ATLANTA — Thirty years ago, Bob Dylan stepped onto stage, clad in black pants and a black t-shirt, wearing an unbuttoned fluorescent pink shirt over the top.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, would you please welcome Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan!” the public address announcer said. With that, the band kicked in, and Dylan quickly chimed in, “Help me in my weakness,” the opening words to “Drifter’s Escape,” a song from 1967’s “John Wesley Harding.”
Dylan sang, playing only harmonica on the opening song of the evening. I remember it like it was yesterday: Music Midtown 1996, and my very first Bob Dylan show.
Who knew at the time what was to come?
Places like Belfast and Cardiff seemed so far away. I can’t say I ever dreamed of seeing Dylan take the stage there one day; I more likely thought this might be the only time I would have the chance to see Dylan perform live.
In fact, The Troubles were still raging in Belfast, making the idea that, within three decades, I would be in town to watch Bob Dylan seem far-fetched, not that it even entered my mind.
Dylan was on an upward trajectory at the time, but the critically acclaimed “Time Out of Mind” hadn’t been released, and no one knew for sure if he still had it. However, based on the crowd that evening and my inner music critic, he still did.
To me, the journey began when I first heard his live “MTV Unplugged” album, released a couple of years before this concert. In an era when everyone around me was listening to Nirvana and other such contemporary music, Dylan’s words and music formed my soundtrack.
The setlist was fairly typical for that era. Looking back, I don’t think I appreciated some of the songs Dylan played that evening, including two Grateful Dead covers: “Friend of the Devil” and “Alabama Getaway.” I haven’t seen him perform “Friend of the Devil” again, though he did sing the first words of it at the final London concert in 2022, but the band was already into “Every Grain of Sand,” and he quickly switched course.
Three decades on, the highlights for me remain “Silvio” and the acoustic rendition of “Tangled Up in Blue.”
What’s perhaps most compelling in hindsight is that my first Dylan show was 30 years after the infamous 1966 world tour. Now, I am reminiscing just as someone in 1996 might have looked back on a concert from that electric tour three decades earlier.
People often ask me about my favorite Dylan concert or live moments.
I don’t necessarily have a definitive list. The surprising cover of Van Morrison’s “Going Down to Bangor” in Belfast in 2025 and “All Along the Watchtower” as an unexpected opener in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, in 2024 are two recent examples that come to mind.
There’s also a surprise rendition of “Positively 4th Street” on the 60th anniversary of Dylan going electric at the Newport Folk Festival.
However, in all likelihood, no moment will ever top the first time I saw Dylan walk on stage. But who knows? As surprising as Dylan, maybe it’s yet to come.
I wonder if he still recognizes me after all these years.
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