I dont need to tell you that it wasnt like that.
He started by finding the setlist online, and downloading all of the songs via the Napster clone Kazaa.
I listened to that 17-song playlist over and over again, he says.
Bob Dylan in 1965.Doug McKenzie/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Through that, I got into Bob Dylan.
And I became a big Weird Al fan.
What came after that?Honestly, probably Bob Dylan.
I was into other things spread across the board I had a little Weezer phase.
But in terms of my obsessive super-fan persona, it was probably Al and then Bob.
But I remember this weird guy coming, and he was unlike most Dylan guitarists.
He would step center stage for a solo.
Its a very un-Dylan band member thing to do.
It was this weird guy constantly stepping center stage and making the strangest noises Ive ever heard.
At the time, the message board of choice was the Dylan Pool.
You clearly had a bigger interest in the live stuff than his albums.Yes, that is true.
I heard it that way before I heard the original.
What appealed to you so much about the concert recordings?
I figured that out early on.
I listened to that one a lot.
Id never been a part of that before.
And so many fans on the message boards are focused on the live tapes.
In the Dylan world, 98 percent of it is unreleased.
You have to hunt around for it.
I enjoyed listening to the music, but I enjoyed that side of it, too.
I was a religious studies major in college, which tells you how career-focused I was at the time.
I didnt know that music journalist was a career.
I had done it since high school.
My college didnt have any music journalism program.
I was practically the only one.
You also started theCover Meblog.Well, after Bob Dylan, I got really into cover songs.
This was the peak of the MP3 blog era, so I started a cover blog.
It got readers, even though it was just me doing it from my dorm room.
What inspired you to start Flagging Down the Double Es?I think of it as a pandemic project.
By early 2020, Id sort of fallen out of the world of Dylan.
I wasnt talking to other fans online.
I wasnt going to Expecting Rain.
And I got thinking that I sort of missed that part of my life.
It had been a meaningful and fulfilling passion for me.
And for no particular reason, I just had sort of drifted away from it.
I didnt have any grand strategy.
I certainly didnt think Id be doing it five years later.
I didnt even think Id be doing it five months later.
But for the first year or so, there were no interviews.
I often wrote about shows on their anniversaries.
I was really writing it almost for myself.
How big is your collection of bootlegs?I have 956 live tapes in my iTunes.
Youre not going to get them on Spotify, so here I am with this massive collection.
Ive never been a collector in the sense that I dont have a ton of rare or unheard stuff.
I make a run at share it if Im allowed to.
I appreciate that youwrote that about those 76 tapes.My inclination has never been to hoard stuff.
I look it up.
Its this guy, Dickie Landry, who Ive never heard of.
Im not a jazz guy, so I Google him.
He hasa website,and just kind of on a whim I emailed him.
I was like, Hey, do you want to tell me about this?
Do you remember it?
He replied back, Sure.
He has this very charming story about meeting Dylan in a restaurant.
He sees [Dylan bassist] Tony Garnier there, who is a mutual friend.
Dylan immediately tries to bounce, because he doesnt like having dinner with people he doesnt know.
Tony convinces him to stay.
Bob gets very interested in the fact that Dickie worked with Philip Glass, on and on and on.
Eventually, he invites him to sit in, and he sits in for the whole show.
I had no idea this story existed.
It really snowballed from there.Yeah.
One sort of led to another.
It often takes a long time to get people to say yes.
Every time I do one, it makes it a little easier to get the next one.
What kind of people are you looking to interview?First and foremost, band members.
Ive expanded a little bit.
Im talking to crew people too, behind-the-scenes people.
Some fans assumed that anyone who worked with Dylan in the last couple of decades signed NDAs.
That seems to not be true.No one has ever mentioned an NDA.
Its just sort of this cone of silence.
Everyone knows Bob is private.
Im sure his band members know that more than anyone.
I can understand it, so the first dozen maybe, were very, very difficult to get.
He really knows the music.
Hes not just looking for gossip or some sort of gotcha thing or some trivia about Bob Dylan.
Hes not going to ask about Bob Dylans kids or something.
Theres still three days of rehearsals.
You called the year 2000 the best year of the Never Ending Tour.
Why?Its the year Im most jealous I didnt see.
I wasnt a fan by then yet.
I think I was at end of middle school.
Theres the amazing acoustic sets.
Theyre doing Country Pie electric.
Theyre doing all these amazing bluegrass gospel covers by the Stanley Brothers.
Its just these beautiful shows, crazy sets.
Some of the first bootlegs I wouldve gotten were rips of the Crystal Cat from fall of 2000.
That was when they started doing the harmonies with him and Charlie, so its opened my appreciation.
I saw really great shows that year, but my favorites were in late 2002.
Then, after that, came the Wolfman, which is more or less what it sounds like.
Bobs always a little growly, but this was extreme.
Unlike upsinging, this you’re free to pretty much hear on some albums.
If you listen toChristmas in the HeartandTempest, thats basically Wolfman, and it was even more extreme live.
Thats maybe one of the reasons I fell out of love a little bit at that time.
I didnt think the shows were as good in the 2010s, especially early in the 2010s.
Then he starts doing these Sinatra albums.
They were almost like singing lessons for himself.
He almost uses singing these standards as a way to rehabilitate his voice.
Theres no way of knowing, but some people have speculated he underwent some sort of throat procedure.Totally plausible.
