Three discs comprising seven hours’ worth of Rough and Rowdy Ways material is nothing short of sensational listening. The 2022 tour from Bob Dylan, particularly the summer shows as documented here, was a riot. A real great time for Dylan on-stage, whose commitment to the Rough and Rowdy Ways material is delightful. Not just because these are some of his career-best songs, I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You and False Prophet are among his very best, but because of the effect the new instrumental style has on songs of old. A Summer’s Dream captures this well, inevitably so, as the bootleggers behind this piece also provided listeners with Things Aren’t What They Were and Just Not the Same As It Was. Two all-time great bootlegs from the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, followed by a third which focuses on, more than anything, the piano-led thrills of this latest tour. Watching the River Flow opens this thirteen-track bootleg, and it couldn’t be stronger.
At-home listeners are quite lucky that just about every performance Dylan has given on this tour has been recorded. There’s a Billy Joel cover lost to time, but aside from that agonising blip, most of his work has made it through. We’re better for having heard these performances, even if Dylan has made his thoughts on bootlegging clear in the past. But then it’s in service of a great artist, to deliver to people who could not attend. It’s a show worth experiencing in any way you can, and if that way is a bootleg where Watching the River Flow from an Oakland show transitions into Crossing the Rubicon from Santa Cruz, so be it. It’s a nice way to interpret and reinterpret shows which hold such meaning years on from the performance. Few shows hold that feeling, that timelessness which makes it worth documenting. For many artists, there are few, if any, deviations from what a performance should sound like. Dylan makes the effort to reinterpret and reimagine his songs from show to show, and that’s of spectacular interest.
Take the stripped-back feel of Crossing the Rubicon here, where Dylan’s vocals are punching through the quiet. There’s a tenderness here which isn’t lacking on the record, but it isn’t the focus there either. Two versions of Black Rider may feel like overkill, but it serves the compilation well. Slight variations on how Dylan delivers those fires and flames, that’s the real beauty to be found in A Summer’s Dream. An essential part of these Rough and Rowdy Ways compilations is complementing the contemporary material with efforts in adapting the classics. Dylan does that with Gotta Serve Somebody, Every Grain of Sand, and a delightful I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight are great examples of this. They’re each given that big band blowout feel, the cooler style which is present on the Rough and Rowdy Ways album and such a core part of the tour, too.
A Summer’s Dream is a delightful cap to a seven-hour bootleg that, even when split into three, is a lengthy listening experience. Well worth it all the same, but chopping it up into more agreeable listens is the way to go. An hour of material pulled from these summer shows is a treat for those who want to hear the detail and difference of songs performed hundreds of times over the span of just a few years. Dylan has, true to form, changed the form of his greatest songs and newest tracks in the hopes of finding fresh meaning. It works here, with the likes of My Own Version of You and False Prophet landing well. It’s in the little details, and here is where Dylan strips the songs back even further from their quiet but confident instrumentals. Those details are as interchangeable and inspired as the frequent re-evaluations Dylan makes on stage.
