Bob Dylan Revealed What He Watches ‘All the Time, Nonstop’ on Tour
With the exception of 2020 and part of 2021, Bob Dylan has been on a virtually ceaseless tour since 1988. The tour is unofficially known as the Never Ending Tour, and Dylan has performed in over 3,000 shows. He spends a great deal of time on the road and needs something to occupy himself when he’s not performing. Dylan explained that when he has downtime on his bus, he has one show constantly playing.
Bob Dylan has been on a nonstop tour for years
While on tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Dylan felt a yawning sense of detachment from his music. He was ready to retire.
“I had no connection to any kind of inspiration,” Dylan wrote, per Vulture. “Whatever was there to begin with had vanished and shrunk … I couldn’t overcome the odds. Everything was smashed. My own songs had become strangers to me. I was what they called over the hill …The mirror had turned around and I could see the future — an old actor fumbling in garbage cans outside the theater of past triumphs.”
After an onstage epiphany, Dylan decided to continue playing shows without stopping, rebuilding his audience and his touring style.
“I’d have to start at the bottom,” he wrote, “and I wasn’t even on the bottom yet.”
Bob Dylan shared his favorite show to watch while on tour
According to Dylan, there were few TV shows he didn’t like when he was young.
“I was about 14 or 15 when we got [a TV], my dad put it in the basement,” he said in an 2017 interview on his official website. “It came on at 3:00 and went off at 9, most of the other time it showed a test pattern, some kind of weird circular symbol. The reception wasn’t that good, there was a lot of snow on the screen and you always had to adjust the antenna to get anything to come in. I liked everything I saw — Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Highway Patrol, Father Knows Best.”
On his lengthy tour, he prefers watching a show from his adolescence.
“[I watch] I Love Lucy, all the time, nonstop,” he said.
He nearly starred in his own TV series
Dylan’s appreciation for television inspired him to make his own show. Alongside comedy writer Larry Charles, Dylan created a slapstick comedy series.
“He’d gotten deeply into Jerry Lewis, and he wanted to make a slapstick comedy,” Charles said on the podcast You Make It Weird, per Rolling Stone. Dylan also “wanted to star in it, almost like a Buster Keaton or something.”
Dylan and Charles pitched the series to the president of HBO, and, despite Dylan’s obvious disinterest during the pitch meeting, the network greenlit the show. The group’s celebration of their luck didn’t even make it out of HBO’s offices, though.
“We go out to the elevator — Bob’s manager Jeff, my manager Gavin, me and Bob – the three of us are elated we actually sold the project and Bob says, ‘I don’t want to do it anymore. It’s too slapsticky,'” Charles explained. “He’s not into it. That’s over. The slapstick phase has officially ended.”
