Bob Dylan Returns to Sing “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”

Bob Dylan performed “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” for the first time in a decade, during a tour stop at the Outlaw Music Festival in Boise, Idaho. During his joint tour with Willie Nelson, Dylan has made headlines for putting dark reworkings on old songs. There’s nothing really new here, though; it’s a practice fans have grown accustomed to. Now, however, Dylan is digging deeper into his catalog to keep audiences surprised and his setlists unpredictable. That’s why he performed “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” for the first time since 2016.

It is the opening track of his 1966 classic “Blonde on Blonde” and contains the legendary refrain “everybody must get stoned”. The song is famous for its unusual instrumentation, in fact it is the only song on “Blonde on Blonde” with a brass band, and also for its controversial lyrics, that “They’ll stone you” repeated at the beginning of each verse, which created no small problems for the song with the censors of the time. Robert Shelton, in his 1986 Dylan biography “No Direction Home” (nothing to do with the Martin Scorsese documentary film of the same title), states that the song was banned from many American radio stations and the BBC, precisely because of its alleged references to drugs. Dylan has repeatedly denied that the song is a “drug song”, that is, a song that talks about drugs. The song was likely inspired by Ray Charles’s famous recording of “Let’s Go Get Stoned,” which Dylan had heard a few months earlier while in a Los Angeles coffeehouse.