan tour since it was announced in February, but I truly had no idea what to expect. During the last week, we have seen one of the most puzzling setlists from Dylan in years, cryptic messages in Tempest t-shirts, and a mixed bag of covers from the 1950s. I’m excited to announce that nothing weird happened tonight, and it was probably the best his voice has sounded since the tour began. The only disappointment was learning on our drive to Syracuse that Willie Nelson had to cancel again due to illness. Here’s hoping for a swift recovery.

We were late after being stuck in eternal traffic at the Canada-US border, but arrived just in time for a stellar performance from Robert Plant & Alison Krauss. Their set featured four classic Led Zeppelin songs (“Rock and Roll,” “Gallows Pole,” “Battle of Evermore,” and “When The Levee Breaks”) and the greatest hits of the two Plant & Krauss records. “Please Read The Letter” was particularly stellar. Plant is still one of the greatest showmen in music, and his charisma alone is worth the price of admission.

Like he has at every show since the second date of the tour, Dylan began the evening with “Highway 61 Revisited.” After seeing him rotate between sitting or standing statically on the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour, it was satisfying to see Dylan sway along with Bob Britt’s groove. This version of “Highway 61 Revisited” was heavy and hit harder than anything played on the last tour other than some occasional raucous “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”s.

Even as a die-hard Dylan fan, I have to admit that I found Dylan’s voice during the first night of the tour in Alpharetta to be a little shaky. However, halfway through “Shooting Star,” we realized we were in for a night of fantastic singing. It seems like he has shed the rust from the first few dates, and he was enunciating clearly throughout the concert, sometimes reaching for and hitting higher notes than usual. “Shooting Star” is a personal favorite of mine, and it was special to hear Bob sing it masterfully tonight. 

“Love Sick” was one of the top performances of the night, featuring an extended Dylan piano solo. During the last line, he dramatically extended the words and we even got a slight chuckle. It might have been aimed at one of the strangest quirks of the evening, which was the number of people who were ambling along all night on a mission to nowhere. In what can only be described as a pedometer step contest, there was a never-ending flow of people walking back-and-forth through every aisle without paying any attention to what was happening on stage. This was incredibly distracting during the first few songs of the night, but by the end I somehow got used to the brash marathon walkers blocking my view every twenty seconds. 

Dylan then launched into back-to-back covers of “Little Queenie” and “Mr. Blue,” Bob’s voice sparkled on the latter, but I found that the pace of “Mr. Blue” jarringly broke the flow after the high rollicking of “Little Queenie” and the hard bop jamming on “Love Sick.” I find “Mr. Blue” by The Fleetwoods to be a strange choice to cover, and it was reminiscent of the slower standards that Dylan covered on his 2017 tour. Despite that, it led to some touching scenes of couples waltzing in the aisles: