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Forty years ago today, one of my favorite Bob Dylan tours ever began.
Unfortunately, it was not one of Bob Dylan’s favorite Bob Dylan tours ever. Writing in Chronicles, he didn’t have much positive to say about his time with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Dylan wrote:
I’d been on an eighteen month tour with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. It would be my last. I had no connection to any kind of inspiration. Whatever was there to begin with had all vanished and shrunk. Tom was at the top of his game and I was at the bottom of mine. I couldn’t overcome the odds. Everything was smashed. My own songs had become strangers to me, I didn’t have the skill to touch their raw nerves, couldn’t penetrate the surfaces. It wasn’t my moment of history anymore. There was a hollow singing in my heart and I couldn’t wait to retire and fold the tent. One more big payday with Petty and that would be it for me. I was what they called over the hill. If I wasn’t careful I could end up ranting and raving in shouting matches with the wall. The mirror had swung around and I could see the future — an old actor fumbling in garbage cans outside the theater of past triumphs.
There’s a Dylan-in-the-'80s collection coming out at some point where I contributed a chapter that makes the case that, frankly, Dylan’s wrong. More specifically, that he’s perhaps primarily remembering his second round of Petty touring in 1987, which everyone I’ve interviewed has reported was bleaker and less fun, even if the music remained strong. (Think Rolling Thunder ’75 vs Rolling Thunder ’76.)
So to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the tour dubbed True Confessions, I’m going to track the first seven 1986 shows with Petty. I’m not going to do the full tour this time—the shows and setlists get repetitive, plus more tapes than usual are missing or unlistenable. But maybe I’ll pick the project back up for the tour’s U.S. leg in the summer and do the first chunk of that too.
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