Bob Dylan turns 84 today, and he will be spending the evening the way he might spend just about any random other night of the year: on a concert stage. There will likely be no commemoration of the occasion at the gig in Ridgefield, Washington, which will be just another evening on the Outlaw Music Festival 2025 tour he is once again sharing with Willie Nelson, with support from Billy Strings, Sierra Hull and some other Americana-favoring youngsters. Why would Dylan treat a birthday unlike any other night? True, we haven’t known him to actually play on Christmas, but he’d probably be out gigging on major holidays, too, if he thought a reasonable crowd would come out. It’s Willie who sings “I just can’t wait to get on the road again” (and there’s no reason to think he doesn’t mean it), but it’s Bob who most embodies that as his actual religion.
Not that there’s any reason to look for daylight between these two giants and their touring philosophies. There is some kind of swim-or-die mentality that motivates Dylan and the 92-year-old Nelson to be out doing what they’re doing. Other octogenarian-and-up types might consider keeping at it to provide further annuities for their heirs, or because there’s no much thing as too much money, or because, like John Huston in “Chinatown,” they imagine they can buy the future — or because of narcissism. I could be wrong, but I don’t imagine any of these rationales really seriously figuring into why Nelson and Dylan are on the road again. It’s because they love it and because they’re still effing good… better, even, in some regards, if you can take the view that experience is a feature and not a flaw for artists who can maintain a real, ongoing vitality. Not to make this into some kind of AARP tract, but: Are there any figures in American music more inspirational than these two? It was true when they were still mere sprouts of, like, 64 ad 72, but all the more so now that they are seriously defying gravity.
Last weekend, they played the Hollywood Bowl, and if you’re in L.A., maybe you were tempted to skip it — maybe you in fact did — because they’d just done it the year before. What a foolish notion that would have been, or was, depending on where you chose to spend your Friday night. There’s an obvious reason to hit these festival tour stops, which is that people who are pushing the envelope of high performance levels in entertainment cannot do it indefinitely, or so we’ve been assured, before health issues inevitably have their day. But I’d say that “this could be the last time” is only the third- or fourth-best reason to catch this tour (if, sure, a compelling one). The overriding one is that these would count as terrific performances even if we could be assured that they’ll still be out there pulling off similar feats five or 10 or 15 years from now. They are embracing the spirit of each night’s moment in an accomplished and downright frisky way that most younger achievers can only aspire toward (although, to give credit where it’s due, most of the younger acts they’ve picked as openers seem like the types who could absorb these lessons).
And, maybe most significantly: If you live in a city the Outlaw Festival is visiting, the best way to think of it is having half of a living Mount Rushmore coming to you. (I’m not even sure who counts as the other half, at this point; perhaps we can just carve the two of them into the mountain twice.)
There is certainly a lot of commonality to Nelson’s and Dylan’s appeal and performing styles — that loose sense of ragged but right that makes the “outlaw” tag for the tour feel like it’s not completely a branding conceit. Greil Marcus once wrote a book about “the old, weird America” focused on Dylan, and Nelson ought to fit into that, too, as one of our seminal dusty beat poets, even if his appeal is so broad and his persona so warm that his music is welcome in practically every home in the United States.
