Forty years ago, Bob Dylan‘s impromptu comments at Live Aid inspired Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and John Mellencamp to stage the original Farm Aid in Champaign, Illinois. And on Saturday night, Bob Dylan returned to the Farm Aid stage to celebrate the event’s 40th anniversary at Huntington Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Dylan was added to the lineup just days before the event, and questions swirled about his appearance until the minute he took the stage. Was he going to perform with his regular road band or repeat his 2023 surprise Farm Aid set by playing with 3/5th of the Heartbreakers? Would he hide himself from the audience as he’s done at recent Outlaw Music Festival shows or actually take off his hoodie and reveal his face to the crowd? Would he let the screens project his set to the entire stadium or force everyone to squint or break out binoculars? And would he let the livestream share his performance with a global audience online?
He wound up wearing the hoodie, though not pulled as tightly around his face as it has been at recent shows, and he agreed to both the projection screens and the livestream. There weren’t closeups, the stage was pretty dark, and much of the stadium audience had a hard time seeing him clearly, but these were major concessions given his history. Very few Never Ending Tour shows have been professionally filmed like this, let alone broadcast on the Internet.
The set was a truncated version of his Outlaw show featuring “All Along The Watchtower,” Bo Diddley’s “I Can Tell,” “To Ramona,” “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Every single song dates from the Sixties, even the Bo Diddley cover.
Unlike his appearances at Farm Aid in 1985 and 2023, Dylan didn’t do the obvious move and play “Maggie’s Farm.” Earlier in the night, however, Margo Price performed it with Billy Strings and Jesse Welles.
Dylan, Billy Strings, Jesse Welles, and Margo Price were part of a stacked Farm Aid bill that also included Kenny Chesney, Waxahatchee, Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, Steve Earle, Lukas Nelson, and Wynonna Judd in addition to board members Neil Young, John Mellencamp, and Willie Nelson.
Neil Young came out after Dylan and played a politically-charged set that opened with his anti-Trump screed “Big Crime” before ripping through “Rockin’ In The Free World,” “Long Walk Home,” “Be The Rain,” “Southern Man,” “Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black),” and “Old Man.”
As always, Willie Nelson closed out the show with a set of classics. Nearly every guest from throughout the day came out for “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” “It’s Hard To Be Humble,” and “I’ll Fly Away.” Unsurprisingly, Bob Dylan was the lone holdout.
