Bob Dylan's Never Ending Tour

In 1988 Bob Dylan left behind the bands he’d been playing with, Tom Petty and The Grateful Dead, and launched his own four-piece band, beginning a remarkable musical odyssey known as the Never Ending Tour that would last thirty-one years, only coming to an end when covid closed the venues at the end of 2019.

In this first volume, Mike Johnson picks up the story the year before the NET began, follows it through its rocking beginnings, how it faltered in the early 1990s before hitting a rising curve that would build to the superb performances of 1995, and rising again to 1999, the first of three peak performance years.

Johnson discusses the performances, and evolution of the songs in performance, and provides dozens of sound files so the reader can hear all the versions he highlights.

Author Biography

Mike Johnson, fiction writer and poet, is widely regarded as one of New Zealand’s most innovative writers. He lives on Waiheke Island and has taught creative writing at AUT University and the University of Auckland. In 2002 he received The University of Auckland’s Literary Fellowship, having been Literary Fellow at Canterbury University in 1987. His first novel, Lear, the Shakespeare Company Plays Lear at Babylon was short listed for the New Zealand Book Awards in 1986, his novel Dumb Show won the Buckland Memorial Award for Literary Excellence in 1995, and he won the Frances Kean Award his short story, ‘Magic Strings’ in 1999. His first book of poetry, The Palanquin Ropes, (1983) was co-winner of the John Cowie Reed Memorial Competition. His non-fiction, Angel of Compassion, was shortlisted for the Ashton Whyle Award in 2014, and a poem from Vertical Harp, The selected poems of Li He (2006) has been anthologised in the Essential New Zealand Poems: Facing the Empty Page (Random House, 2015). Mike Johnson is the author of twenty-six books including nine books of poetry, three of shorter fiction, one non fiction, three children’s books, and ten novels.