SANTA BARBARA — Sixty-one years and a day after he laid down the epochal “Like a Rolling Stone” in a recording studio on Seventh Avenue in New York City, Bob Dylan shuffled onstage on the other side of the country dressed so fine in a dark jacket with the hood pulled over his head.
The hood, which Dylan has been wearing even for shows without the cool coastal breeze that blew through the Santa Barbara Bowl on Wednesday night, has lately become an object of online fascination; one guy on X last year wrote that he was obsessed with the rock legend’s “new dripped out look,” and I have to agree: Though there are great hooded-Dylan photos going back decades, his current wardrobe — as seen nightly against a velvety curtain lit from below — is a vibe through and through. (His Bobness forbade photographers from shooting Wednesday’s show, which means you’ll have to consult social media for a glimpse.)
Dylan’s drip isn’t the only thing putting him into the viral bloodstream of the internet. In March, he launched a Patreon, where he’s posting short stories and apparently AI-assisted installments in an audio series called “Lectures from the Grave”; this week, he contributed his thoughts on aging to a widely shared New York Times op-ed pegged to President Trump’s 80th birthday. In my social feeds, at least, quotes from Dylan’s piece — “You’re an old king from some vanished country,” he wrote — kept turning up next to clips of Timothée Chalamet celebrating the New York Knicks’ NBA Finals win — an oddly poetic interleaving given their history.
All this stuff is cool; I admire veteran culture-shapers who figure out how to adapt to a new information environment. Yet one of the reasons it’s fun to encounter Dylan on Instagram is because you can still encounter him in the flesh. And at 85, he’s absolutely cooking on the road right now.
Wednesday’s show was the first in a handful he’s playing around Southern California this week, including a gig scheduled for Saturday night at Palm Desert’s Acrisure Arena. For years after the release of 2020’s pulpy “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” Dylan said he was on the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour; this month, though, he started selling T-shirts that describe his latest run of dates as the Long Hot Summer tour — precisely the sort of taxonomical quirk to get Bobheads going in the comments.
The concert, which ran about 80 minutes, mixed four cuts from “Rough and Rowdy Ways” with older Dylan songs like “All Along the Watchtower” and “To Be Alone with You” and covers such as Bo Diddley’s “I Can Tell” and Eddie Cochran’s “Nervous Breakdown.” But the whole thing felt like one continuous dream state, as Dylan — accompanied by a four-piece band dressed in dark colors to match the boss — croaked, gasped and crooned from behind an electric piano he played like somebody knocking the keys with his arm as he reaches for a drink.
“False Prophet” was a raunchy blues while “When I Paint My Masterpiece” rode a luscious rumba groove; “Crossing the Rubicon” and “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You,” both from “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” got arrangements completely different from those on the album.
To the astonishment of many a Bobhead, Dylan’s guitarist Doug Lancio was replaced in Santa Barbara by Julian Lage, the youngish jazz star known for his work with Gary Burton and John Zorn. (Dylan said nothing about the change, nor about anything else, from the stage; a spokesman for the singer said he had no word on whether Lage was a permanent addition to the band.) Lage’s playing was tender and spooky, not least in “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” where every 30 seconds or so the chords would go in some direction I could never have predicted.
The result was a spectacle of emotion — you’d have to have tried not to get swept away by “I Shall Be Released,” which closed the show — but also of belief in one’s craft. Onstage as on your phone, Dylan was searching for new limits Wednesday — a lifer grinding toward the sublime.
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