Bob Dylan to Play Stifel in October

The Rough and Rowdy Ways tour is rumored to be his last

By Ryan Krull

Aug 21, 2023 at 11:20 am

Publicity photo

Bob Dylan will play the Stifel Theater October 4.

Bob Dylan will be coming to St. Louis this fall as part of the tour that many have speculated will be the 82-year-old's last.

The October 4 show at the Stifel Theatre is part of Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour 2021–2024, a departure from the Never Ending Tour banner beneath which he circled the globe again and again for more than 30 years, until 2019. The tour name change as well as the inclusion of the 2021-2024 have Dylanologists thinking the artist is going to hang it up after next year.

But there's also the possibility that he just changed the tour's name because the album he named it after, his most recent, is just that good.

When it came out in the summer of 2020, Rough and Rowdy Ways delighted music critics and longtime Dylan heads, both on its own merits and in the context of it being the 39th album from an artist who recorded it in his late 70s. You'd have to be a little bit delusional to say that it's just as good as Highway 61 or Bringing it all Back Home, but given that those albums from the 1960s are so canonical that they're used as a shorthand for an entire decade of American history, the 2020 record lived up to that legacy by finding a way to add something new and worthwhile to it.

If you've never given Rough and Rowdy Ways a listen, the next time your Spotify shuffles to "Like a Rolling Stone" or "It Ain't Me Babe," instead throw on "Key West (Philosopher Pirate)" or "Murder Most Foul." Are either of those two latter tracks iconic? Of course not. But unlike listening to a Dylan classic for the hundredth or the thousandth time, they might just surprise you.

Which is all to say that when Dylan takes the stage in St. Louis in two months, we suspect many people in Stifel will have the most unusual of dispositions for rock fans attending a so-called legacy act show: hoping that the man on stage plays plenty of the new stuff.

Tickets go on sale this Friday, August 25 at 10 a.m.

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Ryan Krull

Ryan Krull is a staff writer for the Riverfront Times. Find him on Twitter @ryanwkrull

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