What's the most random setlist Dylan ever played?

Mailbag #2: She's Your Lover Now's collapse, Street Legal tour, and does Bob like us?

Quick note: I’m not sure I’ve written a single newsletter without at some point consulting Olof’s Files (hell, I quote it in today’s). If you’ve ever done research on Dylan performances, I suspect you’ve found your way to the bjorner.com url too. The titular Olof Björner sadly passed away last year. Thankfully, it was just announced that Olof’s decades of meticulous work will be preserved and expanded on the Dylan-setlists site Bobserve. Read more about it here.

The second installment of our new Mailbag series in which I answer your questions! Here’s the first if you missed it.

No preamble. Let’s go.

---

Greetings from Spain. My question is: what's the most "random" setlist Bob has ever played? I mean: from all the proper tour gigs (not special gigs and other appearances), in which one did he play the greatest number of rare songs?

—Felipe

The immediately obvious answer is Toads Place 1990. Four sets full of never-played originals and off-the-wall covers. But that’s not exactly a “proper tour gig.” True, it came at the start of the tour, but the vibe was more like public-rehearsal. One of the band members even told me he hadn’t realized there would be an audience until the people started filing in.

So I’m disqualifying it. Same goes for another contender, The Edge 1995, another public-tour-rehearsal type show which became Bob’s public wake for Jerry Garcia. I’m also going to discount festival gigs, including an amazing show at Bonnaroo 2004 where he busted out a bunch of one-time-only country covers (great Never Ending Stories episode on that one a few months back).

Where does that leave us? Well, some years ago, Marcel Levesque actually ran a statistical analysis of Never Ending Tour setlists. The most unique “proper tour gig” in his calculations: July 29, 1989 at Kingswood Music Theatre in Maple, Ontario. Three of its fifteen songs are ones Bob has played less than ten times ever: Shot of Love deep cut "Trouble" to open, then two rare covers: Gordon Lightfoot's "Early Morning Rain" and Ernest Tubb's "Hey La La." Read more about the show and Levesque’s project here (spoiler alert: a cool setlist isn’t everything…)

One other show that jumps to mind—two shows, actually—is Rome 2013. This was early on in Dylan adopting what fans nicknamed “The Set”: The same songs, every night (as he still mostly does today). But, for two mid-tour Rome shows that fall, for no obvious reason, he fully dumped The Set and played almost entirely different songs.

Then, after those two nights, he went back to the usual Set as if nothing had happened.

Look at this old Olof’s Files chart of every song played only a single time in 2013—and look at just how many of those come from Rome:

---

Could you please create a playlist of good-sounding versions of the Street Legal songs from the tour that followed or otherwise? Thanks!

—Henry Klingeman