Stu's Noodles

2016-07-06, Wolf Trap, Vienna, VA

When listening to today’s requested show, something struck me before Dylan even opened his mouth: The intro.

We all know the typical Never Ending Tour intros. For many years, it was simple: “Ladies and gentlemen…please welcome…Columbia recording artist…Bob Dylan.”

For a decade after that, it got more complicated, that long “poet laureate of rock and roll” spiel I wrote about here.

This intro though, at the July 6, 2016 show at Virginia’s Wolf Trap, wasn’t spoken at all. It was musical. For about sixty seconds before anything else happens, you hear a jaunty acoustic guitar instrumental. Dylan isn’t even onstage yet. It’s performed by his guitarist Stu Kimball.

As sometimes happens with such offhand observations, this sent me down a rabbit hole. Fans, I discovered, had nicknamed these intros “Stu’s noodles” at the time. They lasted the better part of six years, from 2012-2018. Every show—every set, in fact, in the years where Dylan shows had an intermission—Kimball would kick things off alone onstage, guitar in hand. After a minute or so, Dylan and the band would join him and transition into, usually, “Things Have Changed.”

Over time, though, the noodles evolved. It wasn’t just the same thing every night. Nor was the playing, as the nickname “noodle” might imply, random. It started out that way, just Kimball winging it for a minute or two, but gradually evolved into a scripted part of the show. Kimball would eventually play composed pieces that, maybe not coincidentally, derived from old folk songs we know Dylan is a fan of.

We’ll get there. Here’s a year-by-year guide to the “Stu’s noodles” that would introduce every show.

2012

The first such intro came a few shows into Dylan’s Spring 2012 tour. One night it was the usual “poet laureate blah blah blah” spiel. The next, that had been unceremoniously abandoned. On April 21 in Sao Paolo, Brazil, with no warning, Kimball came out and played this instead:

That set the template for the first year of these intros. You can see where the nickname “noodles” came from. It doesn’t sound to me like he’s playing a composed piece; he’s just getting up there and messing around. That’s not a dig, by the way; Kimball’s a talented enough guitarist that him just improvising is fun to listen to. Clearly Dylan agrees, since he asked him to do this. Maybe Stu could go full Buckethead and release like 20 albums a year of solo-guitar improv. I’d listen! 

Lest you think I’m the only nut insane enough to pay attention to this, on the summer 2012 tour, someone compiled a 14-minute track combining Stu’s intro noodles from 14 different concerts. They called it “Stu’s Blues.” Strap in if you dare. Quincy Jones makes a cameo.

Usually the intros were just Kimball playing alone. But, as the band came onstage, sometimes they would join him for a short jam. Sometimes that included Bob himself. For instance, listen to this one from Dresden, Germany, on July 3, 2012. You can hear Dylan add some organ flourishes, before it eventually shifts into the proper show-opener “Watching the River Flow.” (Eleven years later, that’s exactly how the Rough and Rowdy Ways shows often start, some loose band noise coalescing into “River Flow.”)

When the fall 2012 tour came along, the noodle split in two. Dylan had three different show openers in rotation at this point. One was “Watching the River Flow,” and it went like the one above. On the other two, though, Kimball played acoustic guitar, not electric. So he developed an acoustic-guitar noodle to lead into those, either “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” and “You Ain’t Going Nowhere.” Here’s a taste of the latter, from Brooklyn, November 21 2012:

2013

In 2013, Dylan jettisoned all three of those openers and adopted “Things Have Changed,” a position it would hold all the way through 2019. Kimball kept the acoustic guitar, but gave it an arrangement that would lead straight into the aggressive strumming that would kick off “Things Have Changed.” Hear the transition in Amherst, on April 6, 2013, about about the 40-second mark:

A few months later, something big happens.

By this point, these are no longer just aimless noodlings. This one, though, is the first people identified as an actual song. What famous Dylan song do you hear echoed here?

If you said “All Along the Watchtower,” you’re right! Okay, sure, a lot of songs are built around these same three chords (Patti Smith’s “Free Money” is another personal favorite), but many fans heard “Watchtower” in this riff. Stu played it every night for months. Surely the similarity was no accident?

2014

In the fall of 2013, Dylan began incorporating an intermission in his show, a 15-minute break between the ninth song (usually “Love Sick”) and the tenth (usually “High Water”).

At first, that return to the stage didn’t occasion a second Stu noodle—but, when he kept it during his Spring 2014 tour of Japan, it did. Now Kimball would open the show with the “Watchtower”-ish acoustic riff, then return after the break to play something on electric. In this November 10th take in Chicago, I like the way Donnie Herron’s banjo gradually enters, precipitating drummer George Receli kicking the band into “High Water.”

By that fall, the “Watchtower” bit vanished as suddenly as it arrived. It was replaced by a new bit of guitar picking. Friend-of-the-newsletter Adam Selzer, in an old show review, compared it to Dylan’s “North Country Blues.”

Any similarity is surely coincidental, but I just like imagining Dylan walking onto the tour bus with a battered copy of The Times They Are a-Changin’ under his arm. “Hey Stu, you know this extremely deep cut from my third album I haven’t touched in decades (and barely even played back in the day)? I want to open all my shows with an instrumental version. Get on it!”

Oh that’s right, I forgot to mention this was now preceded by a gong! The sound of a gong, at least; I haven’t seen reports of an actual gong onstage. It led to bits like these in contemporary fan reviews:

The first gong sounded at 9:01, and an acoustic guitar was strummed once, but the lights didn’t dim and it turned out to be a false start.  Within a few minutes, the gong sounded again three times and Stu Kimball took the stage playing what sounded like a minor key mountain ballad that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

Enough, on to the show which began with a huge gong — a loud King of Siam Gong. And then Stu Kimball entered the stage riffing away on an acoustic guitar until the band filled the stage;

The gong is pretty loud. It signaled the beginning of the show at about 6 minutes after 8, followed by Stu's acoustic noodlings as the band takes its place on stage.

