Two Nights in Nashville

2024-03-26/7, Brooklyn Bowl, Nashville, TN

Frank Zappa had a concept he called the “Big Song.” He claimed that if you listened to all his albums end-to-end, it all added up to one single song, one piece of work. The Big Song was more conceptual than literal—his songs and albums don’t all flow together like one endless medley—but I thought of the idea while watching Dylan in Nashville last night, at what will likely my last Rough and Rowdy Ways show.

I usually focus on the individual songs, “Watching the River Flow” through “Every Grain of Sand.” This song was better on night one. That song he mumbled the lyrics of. I preferred the 2022 arrangement. Et cetera. But that’s not really how Dylan presents them live. It’s more like one 115-minute composition. One big song.

Even as the songs (should we instead call them “movements”?) progress from one to the next, the sound throughout a Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour performance is unified, a sort of hushed tension that ebbs and flows, a force of restraint holding back something from exploding—then occasionally letting it explode in concentrated bursts. The music never entirely stops either, as in between movements, one or two band members continue to noodle away. Nor do the visuals ever change, the lighting and vibe and intensity staying the same all night. The fact that, covers excepted, he basically hasn’t changed the program night after night, year after year, supports this presentation being one unified thing. Not a collection of individual small songs but one Big Song.

This Big Song though, seems to be reaching its final crescendo. Dylan has eight shows left on this leg of the tour. Then this summer, for the first time since he returned to the road in 2021, he’s doing something different: the Outlaw tour with Willie Nelson and others. It’s possible the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour will pick back up in the fall, but most people, myself included, assume this is the end. And what a way to go out.

via @false_prophet44

I’ve seen this show in a lot of different settings, but Nashville’s was a new one: a bowling alley. The many times I’ve been to Brooklyn Bowl’s original location (you can probably guess where), I’ve always gotten a kick that, even during sold-out shows, people keep on bowling. A favorite memory is seeing Yo La Tengo there years ago. During one long jam, while the rhythm section kept playing, guitarist Ira Kaplan put down his guitar, walked over to the lanes, and bowled a frame. Then he walked back on stage, put his guitar back on, and joined back in, without saying a word.