Although Timothée Chalomet will most likely not be in attendance for the second annual Bob Dylan birthday tribute at The Broadside but that doesn’t mean it won’t be a great time.
Brian Stoltz, Papa Mali, Susan Cowsill, Johnny Sansone, Alex McMurray, Billy Iuso, Layla Musselwhite, Jake Eckert, Aaron Wilkinson, Dave Jordan, Mia Borders, Eric Johanson, Gal Holiday, Blake Quick, Gregg Hill, Ken Swartz and Rurik Nunan will perform alongside the house band which features Sam Price, Keiko Komaki, Danny Abel and Ethan Shorter.
In 2024, Dylan performed a nearly two-hour show at the Saenger Theatre as a part of his Rough and Rowdy tour. Rough and Rowdy Ways was his first album since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. As noted by OffBeat’s John Wirt, The Swedish Academy placed singer-songwriter Dylan in the company of T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez. The academy’s permanent secretary, literary scholar Sara Danius, explained its reasons for doing so, citing Dylan as “a great poet in the English-speaking tradition” who has constantly reinvented himself. And like the works of classic Greek poets Homer and Sappho, Danius said, Dylan’s poetry is “meant to be listened to, meant to be performed, often together with instruments.”
Dylan’s life has been immortalized in such films as Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There and James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown. Haynes’ 2007 film features six actors depicting different facets of Dylan’s public personas: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger (his final film to be released during his lifetime) and Ben Whishaw. A caption at the start of the film declares it to be “inspired by the music and the many lives of Bob Dylan”; this is the only mention of Dylan in the film apart from song credits, and his only appearance in it is concert footage from 1966. The film’s title is taken from the 1967 Dylan Basement Tape recording of “I’m Not There”, a song that had not been officially released until it appeared on the film’s soundtrack album.
The Bob Dylan Birthday Tribute event will take place Saturday, May 24 at The Broadside, 600 N. Broad Street. