The Outlaw Music Festival began nine years back as a single event in Scranton, Pennsylvania, featuring Willie Nelson, Neil Young, Sheryl Crow, Chris Robinson, and Lee Ann Womack. It’s slowly morphed into a traveling fest that brings Nelson and a rotating cast of top-grade support acts to amphitheaters across America every summer, and they leveled up significantly last year by placing Bob Dylan in the penultimate slot every night of the run.
They repeated the successful Bob/Willie formula this summer for an extensive, 36-show trek, and sprinkled on acts like Wilco, Sheryl Crow, Billy Strings, Waxahatchee, Lucinda Williams, Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, and Bruce Hornsby & The Night Sweats at various stops along the way. Some nights have slightly stronger bills than others, but it’s undoubtedly the most exciting/eclectic multi-artist show of the summer amphitheater season by a wide margin.
That was very clear August 1 when Lucinda Williams, and Wilco played truncated sets at Long Island’s Jones Beach Amphitheater before handing the evening over to Dylan and Nelson. These are four totally unique acts with fairly different approaches to live performances, and their own massive followings, but they all have a deep love and respect for American roots music that permeated through the entire night.
Due to tremendous good fortune, it was an unseasonably cool night at Jones Beach following two weeks of scorching, record-high temperatures, and a massive thunderstorm the prior evening that generated flood warnings all across the region. This placed everyone in a cheerful mood as Lucinda Williams took the stage in the very late afternoon. (Unfortunately, I arrived too late to see opening act Waylon Payne, but I caught him later when he played with Willie Nelson. Jones Beach is a beautiful amphitheater directly on the water, but the mass transit options from New York City are less than ideal.)
Williams no longer plays guitar due to a stroke she suffered in 2020, but she made the excellent decision to bring former Black Crowes guitarist Marc Ford into her band to compensate, and her singing voice retains much of its power. The set began with back-to-back songs from her 2023 LP Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart, “Let’s Get the Band Back Together” and “Stolen Moments,” before dipping back to Car Wheels on a Gravel Road for “Drunken Angel.”
Midway through her set, Williams broke out Memphis Minnie’s “You Can’t Rule Me,” dedicating it to the “so-called king of the United States.” She didn’t speak Donald Trump’s name once, but it wasn’t necessary. Prior to that, she unveiled her excellent new ballad “Lowlife” (“Play Slim Harpo on the jukebox/Let me go with no shoes or socks”) that will hopefully appear on the next LP.
She closed out the set with the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” giving Ford and guitarist Doug Pettibone the chance to show off their chops, “Joy,” “Righteously,” and a fierce take on Neil Young’s “Rockin’ In The Free World” that brought the capacity crowd to their feet.
A decent percent of the Outlaw crowd is on the elderly side, and it’s unclear how many of them were familiar with Wilco when they took the stage, but it didn’t take long for Jeff Tweedy and company to win them over with a set packed with staples like “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” “Jesus, Etc.,” “Handshake Drugs” and “Walken.” None of these songs are “hits” in the traditional sense since Wilco never had anything resembling a Top 40 song, but they’ve been perfected across hundreds and hundreds of concerts by one of the greatest live bands of the past quarter century.
Nels Cline delivered an epic, mind-bending guitar solo on “Impossible Germany,” proving once again that he’s one of the single greatest guitarists of his generation. And Willie Nelson’s harmonica player Mickey Raphael came out to join them on “California Stars,” wearing a Flaco Jimenez t-shirt to honor the legendary Tejano accordionist, who died this week.
They closed out with a cover of the Grateful Dead’s “U.S. Blues” that caused the place to absolutely erupt with joy. (It’s always a good time to cover the Dead, but this was also Jerry Garcia’s birthday, and the first day of the Dead’s 60th anniversary celebration at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.)
As the sun began to set, the crew removed Wilco’s gear and set the stage for Bob Dylan and his band. On most Outlaw dates last year, Dylan compromised on his usual stance and allowed venues to display a single, distant shot of his set on the screens, giving people in the upper seats at least a vague sense of what was happening on stage. This year, the screens remained completely dark, meaning the vast majority of the audience saw nothing more than a distant, blurry figure in a white hat perched behind a piano. And if you were in the nosebleeds, it’s unlikely the figure was anything more than a tiny dot.
