Bob Dylan Is Touring the U.S. in Remote Towns: See the Dates
Bob Dylan has released the initial dates for the 2025 leg of his Never Ending Tour, and it features stops in small markets that rarely get A-list acts. The tour begins March 25 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and then heads to Wichita, Kansas; Mankato, Minnesota; and Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Mankato is the 21st-largest city in Dylan’s birth state of Minnesota. The population is a mere 46,000, and the venue Dylan is hitting usually hosts events like the Folsom Prison Experience (a Johnny Cash tribute show), the Minnesota Valley Action Council’s Lip Sync Battle, and the Pork Congress, which is billed as “the Midwest’s BEST swine specific trade show and education… designed exclusively for pig farmers and pork industry stakeholders.”
It’s impossible to predict what exact kind of show Dylan will perform, but he’s still billing this as the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour. When it started in 2021, posters for the show said it was slated to run from 2021 to 2024. But ads for the shows have removed the years.
Between 2021 and early 2024, the shows focused heavily on songs from Rough and Rowdy Ways, and rarely changed from night to night. In the summer of 2024, however, when Dylan went on the Outlaw Tour alongside Willie Nelson and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, the set was completely overhauled. Every Rough and Rowdy Ways song was gone, replaced by tunes from throughout his career like “Under the Red Sky,” “Shooting Star,” “All Along the Watchtower,” and “Things Have Changed.” He also added in covers like Chuck Berry’s “Little Queenie,” the Grateful Dead’s “Stella Blue,” and Paul Davis’ “Six Days on the Road.”
He even changed up his band by parting ways with drummer Charley Drayton, and longtime multi-instrumentalist Donnie Herron. Drummer Jim Keltner, whose tenure with Dylan goes all the way back to the early Seventies and stretches through the gospel shows of the early Eighties and the Time out of Mind sessions in the Nineties, took over for Drayton.
The upcoming shows will mark Dylan’s first live performances since A Complete Unknown hit theaters late last year. The Academy Award-nominated movie caused a huge spike of interest in Dylan’s life and music. If new fans show up to these concerts expecting to hear “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are-a Changin’” or basically any other song from the soundtrack, they are likely to leave mildly disappointed, at best. And if they expect him to strap on a harmonica rack and play solo acoustic, they will leave incredibly disappointed.
Here are the first four dates of Dylan’s 2025 Rough and Rowdy Ways tour. It’s a near certainty that more will be announced in the coming days.
March 25 – Tulsa, OK @ Tulsa Theater
March 29 – Wichita, KS @ Century II Concert Hall
April 4 – Mankato, MN @ Mayo Clinic Health Systems Event Center
April 6 – Green Bay, WI @ The Weidner-Cofrin Family HAll
