Possibly the greatest Never Ending Tour show no one talks about

A tribute to the great Vienna 1999, Rolling Through The Stormy Weather.

I first heard songs from this concert mere months after it happened and I cherished the real-audio media files I first heard online from one of the many Dylan audio download sites in the early days of the Bob Dylan internet phenomenon. This was while tape trading was still the thing and CDRs in the mail, and in the days before torrenting.

I remember recording the tracks on to tape and taking walks down by the river near where I lived, blasting the live versions of “Friend of the Devil,” “Boots of Spanish Leather,” “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” and “It Ain’t Me Babe” as I cut through the dirt paths escaping the nearing sundown. The sky candy-floss-lilac and pink.

1. Friend of the Devil

To this very day I think this is his finest version of “Friend of the Devil.” The traditional Al Santos introduction brings the fever, it gets me each time, the anticipation and energy in the crowd as the guitars fade-in to the song opening a truly ‘electric’ acoustic set!

This really is one of the best recorded and performed shows of the entire Never Ending Tour. Whatever kind of kismet led to this great convergence of a sublime concert sound mix, and wherever it was that the tapers were in the audience, the overall sound of this show is just as phenomenal as the performance. There’s a magic sweet spot here somewhere between the natural reverb in Stadhalle Vienna, the band and Dylan’s performance, and where the audience recording was taken. It’s not always achievable with audience recordings, but when it is, it’s the stuff of dreams.

Here Dylan throws out the verses in such a nonchalant manner, that when the chorus hits it’s such a release. The vocals on the “crossroads” verse, how he delivers “vanished in the air” while Bucky’s pedal steel dances around it with short poetic phrases is a thing to behold. The second half of the performance is just pure vibe, with Dylan playing low note riffs in between repeats of the middle 8 and the chorus, the band take it for a spin a few times and then you hear them gently put the song down. Magic!

2. Mr Tambourine Man

There’s something so free and easy about this performance of “Mr Tambourine Man.” It takes its time at first. There’s no rush. David Kemper lays the groundwork with brushes. Dylan is in recitation-chant mode, with the occasional vocal flourish, but as the song progresses, and inevitably begins speeding up, most of all toward the end of each verse leading into the chorus, Dylan’s vocals become more and more excited, trading different emphasis on the chorus each time he meets it. There’s a tremendous acoustic solo from Larry Campbell, which initially follows the original melody, but where he and Dylan seem totally as one. Dylan slips in licks and riffs between Larry’s more elegant passing notes until you’re not sure who is playing what part and it all becomes one. It’s really beautiful — It’s something they continue to do throughout the acoustic songs, with emotional high points during “Boots of Spanish Leather” and a truly remarkable “It Ain’t Me Babe” — then he comes back in with “take me disappearin’…..” in a call and response with himself, switching emphasis on the end of each rhyme, “the smoke rings of my mind… the foggy ruins of time… far past the frozen leaves… the haunted frightened trees… out to the windy beach…. far from the twisted reach…. of crazy sorrow.” There’s something almost Willie Nelson about the emphasis of the end words of each line. Then he amps up the energy completely repeating the same phrase styling but turning the melody into a staircase he descends, “circled by the circus sands…”, all the while singing with real intensity. He’s inside the song now so deeply I’m convinced he’s in Fellini’s La Strada on the beach witnessing and recounting both the sadness and the wide eyed wonder of Giulietta Masina’s face.

As the song enters it’s final moments Dylan pulls off a quite extraordinary guitar solo, pentatonic in structure, he moves forward and then back, forward, moving between 4 notes forward, 5 notes back down again, mirroring the way he had been singing the verses, and sprinkling in the odd 3 note to 2 note repeats and then back to the main pattern he’s found, and suddenly the audience are really cheering, because instinctively they know something special has really broken through. If anyone wants to know what a good signature Bob Dylan guitar solo is (a type of guitar playing nobody else does), it’s this, and it’s really good.

3. Masters of War

Dylan brings things down a notch with a strong and lazer-focused “Masters of War.” Midway through the song there’s an instrumental break where again Larry and Dylan lock guitar horns. Dylan plays a lick, Larry takes it further and passes back to him, Dylan plays the lick again and Larry harmonises in response and takes it a little further again, then they’re back “let me ask you on question…” Neither one is trying to outdo the other, they’re simply in a dialogue as they explore the profundities of the song.

