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What if the Never-Ending Tour Never Ends?
Someone cries out, “Judas!”
Uncomfortable laughter from the audience. You watch change glitter in the spotlights, tossed onto the stage at Bob Dylan’s feet. “Pick up your silver!” someone else yells.
Dylan looks into your eyes. He plays a chord. “I don’t believe you,” he answers, almost absent-mindedly. And then, more strongly, as the other instruments come in, “You’re a liar!”
“Like a Rolling Stone” explodes.
The ghosts on stage batter their way through the music in defiance of everything, the audience, its expectations, their outrage.
Manchester, England, the Free Trade Hall, May 16th, 1966. You weren’t there.
But maybe someday you will be; or you’ll catch Dylan in a Greenwich Village cabaret or watch him going electric at Newport, or listen to him deliver one of his maniac Gospel screeds before launching into “Gotta Serve Somebody” or see him beating a harmonica against his leg in time to “Isis” on the Rolling Thunder Tour.
Or maybe the Never-Ending Tour will just never end.
“We live in a world of fantasy where Disney has won, the fantasy of Disney. It’s all fantasy. That’s why I think that if a writer has something to say he should say it at all costs. The world is real. Fantasy has become the real world. Whether we realize it or not.” ~ Bob Dylan
