Earlier this year, Bob Dylan began selling an extremely bizarre shirt at the Outlaw Tour merchandise stands. At first glance, it appeared to be a reprint of a Tempest tour shirt from 2012, but nothing like it was sold back then. The actual tour dates from the fall of 2012 appear on the back, but there’s also a November 10 Rosemont, Illinois, gig listed that most assuredly did not take place. The shirt was sold at Dylan shows all summer without explanation and quickly became a coveted item in the Dylan fan community. (A big tip of the hat to Dylan super fan Ray Padgett for first noticing all of this.)
“Ok but surely he didn’t also do the backs with mostly real tour dates but a few fake ones thrown in?”
Please. pic.twitter.com/oooi9P9sxH
— Ray Padgett (@rayfp) October 25, 2024
The tour headed over to Europe this month, and even weirder faux-vintage shirts have popped up for sale that are packed with easter eggs and take the fuckery of the summer to a whole new level. The first is a 2001 Love and Theft tour shirt (with a 2024 copyright) that lists just as many real shows as fake ones. It begins in the 2001 tour of this universe with legit shows in Spokane, Washington, and Seattle, Washington. But then it veers into the realm of fiction with shows in Sacramento, Honolulu, San Francisco, and Ashtabula, Ohio, that didn’t take place.
If those cities sound familiar, that’s because they’re from “You’re Going to Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” They appear in the final verse (“I’ll look for you in old Honolulu/San Francisco or Ashtabula”), where he lists towns where Columbus A&R executive Ellen Bernstein lived at various points in her life. (They had a brief affair around the time Dylan was writing Blood on the Tracks.) The fake 2001 itinerary wraps up with six cites in Mississippi that he didn’t play that year.
Another shirt purports to come from the 2006 Modern Times tour. It lists a fake October 17 show in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, which is a clear reference to “Thunder on the Mountain,” where Dylan sings, “I was thinkin’ ’bout Alicia Keys, couldn’t keep from crying/When she was born in Hell’s Kitchen, I was living down the line.” (Keys is indeed from Hell’s Kitchen, and a new jukebox musical about her life is called Hell’s Kitchen.) Another phony show in Acapulco, Mexico, on October 21 is a callback to the Basement Tapes song “Goin’ to Acapulco.”
The final shirt is supposedly from the 2009 Together Through Life tour. It once again starts with a real show that took place in Seattle on October 4. But it then goes to Red Hook, Brooklyn, Key West, Florida, Ashtabula, Ohio, and Durango, Mexico. As Dylan nuts surely recognize, those are references to 1976’s “Joey” (“Born in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in the year of who knows when”), 2020’s “Key West,” 1975’s “You’re Going To Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” and 1976’s “Romance In Durango” (“Remember Durango, Larry?”).
The second side of the shirt lists largely real dates, though it moves the November 5 show in Canton, Ohio, to November 2. He played Chicago on Halloween, but the shirt lists that date as taking place in “My Wife’s, HT.” There’s no state with an abbreviation of “HT.” This is a reference to “My Wife’s Hometown” from Together Through Life.
If these weren’t enough Dylan shenanigans, he’s also been posting messages on X that have been baffling just about everybody. It started on September 25 with a birthday message to a mystery woman named “Mary Jo” and continued with praise for Dooky Chase’s Restaurant in New Orleans, a recollection of running into a member of the Buffalo Sabres in Prague, and talk of a publishing convention at his hotel on Frankfurt. “I was trying to find Crystal Lake Publishing so I could congratulate them on publishing,” he wrote. “The Great God Pan, one of my favorite books. I thought they might be interested in some of my stories. Unfortunately it was too crowded and I never did find them.” The cities match up with the dates on his tour, and it seems like he’s writing the messages himself.
It’s tempting to try and derive great meaning from all this, but you’re not likely to find it. The most obvious explanation is that he’s messing around with people just like he’s been doing for the past 60 years. (He’s also trying to sell t-shirts.) He was messing with people in 1962 when he told the press he was raised on a traveling carnival, and he’s never stopped. This is just the latest chapter of it. Don’t overthink it. Just enjoy the ride.
