Bob Dylan’s ‘Long Hot Summer’ tour of the American Southwest and West Coast has had an unusually turbulent fortnight, losing both of his band’s long-serving guitarists and gaining, in turn, a jazz prodigy and a Chicago blues veteran. Setlists have meanwhile eased off Rough And Rowdy Ways, revived a forgotten Basement Tapes obscurity and leaned heavily on Oh Mercy, Time Out Of Mind and Dylan’s beloved ’50s rock’n’roll songbook. Bob has also found time to offer thoughts on ageing to fellow octogenarian Donald Trump and publish short stories and imaginary correspondence between historical figures on Patreon, where his growing enthusiasm for online self-expression continues to take increasingly surreal forms.
The most remarkable musical development came when Doug Lancio disappeared after five years with the band following the June 14 Berkeley show, only for Julian Lage to appear in his place at Santa Barbara Bowl three days later. Lage’s steady rise from child prodigy to Blue Note star makes him Dylan’s most high-profile guitarist since Charlie Sexton. A lifelong admirer who appeared at T-Bone Burnett’s 2022 New York Town Hall Dylan tribute, he combines dazzling jazz technique with a fondness for the kind of ’50s rock’n’roll and R&B Dylan has always loved.
Santa Barbara sounded exceptional. Dylan was in superb voice, while Lage added subtle grace notes to a sublime “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven” and “I Shall Be Released”. “He was pretty heavy on harmonics and stuff and sometimes played things I thought Bob wouldn’t like because of his philosophy on ‘wasting notes’,” one attendee reported on Expecting Rain. “He was not on that tight a leash at all.” Eric Burdon added to the occasion by visiting Dylan backstage and commemorating their reunion with a grinning car-park selfie.
The next shock came when Bob Britt, an ever-present since 2019 and more recently Dylan’s acoustic guitarist, posted a map showing himself travelling not to the June 29 Austin show but to Nashville, accompanied by the message: “Sayonara Bob.” He later clarified matters. “I was not fired but left of my own accord for reasons I would prefer to keep private. I will miss my bandmates and crew… Meanwhile, I have some flower beds to weed.”
Lage’s Dylan stint always looked likely to be brief given his own packed schedule, and with a June 29 Brooklyn engagement taking him elsewhere, Dylan found himself without either regular guitarist in Austin. Enter Joel Paterson, the Chicago-based musician best known for a Monday-night residency at the city’s 150-capacity Green Mill Cocktail Lounge. Far from a last-minute substitute, Paterson had received the call at least a fortnight earlier, his Western Elstons bandmate Casey McDonough told WBEZ Chicago. Fellow guitarist Dave Spector describes him as “fantastic … playing older styles of music, from blues to ragtime to rockabilly to jazz”.
A tape of Austin’s down-home blues reading of “Watching The River Flow” suggests that, despite being reduced to a single guitarist — excluding Dylan himself — for the first time since 1992, the Long Hot Summer remains in fine musical health.
The setlist has also shifted. At Woodinville, Washington, on June 6, Dylan opened with The Basement Tapes’ “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” and debuted “Baby, Won’t You Be My Baby”, previously heard only on The Bootleg Series Vol. 11: The Basement Tapes Complete. After spending the summers of 2024 and 2025 on Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Festival tour, Dylan is once again headlining his own travelling show, accompanied by Lucinda Williams and X’s John Doe. He also appears to be taking another break from the seemingly endless Rough And Rowdy Ways tour that last reached the UK in November.
The future of that repertoire remains unclear. For now, alongside welcome revivals such as “Man In The Long Black Coat”, Dylan is immersing himself in the music of his Hibbing youth, embracing Bo Diddley’s “I Can Tell”, Jerry Lee Lewis’s “I’ll Make It All Up To You” and an extended run for Eddie Cochran’s jittery “Nervous Breakdown”.
Dylan’s recently launched Patreon promises “a living archive of lectures from the grave, letters never sent, and original short stories curated by Bob Dylan”. Whether the platform’s Mark Twain-to-Rudolph Valentino correspondence, pseudonymous fiction and lengthy AI-narrated lectures are wholly authored by Dylan remains deliberately ambiguous, though the enterprise unmistakably bears the stamp of Theme Time Radio Hour.
His most affecting recent writing, however, arrived via the New York Times, which asked him to offer life lessons for Trump’s 80th birthday. Dylan resisted any temptation to critique the President, instead reflecting on the strange freedoms of old age and the experience of outliving “the clocks that have been chasing you”. “You’re an old king from some vanished country,” he wrote. In a longer meditation on “the worst thing” about turning 80, he described a world of “no surprises”, where wisdom no longer grants much ability to change events. His conclusion was typically profound: “When you’re young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn’t; it stands still. We’re the ones that move.” And Dylan, evidently, is still moving.