If nearly any other artist pulled this move at a large amphitheater, a rebellion would likely brew. (Back in 2012, Peter Gabriel kept the screens off for his first few songs at Jones Beach, and fans howled in frustration until they were illuminated.) But Bob Dylan fans are a different breed, and they simply leaned forward and focused on the music.
Unlike his indoor theater shows of the past few years, which focus heavily on material from 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, this was Dylan’s version of a crowd-pleasing set that drew from all eras of his career. That doesn’t mean he played any actual hits besides a radically re-worked “All Along The Watchtower” that stripped out every bit of Jimi Hendrix’s influence, but it did mean we heard “To Ramona,” “Desolation Row,” “Gotta Serve Somebody,” and “Love Sick” from his back catalog.
More importantly, he was once again in remarkably clear voice, even if he occasionally slurred lines in wordy tunes like “Desolation Row.” Many people were forever turned off to Dylan shows after witnessing “wolfman” era gigs about a decade back, but they need to give him another chance. Somehow or another, at age 84, his voice has been rejuvenated. It’s a minor miracle.
If you’re only seen Dylan at a theater these past few years, the atmosphere of the Outlaw Festival will be quite jarring. At the theaters, phones are taken away, the houses are completely dark and silent, and ushers roam the aisles with flashlights to pounce on anyone violating the rules. At the Outlaw shows, people are eating chicken fingers, spilling ketchup on themselves, chugging beers, loudly talking with their friends, scrolling through their phones, and taking selfies with Bob in the background. It’s the opposite vibe in nearly every imaginable way.
As always, practically every song in Dylan’s set was rearranged not just from its original version, but the live rendition we heard as recently as last summer. “‘Til I Fell In Love With You” is now practically a spoken-word track with sparse instrumentation, “Gotta Serve Somebody” has a rollicking groove, and “Blind Willie McTell” has rarely sounded so loose and playful.
There are some grumblings in the fan community that nearly 30% of the set is devoted to obscure covers like “Charlie Rich’s “I’ll Make It All Up To You,” Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Share Your Love With Me,” and George “Wild Child” Butler’s “Axe and the Wind,” but Dylan delivers them with real passion and tenderness. And if they cause anyone to seek out the originals, he’s done them a favor.
The set wrapped with a revved-up “Highway 61 Revisited,” Roy Acuff’s World War II-era folk song “Searching For a Soldier’s Grave,” which Dylan regularly played live at the turn of the century and only recently resurrected, and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Casual fans perked up at the latter one, and some surely recognized it from A Complete Unknown. He delivered it like a torch ballad, and it was easily the most moving moment of the evening.
There’s virtually no figure on the planet with the song catalog and the gravitas to follow that besides Willie Nelson. He missed several shows last summer due to health matters, and he looks every day of his 92 years, but every ounce of his essential Willie-ness remains.
Smartly, he’s stripped his band way down to the essential players, centering the focus on his voice and guitar. His lean band includes Waylon Payne, who doubles many of the vocals, and takes over on lead for a handful of songs, including “Me and Bobby McGee,” “Help Me Make It Through The Night,” ‘ and “Workin Man Blues.” This gives Willie a chance to catch his breath, and prep for the next song.
Willie standards like “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” and “You Were Always On My Mind” sounded absolutely majestic, and were reminders that this man wrote a decent chunk of the Great American Songbook. It’s impossible to cram all into one set, so he combined “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Crazy” and “Night Life” into a medley.
Wilco came back out near the end of the set for “Will The Circle Be Unbroken?,” but there was no sign of Dylan. Oddly enough, despite their close friendship and long history of onstage collaborations, they haven’t appeared together at a single Outlaw Festival. It’s a tremendous missed opportunity because a duet on “Poncho and Lefty,” “You Win Again,” or “Heartland” would set any venue ablaze.
The tour continues Saturday night in Saratoga Springs, New York, and wraps up September 19 in East Troy, Wisconsin. Let’s hope they’re back next summer for another round. It’s only been two years of Bob and Willie leading this tour as a combo act, but it already feels like a summer tradition.