Bob Dylan returns to Europe on October 4th as he begins the final leg of his Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour, which has been running since 2021 and is scheduled to finish this year.

Dylan’s most recent show in Europe was in July 2023 when he played in Rome, Italy. This upcoming leg of the tour will begin with 3 nights at the O2 Universum in Prague, and will finish on November 14th after 3 nights at the Royal Albert Hall in London, England.

Dylan has been performing as part of Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Music Festival Tour in the USA during the summer, with his last show as part of that tour taking place on September 17th in Buffalo, New York.

During that concert, he played one of his most famous songs, ‘Desolation Row’, for the first time since 2018. Other classic Dylan songs, such as ‘All Along The Watchtower’, ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’, and ‘Silvio’, have also made their way onto the setlist recently.

It is expected that the setlist for the upcoming European shows will be mostly made up of content from his brilliant 2020 album, ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’. Dylan has played 9 of the 10 tracks on the album live in concert previously, with the exception being the almost 17-minute masterpiece ‘Murder Most Foul’.

The previous time Dylan performed on the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour, his band consisted of Tony Garnier (bass), Jerry Pentecost (drums), Bob Britt (guitar), Doug Lancio (guitar), and Donnie Herron (violin, electric mandolin, pedal steel & lap steel).

However, during the summer Outlaw Festival shows, Pentecost was replaced by legendary drummer and former Dylan collaborator Jim Keltner.

Dylan also had no steel guitar/multi-instrumentalist during the summer run of concerts, with the extremely talented Herron seemingly having retired. Rumours are currently strong that he will be replaced on the upcoming tour by Greg Leisz.

Leisz played mandolin on the mid-2021 Bob Dylan recordings of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, ‘Masters of War’, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’, ‘Simple Twist of Fate’, ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’, and ‘Not Dark Yet’. These recordings were produced by T-Bone Burnett and recorded and mixed by Michael Piersante for a one-time sale as Ionic Originals.

These Rough and Rowdy Ways concerts have been receiving glowing reviews over the past few years, and if you get a chance, make sure to go and see the Nobel Prize for Literature winner up close.

As the tagline for the tour says – Things Aren’t What They Were…

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