Bob Dylan Is Selling a Bizarre Tour T-Shirt. We Have Questions

Bob Dylan has spent the past two weeks crisscrossing the country on the Outlaw Music Festival summer tour alongside Celisse, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, and Lukas Nelson, who has been subbing in for his ailing father, Willie. Most Dylan fans have rightly been focused on his decision to jettison his Rough and Rowdy Ways set list of the past three years, bring in a series of 1950s covers songs he’s never done before, part ways with longtime pedal-steel player Donnie Herron, and reunite with gospel-era drummer Jim Keltner.

But sharp-eyed fans have fixated on a very bizarre T-shirt for sale every night at the merch stand. The front reads Tempest Tour 2012 and names the songs “Pay in Blood,” “Scarlet Town,” and “Early Roman Kings” from the album. The back lists mostly accurate 2012 dates. (A shout-out to Dylan super fan Adam Selzer for first spotting this.)

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It may look like a simple reprint of a shirt from 2012, but nothing like this was sold back then. Nor was that trek even labeled the Tempest tour. And Dylan played very few songs from the album most nights. There’s also a 2024 copyright on the shirt, proving it is indeed something new. Needless to say, this has sparked quite a lot of discussion in Dylan fan circles. We have some questions of our own.

Is Dylan’s Tempest T-shirt tied to his new set list?

When the Outlaw tour kicked off June 21 in Alpharetta, Georgia, Dylan played fours songs from Tempest: “Early Roman Kings,” “Long and Wasted Years,” “Pay in Blood,” and “Scarlet Town.” He didn’t spotlight more than a single song from any of his other albums. On that night, the Tempest shirt made some degree of sense. But it was a one-off. He totally reworked the show the following evening in Charlotte, North Carolina, and he’s stuck to that new set ever since. It now includes just two Tempest songs (“Early Roman Kings,” “Soon After Midnight”), along with two Highway 61 Revisited tunes (“Ballad of a Thin Man,” “Highway 61 Revisited”), and two Time Out of Mind cuts (“Can’t Wait,” “Love Sick”). But they aren’t selling fake vintage shirts for 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited or 1997’s Time Out of Mind. It’s just Tempest — the least loved album of the three.

Why is one of the tour dates listed on the Tempest shirt fake?

The back of the T-shirt lists all of the shows that Dylan and opening act Mark Knopfler played in 2012 between October and November. But it also throws in a Nov. 10 show in Rosemont, Illinois, that didn’t happen. Was this part of the original itinerary? What’s more likely is they’re taking a page from the 2019 movie Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese. That pseudo-documentary mixed legit footage from the 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue with fictional elements, like a teenage Sharon Stone supposedly joining the tour and sparking up a romance with Dylan. From his earliest days on the Greenwich Village folk scene, Dylan has mixed fact with fiction when referring to his own past. This phantom Rosemont show is likely just a continuation of that, albeit a really weird one.

Why is Dylan highlighting Tempest at all?

It’s common for classic-rock artists to sell T-shirts with vintage designs at their shows. But they usually tie them to their most beloved albums or tours. The Eagles might sell Hotel California shirts, but you won’t see anything connected to their 2007 album, Long Road Out of Eden. Tempest is a fine album by the standards of latter-day Dylan, but he’s released three Sinatra covers collections, the soundtrack to the Shadow Kingdom streaming special, and Rough and Rowdy Ways since it came out. And they’d certainly sell more Blood on the Tracks, Blonde on Blonde, or Desire shirts than Tempest ones. It almost feels like they picked a random Dylan album out of a hat.

Did Dylan quietly pull a similar T-shirt stunt before?

As Dylan fan False_Prophet44 pointed out on Twitter, a 1992 Outburst of Consciousness tour shirt was sold at shows last year, with a 2023 copyright. This generated less attention since the dates were all legit, and it was old enough to seem like a standard vintage shirt. But in hindsight, the 1992 tour is also a weird thing to spotlight. They didn’t make up that tour name — it comes from the World Gone Wrong liner notes where he gives goofy names like The Money Never Runs Out Tour, Why Do You Look at Me So Strangley Tour, Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down Tour to recent tour legs.

So what will Dylan do next?

If this is indeed an annual thing, where might it go next year? We’d vote for the 2002 tour where Dylan switched from guitar to piano, and suddenly started playing Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Don Henley, and Warren Zevon covers. These were some of the best shows in the long history of the Never Ending Tour. It deserves a celebration. And if they want to make up a few shows that never actually took place, why not?

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