One thing about this concert, and the run of European concerts that preceded it, is just how consistently engaged Dylan is song to song. Unlike what can happen at Dylan concerts, where there might a lull for a song or two, here the energy is constant.

4. A Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall

Much with the preceding songs the mood and the feel are the same. So far it’s like one big song. They blend so seamlessly into each other. This is a really gentle version of the song, and again there’s no rush, there’s time to lay out the lyrics and stretch and compress the phrasing. Dylan wanders around the geometrics of the song in the introduction, like he’s searching for something, scanning a gravel path for something he’s dropped. But really this is just how he enters into a song. He uses his guitar like a key to take him inside. It’s a sweet and pleasant wander, and then he’s in. When he sings “It’s a hard” it’s really not hard, it’s easy and the audience join him, and right then there’s a dash of sorrow in “it’s a hard raaaains gonna faaawl.” As the song moves ahead he sings ahead of the beat, he squeezes the lyrics into the first beats of the bar and recedes briefly while the music breathes in response. He latches onto a guitar figure that he slips in at the end of each couplet that almost sounds like it could be a horn part if only there were horns up there on stage. But as I’ve said many times before, I think Dylan plays the guitar like it’s a horn.

5. Tangled up in Blue

Once Larry joined the band he captured the perfect middle of Dylan’s New York Sessions version with the high sliding guitar figure, with the control of the Minneapolis version. There’s hardly a performance of this over the next few years in that arrangement that isn’t great. It’s not one I return to listen to for some reason, but it’s always good. In this version Dylan’s cramming lyrics in bursts, usually on a one note melody pushing the tension grip of the arrangement. Here Bucky Baxter gets a chance to shine on mandolin while he, Dylan, and Larry weave interplay.

6. Its All Over Now Baby Blue

This is probably the first real high point, a 2-punch-ballad mix of Baby Blue and Boots of Spanish Leather, in what has been a pretty fine acoustic set. Continuing much in the same arrangement as the previous 5 years, except now there’s Kemper’s brush or rod drums and Larry’s guitar playing. The drums lift the song from the free time of earlier NET versions. Dylan finds a 3-note to 2-note guitar figure to repeats with occasional chord inversion splashes up and down the guitar neck, complimented by Bucky’s mandolin and Larry’s acoustic. There’s some lovely instrument bits that really crescendo towards the end with Dylan’s guitar dominating and a very satisfied audience.

7. Boots of Spanish Leather

When Dylan makes real magic the hairs on your arms stand up on end and this performance of “Boots of Spanish Leather” is the first real epiphany of the set. The moment those opening picked chords kick in and Kemper hops aboard on the brush snare shuffle you know there’s something unquantifiably beautiful going on. The way he sings “unspoiled” in “carry yourself back to me unspoiled” is worth price of admission. The way he sings “all I’m wishing to be owning,” and “remember me by,” with his guitar lines answering the lyrics between “how can, how can you ask me again” and “it only bring me sorrow.” When Dylan sings “letter on a lonesome day” shortly followed by the finality of a pronounced note of a picked guitar chord from Larry like it’s a period in a sentence, it gets to me each time.

Dylan’s singing throughout is gentle, almost whispered at times. The cry of the the mandolin after Dylan sings “take heed, take heed of the western wind” as the song wraps up you feel satiated, even though the song reminds us all of the sorrow of first loves, true loves and the pain of missing someone, someone I imagine Dylan’s been missing his whole life, and what better tribute to a muse who unquestionably changed Dylan’s life and that of ours too, as witnesses to the ageless beauty of this song.

8. Cold Irons Bound

I often forget about the strength of the electric part of the set simply because of the sheer brilliance of all the acoustic songs performed. But the intensity shifts with “Cold Irons Bound.” Meanwhile though, there’s things happening off stage that you simply wouldn’t realise just listening to the show.

One of the great Dylan writer’s, Andrew Muir, also attended this concert and writes of his experience in his book The Razor’s Edge:

There was one problem: arena security guards. After a spell-binding opening set in Vienna, Dylan lit into “Cold Irons Bound” and a heartfelt “Make You Feel My Love”. At the end of each of these songs, he peered below the front of the stage to see how everyone was reacting and his disappointment was palpable when he saw no-one there. His “thank you kind folks” comment after the latter was a mixture of the routine and the ironic.

