Ever the enigma, Bob Dylan will appear at Stage AE Sunday
It’s hard to think of a public figure who is both more visible and more elusive than Bob Dylan.
Since 1988, he has toured relentlessly. In what has since been dubbed the Never Ending Tour, he has played more than 3,700 concerts over the last 38 years, playing in cities both large and small and venues both massive and microscopic. He has twice played at the stadium outside Washington that is the home of the Wild Things baseball team, has played at the Pavilion at Star Lake outside Burgettstown several times and was booked at the Convocation Center at what was then called California University of Pennsylvania in 2013.
He’s played at just about every crossroads in the country – Toledo, Ohio, Huntington, W.Va., Saginaw, Mich., you name it.
But while he’s easy to see live, the 85-year-old has kept himself stubbornly shielded. Dylan rarely grants interviews – it’s been almost four years since the last one – and has given exactly one television interview in the last 40 years. He doesn’t interact much at all with audiences during his shows, remaining hunched over keyboards on a darkened stage. His stage attire? Most recently, black pants and a hoodie.
The world may have been treated to up-to-the-minute reports on Taylor Swift’s wedding last weekend, but even Dylan’s most zealous followers aren’t even sure if he has a spouse right now.
And his set lists frequently bypass his best-known songs in favor of more recent material. “Like a Rolling Stone,” “All Along the Watchtower,” “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Tangled Up in Blue” have all been missing from Dylan’s shows.
Ever the enigma, Dylan will never be a crowd-pleaser on a par with, say, Paul McCartney. But McCartney may be Dylan’s only living peer when it comes to influence and impact. Over the last 35 years, Dylan has won a Nobel Prize in literature and a Pulitzer Prize, and that’s on top of a Kennedy Center honor, an Oscar, Grammy awards and a slew of other accolades.
Trying to divine what Dylan will do is a fool’s errand, but he seems likely to keep touring until he simply can’t anymore. In an essay about making it past 80 that appeared last month in The New York Times, Dylan observed, “You don’t chase the parade anymore. You’re an old king from some vanished country. You’re hard to program. You’re not rushing to become anything and you’re not haunted by things that you did. You’re haunted by how little of it really mattered in the way you thought it would.”
Dylan will be at Stage AE on Pittsburgh’s North Shore Sunday at 6:30 p.m., with blues guitarist Jimmie Vaughan and singer-songwriter Brittney Spencer will be opening. For information, go online to bobdylan.com.