Songs Bob Dylan ALMOST Covered In Concert | FLAGGIN DOWN THE DOUBLE Es - RAY PADGETT

Now as per usual from Ray over at Flaggin’ Down . . .  this is REALLY interesting . . . . . . . 

Surprises on '90s cue sheets: Son House, Ray Price, The Carter Family and more

RAY PADGETT

"One of my weird areas of fascination in Dylan touring (I mean, even weirder than having a fascination with Dylan touring to begin with) are cue sheets. These are the pieces of paper that are placed on stage for Bob and the band members to remember the setlists.

They still use these today, even though the setlist basically doesn’t change. Why risk someone having an onstage brain fart trying to remember what comes after “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” no matter how many times you’ve done it before (the answer, by the way, is “Black Rider”).  

 

That said, the most interesting cue sheets come from back when the setlists werechanging every night. As I’ve explored before, they can tell an alternate history of a show, displaying in black and white the songs Bob was considering playing, but didn’t. He would often list two or three different song options in a single slot, and pick one in the moment. Hell, sometimes he didn’t pick any of them, and decided he’d rather play some other song instead.

Today, I wanted to look for the cue sheet Holy Grail. Not looking for listed songs he didn’t play that night. Not even listed songs he didn’t play that tour. I wanted to look for listed songs he didn’t play ever. But, apparently, came close to playing—close enough that he had them written down on the paper in front of him onstage. The band was ready to launch into them, presumably they’d rehearsed them, but, when he got to that slot on the sheet of paper, Bob went in a different direction. And he never played the song anywhere else either.

These are all covers. They mostly come from the ‘90s, since that’s the period where we have cue sheets for every show—shoutout Bill Pagel at BobLinks, where I found most of these. At some point, cue sheets became rare for fans to acquire. If Bob had “Lily Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” written on the paper last month, I have no idea. But, for most the ‘90s, we would have known.

Let’s look in chronological order at eight songs Bob almost covered in the ‘90s. He was planning it. Probably even rehearsed them with the band. But he never did them onstage"