“There was a Never Ending Tour, but it Ended.”

Guest Post by Matthew Ingate on the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour '21-'24

Matthew Ingate is the author of Together Through Life: My Never Ending Tour with Bob Dylan (Available at Amazon). He’s been to a bunch of recent shows and shares his thoughts below.

“There was a Never Ending Tour, but it ended.”

Bob Dylan, 1993

So, too, it now seems, has the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour 2021-2024.

For almost 35 years it felt like the only thing that could join “death” and “taxes'' in a list of life's certainties was that Bob Dylan would be appearing in concert somewhere in the world in any given year. It took a pandemic and a total global shutdown of the live music industry in 2020 to keep him off the stage - and it was not for the want of trying; both a 14 date spring tour of Japan and a summer swing through North America had to be cancelled - for the first time since 1983.  

When the world tentatively started to re-open in 2021, there were still a lot of question marks over whether we’d get to see Dylan again. Surely an artist who had performed over 3,000 concert…