This got me a great parking spot a hundred feet from the door but I had a lot of time to while away before the gong sounded and Stu Kimball’s very sweet-sounding, adept strumming started the show at 8:04.

It strikes me as amusing how easily Dylan fans incorporate any new bizarre development into their mental planning. “Alright, if I know the traditional Bob Dylan gong is gonna hit the first time at 9:01, then it’ll hit three more times at 9:04, I gotta get to my seat by…”

2015

Quick sidebar: I love how, for the first newsletter since my book drew an extra load of attention here, I’m doing a deep dive on an esoteric-even-by-our-standards part of the show where Bob Dylan’s not even onstage. Perverse! If you’ve made it this far, you’re truly one of my people.

As 2015 continues, fans begin to identify that “North Country Blues”-ish acoustic song—and it does now sound like a song, even without lyrics—Kimball now plays every night. It apparently derives from the Irish ballad “The Foggy Dew.” This is the first of several old-time songs Kimball will begin incorporating. At Dylan’s suggestion, perhaps? The man knows “The Foggy Dew” certainly. He nodded at it in the “2x2” lyrics, for one: “Two by two, into the foggy dew.”

In an old concert review from around that time, Dylan scholar Anne Margaret Daniel wrote:

Stu Kimball strolls onstage and begins live walk-on music for his bandmates; in Roanoke, it was "The Foggy Dew," in the version written by Irish priest Charles O'Neill after the Easter Rising of 1916. Did Dylan ever hear Liam Clancy sing this one night long ago in New York City, I wondered, as Kimball played.

Compare the two. 37 seconds into this Milwaukee tape, someone near the taper even asks, uncertainly, “Foggy Dew?”

The electric noodle to open the second set, before “High Water,” changed too. This also sounds like a real song, especially that distinctive guitar riff that recurs.

Can anyone out there place it?

2016

“The Foggy Dew” remained in 2016, but with a notable change: Kimball started playing it on electric guitar. Presumably because the latest “Things Have Changed” arrangement has him back on that instrument. It’s slower too.

“Foggy Dew” has officially gone electric. Dew-das!

2017

After a few years of steady “Foggy Dew” intros, it got switched for another old song. Or rather, an auld song. In summer 2017, Kimball began performing a new noodle that fans quickly identified as “The Auld Triangle.” Dylan had recorded this during the Basement Tapes sessions. Can you hear the similarity?

2018

In Summer 2018, Stu Kimball played the last of his noodles. But he had one more surprise in store before he wrapped up for good.

At the very end of a spring tour in Europe, with just a couple shows to go, Kimball abruptly debuted a new intro, taken from yet another old song. This one came from Stephen Foster’s “Nelly Is a Lady.” 

Just a day before he started to play this, Stephen Foster was in the news. Pittsburgh, the city Foster came from, removed a controversial statue of the songwriter from a town plaza. Did Kimball see the news and feel inspired? Or did Dylan himself see it and pass on word?

We know Dylan knows the song. He devoted an entire chapter to it in his 2021 book The Philosophy of Modern Song. Hell, maybe he was writing this chapter in spring 2018 and got inspired that way. In the book, he writes:

Stephen Foster is the counterpoint to Edgar Allan Poe. This is one sweeping song that is designed to make anybody who’s ever lived a life just lie down and weep. A lot of sad songs have been written but none sadder than this. Both the lyrics and the melody. Alvin Youngblood Hart’s is as good a version as you’ll ever hear. Alvin sings the song in its pure form. 

The guitar turnarounds are a slow cakewalk between heartbroken verses, loss shared on the front porch. The tune will stay in your head long after you have forgotten the story and every time you hum it a tear will roll down your cheek.

“Nelly Was a Lady” might have been a topical choice to respond to the Pittsburgh news. The statue was deemed racist, focusing attention specifically on Foster’s minstrel history by depicting a Black man sitting at his feet. Is it possible Dylan was obliquely responding with a song often considered a turning point in Foster’s career, away from as Graley Herren puts it in a perceptive essay, “racial mockery in favor of sentimental ballads designed to elicit sympathy.” (Herren also notes the truth is more complicated.)

That Alvin Youngblood Hart version Dylan mentions can only be found in one place: the 2004 tribute album Beautiful Dreamer: The Songs of Stephen Foster.

That album was only ever released on one format: CD.

Meaning, if Dylan knows the song, he had the CD. He might have read the liner notes. If he did, he would have read this in those liner notes:

“In the meantime Foster replaced what he termed ‘the trashy and really offensive words’ of blackface minstrelsy with a more dignified address exemplified by ‘Nelly Was a Lady.' No white songwriter had ever called a black woman a ‘lady’ before.”

So he would have known “Nelly Was a Lady” was explicitly held up as one of Foster’s not-racist songs. No, none of those comes close to conclusively proving Dylan told Kimball to play “Nelly Is a Lady” in response to the statue news out of Pittsburgh, but it’s interesting to think about.

And did you catch Dylan’s line about the “guitar turnarounds” in his writeup? To me, the fact that he’s paying attention offers further evidence Dylan was dictating the direction of Stu’s so-called noodles. No, he wasn’t actually on stage when Kimball was playing them every night. But his presence was felt all the same.

2016-07-06, Wolf Trap, Vienna, VA

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