Bob Dylan with Willie Nelson for the Outlaw Music Festival tour

Bob Dylan plays “Roll over Beethoven” live for the first time

After kicking off his 2024 tour last March 1, with a show that – in addition to seeing someone in the audience shouting at him to play “something we know” – marked his first live performance of Jimmy's “Walking by myself” Rogers, Bob Dylan in concert continues to amaze fans with covers of songs by other artists.

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In addition to performing his own version of Johnny Cash's “Big River” during his March 6 set in Clearwater, the following night on stage at the Suncoast Credit Union Arena in Fort Myers, the Duluth singer-songwriter played a live version for the first time cover of the Chuck Berry classic, “Roll over Beethoven”. Although Dylan had never re-read the 1956 song before, over the course of his career he had remade other Berry songs, including – as reported by the US edition of “Rolling Stone” – “No Money Down” in 1981, “Around and Around” in 1992 and 2003, “Nadine (Is It You?)” in 1988 and 2023 and “Johnny B. Goode” in 2003 and 2023.

Regarding Chuck Berry's impact on his songwriting, in an interview for “Rolling Stone US” in 1987, the voice of “Like a Rolling Stone” said: “Chuck Berry was a rock & roll singer-songwriter. So I never tried to write rock & roll songs, because I thought he had already done it. When I started writing songs, they had to be in a different mold. Because, who wants to be someone second rate? She had arrived a new generation, of which I was a part: the second generation of rock & roll people. For me, and for others like me, it was a lifestyle. It was an all-consuming lifestyle.”

In another 2009 interview, about eight years before Chuck Berry's passing in 2017, Bob Dylan added: “In my universe, Chuck is irreplaceable. All that brilliance is still there, and he's still a force of nature. As long as Chuck Berry is around, everything is as it should be. This is a man who has been through everything. The world treated him very badly. But in the end, it was the world that was defeated.”

Unlike “Roll over Beethoven”, with “Big River” by Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan has a long connection, even if before the evening of March 6 he had not played it since 2003, when he was on tour with the Grateful Dead.

In addition to having always been a fan of the music of the “Man in black”, who reciprocated his respect so much so that he himself covered Dylan songs, the 82-year-old singer-songwriter re-recorded some of Cash's songs as early as 1967 during the legendary “Basement tapes”, sessions which saw him engaged together with the Band – made up of Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson, who would later also be joined by Levon Helm – at the home studios that went down in history as “Big Pink ” in West Saugerties, New York. On that occasion Dylan re-read “Folsom Prison Blues”, “Belshazzar” and “Big River”, which he also revisited with Cash himself in 1969.

Bob Dylan then re-read “Big River” in 1988, then in 1999, in 2000, and – before the concert in Clearwater – in 2003 with the Grateful Dead.