“The Philosophy of Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour”
By Jack Walters
Ironically, the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour was anything but rambunctious. Yet we should haven’t expected anything different – it is the trickster in Dylan.[1] Ignoring the hell-bound blues numbers, including the stop-start Chicago riffs, one of the defining aspects of the tour – especially the spring and fall 2024 legs – was the pared-down arrangements. After the interlude of the boisterous Outlaw Tour in the summer of 2024, Dylan returned to the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour in Europe; the latter half of the fall leg produced, to a certain extent, quieter and sparser arrangements in which silence and space were equally important as the words and the music.
Starting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on November 2, 2021, the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour reached the Royal Albert Hall, London, on November 14, 2024. Throughout the three years, Dylan stuck with a heavily curated setlist, highlighting his 39th studio album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, a record that pivots around music and art, inspiration and creativity, Greco-Roman and bardic traditions, Eastern and Western religions, divinity and immortality, time and timelessness. Within the live arrangements of the spring and fall legs were pauses and pockets of space, which, in Japanese music, is known as ma, and can be found in Western music, as well.[2] This created an audible lacunae that, paradoxically, filled the compositions. Theoretically, music is embedded into the bedrock of silence; the two are in a symbiotic relationship: music is born into the silence, which, in itself, does not emerge ex nihilo.[3]
Gisèle Brelet writes in her essay “Music and Silence,” “That silence into which music is born is not pure nothingness: in it dwell an attentiveness and an expectation.”[4] Certainly, attentiveness is crucial when attending a Dylan concert, as he makes the audience come to him, not vice versa. Yet, even to his usual standards, Dylan, in the 2024 spring and fall legs, challenged his audience in a way he hadn’t before: making them attuned to silence. The silence became a counterpoint, a reference, a sound in itself. Donnie Herron, who had been in the band since 2005 on steel guitars, violin, and mandolin, played his final Dylan concert on April 6, 2024.[5] Yet even before the multi-instrumentalist’s exit, Dylan had rendered the sound sparingly.
Silence, in music, can serve as a destructive and constructive force. For example, when we hear a silent interlude we attempt to fill it.[6] Occasionally, Dylan did not finish a lyric, an omission that created a dialectic between what was said and left unsaid. We, the seasoned audience, knew the omitted lyric. “A big part of songwriting, like all writing, is editing – distilling thought down to essentials,“ Dylan writes in 2022’s The Philosophy of Modern Song. “Novice writers often hide behind filigree. In many cases the artistry is in what is unsaid.”[7] Ernest Hemingway writes about the Iceberg theory, or the theory of omission, in Death in the Afternoon (1932):
If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have the feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.[8]
After playing “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” in Liverpool on November 3, 2024, Dylan said, “Well, thank you. I wrote that song at Ernest Hemingway’s house. I think there’s a lot of him in that song. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect it.”[9] Perhaps the first significant use of omission in Dylan’s writing was on John Wesley Harding (1967), which is likely a reference to the English poet and engraver William Blake, who apprehended that usually the potency of a work derives from ellipses.[10] Blake is, of course, referenced in “I Contain Multitudes,” a track that, in part, shares with Blake’s meaning of “eternity,” which, on one level, is all of time – past, present, and future – exists.[11] In the fifth verse, in which he directly cites Blake, Dylan sings, “Everything’s flowin’ all at the same time,” echoing this definition of eternity. Conversely, Blake also saw “eternity” as an atemporal state, existing only in the present moment, an eternal now.[12]
Dylan is never linear and therefore there was a Janus-faced nature to the Rough and Rowdy European fall leg. On the one hand, there were vestiges of the rollicking Outlaw Tour; on the other, it was delicate to the point of stillness. The former aesthetic can partly be attributed to Jim Keltner who, replacing Jerry Pentecost for the Outlaw Tour, stayed on for the European leg. Keltner is a busier drummer than his antecedents Charley Drayton and Pentecost, respectively. Naturally, Dylan, at times, leaned into Keltner’s larger sound, even perhaps selected songs due to Keltner’s inclusion.[13] His forceful drumming could be heard in the live versions of “All Along the Watchtower” and “Desolation Row”; the latter, with the walloping rataplan of tom-toms and Doug Lancio’s pulsive acoustic guitar, echoed the rhythm section of “Series of Dreams.”
The feeling of the Rough and Rowdy European leg being a continuation of the Outlaw Tour is best exemplified on the first night of the Royal Albert Hall concerts, as Ray Padgett discerningly highlighted.[14] But the following night Dylan did a one-eighty: some of the arrangements were rendered bare, with him performing a near a cappella version of “My Own Version of You.” There was a noticeable difference between the two versions, as well as the overall feel of the concerts. Therein lies the question: what did this shift mean? Simply a return to the muted sound first heard in spring and the latter half of fall due to a stylistic preference. However, this choice could have been influenced by theoretical ideas.
In art, silence can have multifarious meanings: salvation or void. Loud or quiet. And a way to represent a character torn from his “true self,” others, or God.[15] Maimonides, a Torah scholar in the Middle Ages, postulated that “God’s essential unknowability means that He has only negative attributes, then the only appropriate way of describing His nature is through silence, known as negative theology.”[16] Due to the inadequacy of language, some writers have interpreted words as ineffectual in articulating the qualia (a quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person). Others, as misrepresenting the subjectivity of human experience.[17] Therefore, in circumspection, they put down their pen; they are, in other words, an “inactive artist.” Of course, an “inactive artist” is not often an active choice. Although Dylan has never been an “inactive artist,” Dylan addresses the idea of reticence in the opening couplet of 1971’s “Watching the River Flow”: “What’s the matter with me / I don’t have much to say.” Preceding the writing of this, Dylan, in just under a year and a half, released Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, and New Morning. Ergo it was not so much a question of activity as the feeling of having little to say. Or, more accurately, anything new to say artistically. And, thus, Dylan was perhaps enveloped by an artistic silence. Until the European 2024 fall leg, Dylan opened every concert of the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour with “Watching the River Flow.” Deadpan and cool, Dylan delivers the lyrics when he now has a lot to say – in fact, a whole concert of words.
