We are well past the fan controversy years when Dylan “went electric” or played religious concerts; however, some Bob Dylan fans can still talk up a tempest about static setlists. But what story do the numbers tell? Just how common are truly identical Dylan setlists?
A new button
A new bobserve.com feature lets you see for yourself when and where a setlist was repeated with the exact same songs in the exact same order. Take April 25, 2017 in Frankfurt, for example. Click the button below the song list to reveal concerts that used the same set. (The button is only visible when repeats are found).
Play all the numbers
bobserve has data on 3,952 Bob Dylan concerts, excluding private appearances, benefits, guest appearances and other non-concert type events. These concerts include 125 setlists that were each played more than once1.
Dylan drew from this pool of 125 “same-sets” for 783 of his shows. This means he re-used setlists at 19.8% of all his concerts over the course of six decades. But not every year is equal, as we’ll see.
If you like your data, you'll love this next table2. If not, no worries, just scroll past to read the takeaways.
Up until the late 1980s, only the religious shows in ‘79 and ‘80 were big repetition years. Dylan was sharing his passion with his new songs, with almost 90% of his 1979 concerts re-using setlists.
The major tours with no repeated sets at all were 1976’s Rolling Thunder, the 1984 Tour, 1986 with The Heartbreakers, and the 1987 tours.
Never-Ending Setlists
The first 25 years of the Never-Ending Tour had so much variation that more than 99% of concerts had totally unique setlists! Incredibly, this amounts to a mere 16 repeated sets out of 2,478 concerts.
Then came 2012 and the year of “The Set.” Ten re-used setlists took up a whopping three-quarters of all the concerts that year alone.
This pattern only increased, until the high point was reached in 2019, with 70 out of 77 concerts (91%!) drawing from one of just seven repeated song lists.
The static era
Some have complained about the Rough And Rowdy Ways static setlists. At first glance, though, it looks pretty similar to the late NET trend. The RARW tour has 13 same-sets performed at 77% of the concerts, compared to the final seven years of the NET with its average of 10 same-sets at 82% of the concerts.
So then why has the current tour felt more fixed? It’s because in the last two years a little more than half of all concerts (85) have been dominated by just two setlists. No two-year period in the NET came close to this profile.
Here is an illustration of the most recent 10 years of concerts. From front to back: the number of unique same-sets (blue), number of times any one of these was played (orange), and total concerts in the year (gray).
Take a look at 2023, where the debuts of many cover songs dramatically turned things around. At almost as many concerts as last year there are only half as many repeated sets. See here for a full list of these covers.
Same-Sets spanning more than one calendar year
This is a very rare occurrence, with the continual addition of new albums and covers helping to make it unlikely. However, there are still three setlists that fall into this category:
The San Francisco setlist from November 10, 1979 was performed 14 times that year, and 17 more times in the next.
Also from the same religious tour, the Tempe setlist on November 25, 1979 appeared again the following year for a further two outings.
The setlist from Denver on July 6, 2022 was repeated 28 times that year, and a further 15 times in 2023.
The single most performed setlist of all time
This just so happens to be on the current RARW tour, which also helps explain why it has felt like static setlists have very much taken hold recently. We all love surprise song selections, it’s true, but it’s also hard to overlook how impressive this set really is.
Do you have a Dylan Data question you’d like answered? For this and any other feedback, send me a note via bobserve.com or comment below.
What is bobserve.com?
A database-driven Bob Dylan setlist site, launched this summer. Search songs, concert dates, musicians, covers, perform analytics. Listen to linked audio for thousands of individual songs and complete concerts. Click around and browse for yourself.
Of course, the 1966 and earlier statistics are skewed by the number of incomplete and unknown setlists. The counts for 1965 and 1966, in particular, are very likely higher than we are able to determine.
All data analyzed here was updated through November 5, 2023.
very impressive work. what happened to 2012 in the table?
'Rough and Rowdy Ways' is RARW, not RAWR!