The problem was that the security guards at Vienna’s Stadthalle were stopping anyone moving forwards. Dylan enticed the fans to come to the front by extending the beginning and endings to songs that normally found the front-stage area full, but the guards wouldn’t let anyone move down to the front section (which was inhabited by less demonstrative members of the audience). I was sitting to the side watching a cat and mouse game develop as Dylan kept trying to pull people towards him with extended guitar playing. Vienna, unsurprising became the longest Dylan concert I had been at for many a long year.

9. Make You Feel My Love

This is one of the finer versions of “Make You Feel My Love,” which was particularly strong throughout 1999. Dylan’s singing again on all of the ballads is really gentle and enunciated, and the way he lifts things up yet gently on the bridge along with Bucky’s mournful pedal steel, especially how he sings “you” on, “No doubt in my mind where you belong.” I still think this is one of his finest ballads, his version of an American Standard. Dylan signs off with a sweet, “thank you kind folks.”

10. Stuck Inside of Mobile

Dylan croons this one and at times seems to resurrect an older version of the Nashville Skyline vocal. There’s a smoothness in places to some of the lines and phrasing, key moments include: “up and down the block,” “deep inside my heart, I know I can’t escape,” the way he sings “Memphis blues again,” each time, “waltz for free,” “I said oh come on now,” “eyeballs,” and “cigarette.”

Muir continues:

Something had to give, and give it did during the damn-the subtlety-get-up-and-party noise of “Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again” which brought a forward crowd surge from behind the front section.

And in the final verse you hear the crowd roar and applaud what is going down.

Meanwhile Bob’s sudden realisation that the vast majority of the crowd were loving his performance and wanted to share the joy of the night with him brought out the showman in him.

11. Tryin’ To Get To Heaven

This one is pretty special having only been played for the first time in the first week of that same month. But this time Dylan’s on electric guitar rather than leading with acoustic. You can feel that the band are feeling this out, bits still a truly great and fresh version that Dylan sings with deep conviction. Bucky’s pedal steel drives this song, it’s sad to think it would be one of the last times he’d get to do it. “Might get the hang of that” Bob assures the audience as the song slightly splutters to an end.

12. Highway 61 Revisited

The energy levels are back up for some good time party action. This song is also a great opportunity to showcase his great band and specifically the guitar maestro Larry Campbell who’s able to cut loose like a spitfire bending and twisting the strings of his telecaster firing shots with Kemper pushing the dynamics. They put some bleachers out in the sun and head on down Highway 61. Dylan and Larry find the same guitar line and throw it back and forwards between eachother all the way to end.

13. Not Dark Yet

“Not Dark Yet” floors me. The way he sings the first lines “shadows are falling” you know you’re in for a killer version, the thrill of the audience washing back over him. The second “letter” song of the evening and probably the second big highlight after “Boots of Spanish Leather.” You could certainly argue “Not Dark Yet” and “Boots” are the same song, flip-sides of the same love, but 30 years later and this time it’s the man traveling not the woman.

You’ll get lost in this version chasing his voice through the shadows as he sings “not even room enough to beeeeee anywhere” with Dylan playing the hook low on his guitar. The vocals are consistently pleading. “She wrote me a letter and she wrote it so kind…”

As someone who came to Dylan midway (hard to even believe the ‘90s were just midway) through his career I always noticed the dramatic shifts in his vocal sound over the years more so than friends who’d grown up with his voice from the ‘60s onwards. So his vocal transformations or transfigurations have always fascinated me.

Late 1998 through 1999 was the beginning of Dylan finding new ways of singing. Somehow softer than 1997, yet not the histrionic brilliance of the 1994 tour or the more conservative controlled cool of MTV Unplugged, but somehow his voice cuts through in new ways, softer at times, smooth as a butter knife when his surprisingly soft, rich and warm chest voice croon mournfully, before catching at the nasal rasp of his head voice. I’ve always theorised if the steroids he was on, known for their anti inflammatory effects, for histoplasmosis the previous year may have been responsible for this softening up his voice. Wild theory but you never know.

But “Not Dark Yet” underlines this new flex in the voice, shifting back and forth from this absolutely gorgeous and mellow chest voice back to the famous nasal rasp of the head voice. Dylan doesn’t keep his voice in his soft palette when he sings in head voice, he pushes it up through the nasal. But every now and then over a long career he’s returned to chest, with some soft palette and head singing, something which he mastered best on Desire — aside from the apex beauty of the Basement Tapes/John Wesley Harding voice which would ease ever so lightly into the Nashville Skyline voice before maturing into that gorgeous 73-75 voice — which when he wasn’t shout-singing was probably the best and most commercially acceptable his voice ever sounded.

