Bob Dylan will be at Stage AE on Pittsburgh\u2019s North Shore Sunday night. [AP file photo]\n<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to think of a public figure who is both more visible and more elusive than Bob Dylan.<\/p>\n
Since 1988, he has toured relentlessly. In what has since been dubbed the Never Ending Tour, he has played more than 3,700 concerts over the last 38 years, playing in cities both large and small and venues both massive and microscopic. He has twice played at the stadium outside Washington that is the home of the Wild Things baseball team, has played at the Pavilion at Star Lake outside Burgettstown several times and was booked at the Convocation Center at what was then called California University of Pennsylvania in 2013.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s played at just about every crossroads in the country \u2013 Toledo, Ohio, Huntington, W.Va., Saginaw, Mich., you name it.<\/p>\n
But while he\u2019s easy to see live, the 85-year-old has kept himself stubbornly shielded. Dylan rarely grants interviews \u2013 it\u2019s been almost four years since the last one \u2013 and has given exactly one television interview in the last 40 years. He doesn\u2019t interact much at all with audiences during his shows, remaining hunched over keyboards on a darkened stage. His stage attire? Most recently, black pants and a hoodie.<\/p>\n
The world may have been treated to up-to-the-minute reports on Taylor Swift\u2019s wedding last weekend, but even Dylan\u2019s most zealous followers aren\u2019t even sure if he has a spouse right now.<\/p>\n
And his set lists frequently bypass his best-known songs in favor of more recent material. \u201cLike a Rolling Stone,\u201d \u201cAll Along the Watchtower,\u201d \u201cBlowin\u2019 in the Wind\u201d and \u201cTangled Up in Blue\u201d have all been missing from Dylan\u2019s shows.<\/p>\n
Ever the enigma, Dylan will never be a crowd-pleaser on a par with, say, Paul McCartney. But McCartney may be Dylan\u2019s only living peer when it comes to influence and impact. Over the last 35 years, Dylan has won a Nobel Prize in literature and a Pulitzer Prize, and that\u2019s on top of a Kennedy Center honor, an Oscar, Grammy awards and a slew of other accolades.<\/p>\n
Trying to divine what Dylan will do is a fool\u2019s errand, but he seems likely to keep touring until he simply can\u2019t anymore. In an essay about making it past 80 that appeared last month in The New York Times, Dylan observed, \u201cYou don\u2019t chase the parade anymore. You\u2019re an old king from some vanished country. You\u2019re hard to program. You\u2019re not rushing to become anything and you\u2019re not haunted by things that you did. You\u2019re haunted by how little of it really mattered in the way you thought it would.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dylan will be at Stage AE on Pittsburgh\u2019s North Shore Sunday at 6:30 p.m., with blues guitarist Jimmie Vaughan and singer-songwriter Brittney Spencer will be opening. For information, go online to bobdylan.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bob Dylan will be at Stage AE on Pittsburgh\u2019s North Shore Sunday night. [AP file photo] It\u2019s hard…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":239790,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[103108,73,75,74,16665],"class_list":["post-239789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-bob-dylan","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news","tag-stage-ae"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239789"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239789\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}