Bob Dylan has performed thousands of shows across the world but a select few featured some all-time great collaborations. Between a Paris show with Ringo Starr and a few appearances from Elvis Costello over the years, Dylan can pride himself on a selection of great musicians joining him for the Never-Ending Tour. But one show that took place on this day in 1988 paired Dylan with long-time collaborator and Grateful Dead member Robert Hunter.
While it may not be as staggering the time Patti Smith and Dylan covered an Empire Burlesque song or as strange as hearing Dylan cover Bruce Springsteen‘s Dancing in the Dark, Grateful Dead veteran Hunter would appear with the All Along the Watchtower hitmaker more than a few times. This show in 1988 at the Civic Auditorium in Portland, Oregon, featured a 14-song set of Dylan’s very best songs.
A full setlist for the Civic Auditorium show on August 19, 1988, can be found below.
- Subterranean Homesick Blues
- Absolutely Sweet Marie
- Simple Twist of Fate
- Masters of War
- Shelter from the Storm
- Highway 61 Revisited
- To Ramona
- A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
- Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
- I Shall Be Released
- Silvio (with Robert Hunter)
- Like a Rolling Stone
- The Times They Are A-Changin’
- Maggie’s Farm
While the pair would often play together on-stage, they would collaborate in the studio on one of Dylan’s quietest best in 2009. Together Through Life featured “old buddy” Hunter, and Dylan hinted at there being a possible follow-up in the works shortly after release.
We could probably write a hundred songs together if we thought it was important or the right reasons were there,” Dylan told Rolling Stone Magazine in 2009. “He’s got a way with words and I do too. We both write a different type of song than what passes today for songwriting.”
A collaboration after Together Through Life would not come to pass, and Hunter, who wrote Silvio and The Ugliest Girl in the World with Dylan in 1988, died in 2019. Hunter was a founding member of Grateful Dead and allowed Dylan to join the band on tour in the late 1980s. Dylan would make it clear he wanted to be considered a full-time member of the band, though this was vetoed by the band.
Grateful Dead band member Bob Weir would confirm that the one band member to veto and effectively kill the potential collaboration was Phil Lesh. Writing in Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, biographer Howard Sounes claims: “Bob had a wonderful time in any case. The next day he called The Grateful Dead office and said he wanted to join the band. He made it clear that he was serious.
“So the band took a vote. ‘I was in for that, but one of our members didn’t particularly care for him,’ says Weir. ‘I think we would have [taken him], if it hadn’tve been for that one guy. We would have pick him up as a sort of temporary band member.'”
Sounes suggested this attempt from Dylan to join Grateful Dead is an example of how the veteran songwriter “lost his way” in the 1980s and that he was “not thinking clearly.”
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