The tension in “My Own Version of You” (Royal Albert Hall night two) was not the words; rather, the extensive pauses between the piano notes and vocals. The style of the rendition echoed its lyrical inspiration: the English novelist Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Drawing directly on Frankenstein, “My Own Version of You” is a metatextual track about the creative process – the narrator is literally building his creation like the young scientist Victor Frankenstein creating a monster:
Looking for the necessary body parts
Limbs and livers and brains and hearts
I want to bring someone to life – is what I want to do
I want to create my own version of you
There is a link between silence and creativity. In his book, Silence in Philosophy, Literature, and Art, Steven L. Bindeman writes:
If the experience of silence can provide us with a charged field of energy, then it would follow that silence also resonates with related issues regarding the origin of life and the animist belief that all things have a soul. Mary Shelley’s novel of Dr. Frankenstein’s dream, to create life out of lifeless matter, is similarly of deep mythological and psychological significance.[18]
Therefore, with these skeletal arrangements, Dylan reinforced his lyrical ideas through his musical approach. As a performer, Dylan, in theory, on stage is creating out of lifeless matter – a scientific experiment. Known for radically deconstructing his arrangements, Dylan can be seen as a Process artist in which the process of making art is in view. During the Japan leg of spring 2023, Dylan attempted Grateful Dead’s “Brokedown Palace” three times, which included a version on April 16, 2023, that, fittingly, collapsed after one and a half minutes.
Perhaps no other song on the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour showcased its lyrical content via its live arrangements better than “Key West,” a metaphysical threnody, that echoes the modernist poet T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” (1936-1942), a tetralogy of poems in which mystical silences underpin the collection.[19] Eliot based “Little Gidding,” the first poem of the “Four Quartets,” on the town of Little Gidding, Huntingdonshire, England, after a visit, mesmerized by the supposed timelessness of the village.[20] Seemingly, the unadorned live versions of “Key West” were, through poetic silences, purposefully arranged to draw greater attention to the timelessness and mysticism of the composition.
The southernmost key, Key West is an island in the Straits of Florida, within the U.S. state of Florida, where the Gulf of Mexico meets the Atlantic Ocean. In the song, Key West is both a place and a place within, capturing the liminality of existence. Both Eliot and Dylan use a real-life location – “Little Gidding” and “Key West” – as a jumping-off point to explore time, salvation, and immortality. These themes became foregrounded on the second night of the Royal Albert Hall concerts when “Key West” oscillated between music and silence, with Dylan distinguishing between the two. Yet, simultaneously, he rendered the opposites obsolete, due to showing that there is music in silence. As established, there is a link between silence and creativity. Through the punctuated silences and the stripped-down arrangements, Dylan married music and lyric; by doing so, he foregrounded the theme of creativity in his concerts. Therefore creativity, through silence, was invoked upon most nights, specifically the spring and fall 2024 legs, as if it was a Greek Muse.
[1] For a reading of the role of the trickster in Dylan’s personas/work, see Stephen Scobie, Alias Bob Dylan: Revisited (Red Deer Press, 2003), 31-34.
[2] Murakami, Haruki, & Ozawa, Seiji. Absolutely on Music. Vintage, 2017. 22.
[3] Brelet, Gisèle. “Music and Silence.” Silence in Philosophy, Literature, and Art. Brill, 2017. 31.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Expecting Rain. https://expectingrain.com/dok/who/h/herrondon.shtml, accessed December 22, 2024.
[6] Bindeman, Steven L. Silence in Philosophy, Literature, and Art. Brill, 2017. 32.
[7] Dylan, Bob. The Philosophy of Modern Song. Simon & Schuster, 2022. 55.
[8] Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon, Jonathan Cape, 1958. 183.
[9] Hewitt, Harrison. X (November 04, 2024), https://x.com/harryhew/status/1853495196383953297, accessed December 22, 2024.
[10] Ackroyd, Peter. Blake. Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995. 191. The author made the connection when reading Ackroyd’s analysis of omissions in Blake’s poetry and art.
[11] Higgs, John. William Blake vs the World Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2021. 278-94
[12] Ibid.
[13] Tenschert, Laura. “Slow coming home”: Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour Finale (with Ray Padgett). Definitely Dylan (November 24, 2024), https://www.definitelydylan.com/listen/2024/11/24/slow-coming-home-rough-and-rowdy-ways-tour-finale-with-ray-padgett, accessed December 22, 2024.
[14] Padgett, Ray. “Last Night at the Royal Albert Hall.” Flagging Down the Double E’s (November 13, 2024), https://www.flaggingdown.com/p/last-night-at-the-royal-albert-hall, accessed December 22, 2024.
[15] Michalski, Przemysław. “The Significance of Silence in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot.” 2017. 73.
[16] Bindeman, Steven L. Silence in Philosophy, Literature, and Art. Brill, 2017. 35.
[17] Michalski, Przemysław. “The Significance of Silence in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot.” 2017. 74.
[18] Bindeman, Steven L. Silence in Philosophy, Literature, and Art. Brill, 2017. 48.
[19] Michalski, Przemysław. “The Significance of Silence in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot.” 75.
[20] González. Pedro Blas. “Time and Permanence in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.” Russell Kirk Center (October 27, 2014), https://kirkcenter.org/essays/time-permanence-eliot-four-quartets/, accessed December 22, 2024.