Ive also just heard he quit smoking again, which also makes total sense to me.
But the change is gradual.
Its not like one day he got surgery, and then he sounded much better.
I had unplugged enough that I did not know this was a thing.
I saw him in 2013 on back-to-back nights in Hoboken and Jones Beach.
The second song that they sang, its not unheard of.
Five songs, six songs, 10 songs, I start getting really pissed off.
Again, had I been more plugged in, I wouldve known.
I do think that contributed to me becoming disillusioned for at least a few years.
Thats because even when the songs dont, the inflections, the arrangements do change.
One night a song has drums and is a fast, up-tempo song.
The next night its basically a solo piano ballad, the same song.
Thats a fair point a lot of fans miss.It requires more effort.
People need to listen to When I Paint My Masterpiece on 2023 tapes and 2024 tapes.
One of them sounds like Istanbul (Not Constantinople), and the other is a slow piano ballad.
I know we were both in Milwaukee in 2021, for his first show after the pandemic.
That was obviously a very special night.
I hadnt felt quite that way at a Dylan show in a long time.Im with you.
People often say, What was your favorite show?
It has honestly, almost nothing to do with the music on stage.
Is it the musically best show Ive ever seen?
It was very good.
I dont know if it was musically the number one, but it was the emotion in the room.
Are you able to imagine a Bootleg Series that chronicles the Never Ending Tour?
Convey that Im joking, but I have thought about it.
1995 needs its own disc, 2000, 2002…
Honestly, there would be enough excitement in the fan community.
Just pick the absolute best.
Its much more work, but I think that would be very rewarding.
Ive asked so many people that.
Obviously, the Archives doesnt have it.
Maybe some rando Salt Lake City local or dad had a tape in the back of the closet.
It made sense, but didnt turn up anything.
I even asked the sound engineer who gave me the other never-heard 76 soundboards.
He doesnt have it.
Id love to hold onto hope, but hope is fading fast on Salt Lake 76.
What other tapes do you hope surface in the future?Oh, theres a lot.
Its only sort of a show, but the fullMasked and Anonymouslive sessions.
Theres so much more of that than ended up in the film.
Whats on the film and whats in the soundtrack is so good.
Again, amazing band and different songs, different arrangements.
That alone could be a bootleg series.
I would love for later 78, like some of those soundboards to get out.Complete Budokanwas nice.
A two-track or whatever is just fine with me.
Youve mentioned the Grateful Dead.
They did a whole series of Dicks Picks.
They did like 40 albums that were all two-tracks or whatever.
They were the non-multi-tracks.
That was the whole idea behind them, so I think being too precious about that is a shame.
Do you see yourself as a Dylan scholar in the same vein as Clinton Heylin?No.
I still think of myself as a Dylan fan.
I wouldnt use the word scholar.
I would certainly not use the word Dylanologist.
But youre doing the work.
Youre talking to all sorts of people who have never talked before.
I think of myself as a Dylan fan, and Im a Dylan writer, but scholar sounds…
I come from a very not-academic place.
So much of Dylan scholarship is from academia, and thats fine.
I never write about the lyrics.
I dont analyze them.
I dont mention them.
I dont even think about them.
Im just not someone who pays much attention to lyrics.
Why is that?Ive never been a lyrics person, not for Dylan or anyone else.
Im listening to the performance.
Im listening to how the voice sounds.
Im listening to how the band sounds.
Im listening to the energy.
Im listening to the melody.
And the lyrics just sort of float by me.
Whats the dream interview that you have yet to book?Tony Garnier, of course.
I dont even try with the current people.
I know theyre not going to talk.
They probably shouldnt talk, so I dont approach anyone whos currently in the band.
Can you imagine the stories that guy has?
Did you seeA Complete Unknown?Yes.
This is a very lukewarm take.
I liked it, didnt love it.
I thought the performances universally were very good, the best part of the movie probably.
I thought the overall plot and structure was fine in a sort of paint-by-numbers, Hollywood, biopic-y way.
Thats the Bob Dylan movie for people like me.
I think its going to bring new fans to the shows.Its getting new Dylan fans, which is great.
I certainly hope some of them come to the live show.
Why do you think he does so many shows a year?
Look at thesale to Sonyfor whatever it added up to.
Half a billion dollars, if not more.
Lord knows, he does not need the money.
Yeah, its what he likes to do.
For most people, Bob Dylan will be the albums.
Hell beBlonde on BlondeandBlood on the TracksandFreewheelinand all the rest, and thats fine.
If you could time travel to any show in history, what would it be?Rolling Thunder 75.
Its like four hours of music.
Yeah, the Montreal 75 tape is just amazing, so that would be hard to beat.
Or maybe Id go to Salt Lake 76 and Id bring a modern recorder with me.
If I can bring gear, then Im switching it to Salt Lake 76.
The set list was insane.
Hes doing Cold, Cold Heart.
Hes doing My Babe.
But it was also wild in terms of the performance.
The band, even though Im sure they had rehearsed, they seemed under-rehearsed.
Tony Garnier was walking around trying to direct traffic the whole time.
The poster for the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour said 2021 to 2024.
When those posters first came out, I fully pooh-poohed them.
Whatever, just someone put some numbers on it.
Hes doing it to troll us.
Do you hope to be at the last show, wherever it happens?I hope it never happens.
I hope he outlives me, but yeah, sure.
Then again, I hope to be at every show.
