No banjos to be heard here, unfortunately. Whether Bob Dylan and Tom Petty ever picked up the country-adjacent instrument and plucked away while on stage remains elusive at best. Those with a need for Tassimo coffee pods merely to make it through the day are not well-equipped for figuring out whether the pair ever did play Chimes of Freedom in the style of Mumford and Sons. Pray to God they did not. But stranger things have happened, like the two-fifths of The Traveling Wilburys heading out on a joint tour together, where they mainly performed Dylan’s hit songs. They did so with the withering sound of 1980s rock and pop, as Duelling Banjos in part highlights. It was not all terrible. Some of these renditions are aided by the instrumental looseness, other parts built stronger by surprise lyrical highs which Dylan had not quite managed to grasp in the years preceding, or even following, this showcase of songs.
A nice blur of The Heartbreakers hits, and Dylan classics is what Duelling Banjos provides. Those who are infatuated with the pop-adjacent, easy-going rock sound Dylan and Petty were part of in the mid-1980s will be served well here. Positively 4th Street is a bold opener at the best of times, but the vocals from Dylan here are, well, poor. He sounds strained, croaked-out and all those usual words the passing listener will throw at his style. This time, they may have a point. No amount of upbeat instrumental can salvage that. He sounds close to collapse, and this is a sound which continues throughout the set. Different nights, yet the same strained sound. All Along the Watchtower has flickers of the gospel delivery Dylan had offered on earlier tours, around the time of Saved, but with a nasally noise which simply doesn’t suit him. Those ghostly backing vocals and a twisted guitar riff does, however, suit All Along the Watchtower. It sounds cool, it’s groovy, and it reflects the tone of the times without sacrificing the core of the track.
The same cannot be said for the likes of Like a Rolling Stone and Blowin’ in the Wind, both all-time great songs which sound a little aimless here. Dylan would adapt both much better on future tours, but like many of the songs featured on this compilation, there doesn’t appear to be much of a thought to how he wants to present or change the songs beyond just playing them for the sake of it. There’s no moment or reason for audiences, either at the time or now, to latch onto. We do not receive a new take of intense interest, nor an instrumentally slick version which can support any theory to Dylan as an always-changing artist. A shapeshifter who has never backed down from the thrill of adaptation. Duelling Banjos has none of that, just a few instrumentals you can hear on Real Live.
Nothing quite suits the sound it’s given, and when it does, Dylan is in such poor form vocally that it’s hard to muster the courage to listen to much more of it. I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know and That Lucky Old Sun are still bold choices. Petty is in solid quality, at least. His renditions of Bye Bye Johnny and Spike are great fun – the man knew how to work the stage, and hearing him do so on Duelling Banjos is the highlight. A bootleg more for the Petty fans than for the Dylan listeners, though the latter is the man with the lion’s share of space on this compilation. Understandably so, Dylan was capable of a rare and bold performance post-Empire Burlesque, they’re just harder to come by. This is, unfortunately, not one of those moments.