There’s just so many great ways he phrases the songs, like short jazz phrases of emphasis that bounce against David Kemper’s tender drums. The pedal steel is more like like a lonesome horn rippling over the river as Larry’s electric accompaniment swims alongside elegantly.

There’s a heart-wrenching “I don’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from” with emphasis on “away.” The way he sings “river” in “I followed the river.”

The way he sings “sometimes my burden is more than I can bear” crushes me every time. But the way he sings prayer in “murmur of a prayer” might be the cherry on top.

I know from my own experiences of concerts that they’re not always captured by the recording and that sometimes a seemingly lacklustre show ends up being one of the best when you hear it back later. This show however is way more beautiful than that reviewer realised.

Here we’re nearing the end of Bucky’s tenure in the band, whether he knew it or not, and his playing throughout this is nothing short of exceptional. He and Larry are perfectly connected. Every note and sweep of the pedal steel is like some kind of goodbye.

The whole band are in the zone with Dylan using the softest parts of his voice, singing wispy and reaching high at times with a real emotional depth.

14. Rainy Day Women #12 & #35

After a breathtaking “Not Dark Yet,” the proceedings loosen up again with a rocking, freewheeling “Rainy Day Women” given Dylan, the band and the audience a chance to flex and jam before settling back into the land of acoustic profundities with “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” Larry fires some shots and Bucky tries some interesting approaches on the pedal steel.

15. It Ain’t Me, Babe

The introduction to “It Ain’t Me Babe” is a rather splendid thing. The first time round the chords the band are finding their groove, Larry finding his and Kemper punctuating with drums. Then Dylan plays a few chord pull offs that slide up and down which against the palette of Larry’s picked acoustic guitar create a really rich chord texture followed by a knowing whistle from an appreciative audience member and it becomes clear this is going to be special too. He plays between the soft edges of his voice with a stunningly sung: “Never weak but always strong, to protect you or defend you, whether you are right or wrong.”

This is probably my favourite moment of the entire concert, it has all the joy, elegance and beauty and sadness of the other ballads of the evening, but there’s another level to it all, that I just can’t put my finger on. Maybe it’s because it’s 11 minutes long, maybe because it’s a great one to blast in the car on a summers day.

The way he sings “I’m not the one you want babe, I will only let you down,” will finish you off. The same goes for “Someone to close his heart.” The way he sings “no, no, no it ain’t me babe” before a particularly fine and bouncy guitar solo he plays on the lower strings. “Go melt back into the night babe” draws out orgiastic audience screams and it’s clear here that Dylan is also playing the audience as an instrument too as they can’t help but express their ecstasy. Each go round of the chorus is just progressively more beautiful, and he sings the absolute heart and soul out of the song.

The extended solo that happens with Larry, Bob and Bucky coalescing as one again draws out the applause from the audience. And then screams of expectation as it’s clear he’s wandered off to find a harmonica, and meanwhile Larry plays some really gorgeous guitar picking. Bob’s harmonica rides the ocean tide of audience cheers taking the song into its half time breakdown and into the final sprint. I don’t think I can think of many examples of an audience so actively engaged in lifting this song into the stratosphere, but when Bob goes high on the harp as the song slows to the half beats you’ll feel it deeply, a surge of amazement and wonder. and you’ll feel it every time you hear this performance. Goosebumps, Bob.

16. Not Fade Away

There’s not really any way to follow that epic performance of “It Ain’t Me Babe” other than doing a volte face. You can’t follow it with another ballad, so it’s got to be something hot. “Not Fade Away” was always another chance for that band to loosen up and show their chops. This performance belongs to David Kemper and Larry Campbell every time, and you can tell how eager Dylan is to shred and vamp. He hits those high notes with an ease even some of his contemporaries probably couldn’t have pulled off.

17. Like A Rolling Stone

    Rolling Stone was played a lot in these years and it’s always great, but much like with Tangled up in Blue I never feel a need to hit the repeat button. Credit to Larry Campbell on returning much of the giitsr majesty of Michael Bloomfield, of which a month or two later Charlie Sexton would also take next level.

    And with that I say farewell Bucky, we’re on the cusp of a new age here and soon a new century, and we all k ow how great those 2000 shows were. But here we are still only less than half way through 1999 with one of the great Never Ending Tour shows in all its sonic beauty.