I went to the Baton Rouge River Center last night to see 84-year-old Bob Dylan and band belt out the critically acclaimed Rough and Rowdy set.
He sat center stage in a hoodie and did what he’s always done. He played his music. No fuss, no frills.
Just the man and his band.
He worked the keyboard, sometimes standing, stepping out from behind it once or twice. Two harmonica breaks—both of them landing exactly where they needed to, cutting clean through the room.
They started a little rough. Then they found it.
The rhythm came, and once it came, it held.
It’s extraordinary for any octogenarian. More so when you consider that he’s been touring, in one form or another, since 1988—the long arc people call the Never Ending Tour. The pandemic paused it. In that pause, he released his 39th album, Rough and Rowdy Ways. The tour that followed was supposed to end in 2024.
But Bob?
He wanted to keep going.
So he added more shows. And now we’re in 2026 and he is still on the move.
You could say the extension is driven by demand. Of course there’s demand, but it’s more than that. It’s him.
Dylan doesn’t work the stage. He never did. He stands, he plays, he moves when he needs to.
What he wants—what he has always wanted—is to play the music.
And increasingly, he wants to do it without distraction—or being one.
He doesn’t want photographs. He doesn’t want the performance mediated through a thousand small glowing screens. The audience is there for the show, and the show is his. That’s the contract.
At Baton Rouge, every phone was locked in a Yondr pouch before the lights went down.
His show, his rules.
A minor inconvenience, maybe. But a meaningful one.
Because the alternative—the one we’ve all come to accept—is a room full of raised arms, lenses pointed forward, attention split between the moment and its documentation. From the stage, that must look like something close to surveillance.
At 84, under stage lights that are unforgiving at any age, I don’t blame him for resisting that.
After the show, I plugged the hoodie question into a search engine. Photos of Dylan on stage in the hoodie are posted on Reddit and TikTok. Not from Baton Rouge, but from other shows on the same tour.
It irritated me more than I expected.
Because it breaks the terms of something that had, for a brief hour and a half, felt intact. A room without phones. A performance that wasn’t immediately flattened into content.
If people don’t like the rules, they don’t have to go.
But if you’re there, you’re there on his terms.
I wish I had been thinking more clearly; I would have downvoted the Reddit post. (I don’t do anything on TikTok.) If people don’t like the measures the tour takes to prevent photos of the performance, too bad. It’s not an arbitrary request.
In my opinion, it’s a an annoyance worth enduring for the privilege of hearing Bob Dylan live. Especially if the sacrifice makes the performance better because the star is unbothered, feels comfortable and happy.
An hour and a half without an iPhone is nothing.
An hour and a half in the room with Dylan, at this point in his life, is not nothing.
It won’t happen again in quite the same way. It can’t.
He keeps adding dates to a tour that has already outlived its original design. That extension isn’t logistical. It’s personal. It’s the expression of a man who still wants—insists—on doing what he loves.
He wants to play the music and let the music breathe in its own way.
Without a phone that has too many superfluous abilities, the mind does what it used to do at concerts—wanders, attaches, drifts, returns—without needing to hold anything up to prove it was there.
I think of the concert scene in Howards End, when Forster dwells on the Schlegel siblings carried along not just by Beethoven, but by their own interior weather as the music moves through them. Tibby’s attention was fractured much as mine was in the Dylan concert, not away from the music but into something the music made possible. Instead of splitting outward, as happens when we record moments with our phones, the music pulls the attention inward.
For all the diligence of the workers of the venue, there is no guarantee that all audience phones will be detected. What I saw on Reddit proves that there is always someone audacious enough to flout the rules.
The hoodie, then, feels like more than a wish to hide.
It feels like a continuation of resistance. A kind of last defense. If the system fails—if a camera slips through—there is still shadow.
There is still some part of him that remains his.
He just wants to do music. He wants to do music badly enough to keep touring in spite of the aggravation.
He has given his heart—to the music, to the world.
But because of the boundaries he has always taken care to establish, there is still some part of him that remains only his.
That feels right.
Play me some Dylan
These words, “I listened to ’em while they struck me down to the ground,” were spoken by Timothée Chalamet in his portrayal of Bob Dylan for A Complete Unknown (2024). It was the music of Woody Guthr…