The biggest difference between “Truckin’” and the earlier covers is that Bob seems somewhat unsure of the words, switching the order of verses and sometimes singing off-mike to conceal a forgotten lyric. But it doesn’t matter; he and the band are having a great time, and their joy at performing this song is infectious. It’s possible that they’ve only played "Truckin'" before at rehearsal, and may have only decided to perform it while the show was in progress.
Strangely, Bob has a long history of covering songs that he doesn’t know the words to. For example, the famous performance of Sonny Boy Williamson II’s “Don’t Start Me to Talkin’” on Late Night with David Letterman in 1984 contains very few of that song’s actual lyrics. Bob remembers the chorus (“Don’t start me talkin’/I’ll tell you everythin’ I know/I’m gonna break up this signifyin’/Somebody’s got to go”) and the phrases “beauty shop” and "two dollars," but that’s basically it; everything else is coming straight off the top of his head.
Similarly, a bootleg called The 1985 Rehearsal Tape – featuring Bob backed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and The Queens of Rhythm – includes a moment where Dylan begins singing wordlessly, almost to himself. You can hear the other musicians listening intently, trying to figure out if this is a new song or something they should know. Eventually, it turns out that Bob is singing Merle Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home,” the twist being that he knows none of the words except some of the chorus and a few phrases like “guitar playing.” Nevertheless, it’s beautiful, perfectly capturing the plight of that song’s doomed narrator. Bob would later perform word-perfect versions of “Sing Me Back Home” in 2004 and 2005.
The early years of the Never Ending Tour feature several great “forgotten lyric” covers. One of my all-time favourites is a performance of Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty” from Peoria, Illinois in 1989. Not only is Bob deeply unfamiliar with words of the song, but he is also on a mission to outfox his band, repeatedly catching them off guard by jumping ahead of the beat or unexpectedly launching into the chorus. It’s as though Dylan is acting out the part of the outlaw Pancho, with the band as the federales on his tail: each time they think they’ve caught up with him, he slips out of their grasp once again. The drums of this performance sounds like galloping horses, and I can’t help picturing Dylan as the intrepid adventurer who appeared on the cover of Desire 13 years before.
1989 also brings us lyrically-jumbled-but-brilliant (to me, at least) performances of Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” and Van Morrison’s “And it Stoned Me.” I don’t think Bob’s unfamiliarity with the words can be put down to laziness; this was a different time, and Dylan is a spontaneous man. In the absence of the internet - and unless he happened to have the album containing the song with him on tour - procuring lyrics would probably involve sending someone to a music shop in search of either a copy of the album or the printed music and words. Once that had been accomplished, enthusiasm for performing the song may have already been and gone.
Similarly, a bootleg called The 1985 Rehearsal Tape – featuring Bob backed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and The Queens of Rhythm – includes a moment where Dylan begins singing wordlessly, almost to himself. You can hear the other musicians listening intently, trying to figure out if this is a new song or something they should know. Eventually, it turns out that Bob is singing Merle Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home,” the twist being that he knows none of the words except some of the chorus and a few phrases like “guitar playing.” Nevertheless, it’s beautiful, perfectly capturing the plight of that song’s doomed narrator. Bob would later perform word-perfect versions of “Sing Me Back Home” in 2004 and 2005.
The early years of the Never Ending Tour feature several great “forgotten lyric” covers. One of my all-time favourites is a performance of Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty” from Peoria, Illinois in 1989. Not only is Bob deeply unfamiliar with words of the song, but he is also on a mission to outfox his band, repeatedly catching them off guard by jumping ahead of the beat or unexpectedly launching into the chorus. It’s as though Dylan is acting out the part of the outlaw Pancho, with the band as the federales on his tail: each time they think they’ve caught up with him, he slips out of their grasp once again. The drums of this performance sounds like galloping horses, and I can’t help picturing Dylan as the intrepid adventurer who appeared on the cover of Desire 13 years before.
1989 also brings us lyrically-jumbled-but-brilliant (to me, at least) performances of Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” and Van Morrison’s “And it Stoned Me.” I don’t think Bob’s unfamiliarity with the words can be put down to laziness; this was a different time, and Dylan is a spontaneous man. In the absence of the internet - and unless he happened to have the album containing the song with him on tour - procuring lyrics would probably involve sending someone to a music shop in search of either a copy of the album or the printed music and words. Once that had been accomplished, enthusiasm for performing the song may have already been and gone.
As the Never Ending Tour became a more polished operation throughout the '90s and into the 21st Century, the chances of Bob spontaneously covering a song that he only half-remembered the lyrics to became less and less. However, this ramshackle but loveable performance of “Truckin’” in Tokyo shows that it can still happen when the mood takes him.
