Bob Dylan Is Mixing Up His Setlist to Honor Local Heroes in Every City He Hits

One week after his unannounced appearance at Farm Aid, where he stunned the crowd by playing three 1965 classics with 3/5th of the Heartbreakers, Bob Dylan resumed his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour at the Midland Theater in Kansas City, Missouri. And even though he was back with his standard touring band, the surprises kept coming when he opened the show with Leiber and Stoller’s 1952 classic “Kansas City.”

It was the first time he’d played the song since a 1986 show with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in Bonner Springs, Kansas. The rest of the concert stuck to the standard set from the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour from the past couple of years. But when the tour headed to St. Louis on October 4, he honored local legend Chuck Berry by opening with “Johnny B. Goode” and closing with “Nadine.” He last played “Nadine” at a St. Louis show in 1988, and he hasn’t done “Johnny B. Goode” since he sat in with The Dead in 2003.

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The hometown tributes continued when Dylan’s tour moved to the Cadillac Palace Theater in Chicago for a three-show stand. On night one, he opened with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s 1965 classic “Born in Chicago” and closed with Muddy Waters’ “Forty Days and Forty Nights.” He again opened with “Born in Chicago” on the second night, but he trotted out Howlin’ Wolf’s 1964 tune “Killing Floor” for the finale. Dylan’s love of Chicago Blues goes back several decades, but this is the first time he’d played any of these songs.

The tour continues October 11 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and heads all across the East Coast and Midwest before wrapping up December 3 in Evansville, Indiana. Predicting Dylan’s future moves is impossible, and he might drop these city-specific covers after Chicago. But if not, we hope he breaks out some Devo in Akron, J. Geils Band in Boston, Notorious B.I.G. in Brooklyn, and Rush in Toronto. (We know odds are very slim he’ll do any of that. But this is a guy who played a random 2016 Bob Weir solo song a few months back, so anything feels possible.)

When the tour comes to the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York — site of countless Grateful Dead concerts — the place would explode up if he played “Brokedown Palace,” “Truckin’,” “Stella Blue,” or any of the Dead songs he played earlier this year in Japan. In the meantime, Dylan fans should be grateful he’s mixing it up like this. The set had become a bit stale after all this time, and these regional covers are a prefect way to spice it up.

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