25 YEARS ON: BOB GETTING SNIPPY ABOUT BRUCE

I realise with the usual twitch of hapless surprise that the US and Far East tour with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers was 25 years ago already! Here's one of the shorter entries from The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, about Bob's little rap during the last night's concert in Japan:

Jesus v. Springsteen

On the 1986 tours with TOM PETTY & THE HEARTBREAKERS, beginning in Australia and Japan in February and March, Dylan would nightly regale his audiences with garrulous, slightly mad raps before a number of songs. Disappointingly, these were always roughly the same (i.e. descending to showbiz routine, rather than the spontaneous one-off communications of earlier eras  -  or at least of those when he spoke at all).

            The most effective was the rap that introduced ‘In The Garden’, from the Saved album: a song about Christ. The rap always begins with a short list other people’s heroes, and those on the list varied nightly  -  except that they always seemed to include BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN. The list was particularly nifty in Tokyo on March 10, at his last concert in the Far East. Dylan says:

            ‘This song here’s about my hero. Everybody’s got a hero. Where I come from heroes are . . . John Wayne, Boris Karloff, Henry Winkler, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon. Anyway, I don’t care nothing about any of those people. I have my own hero.’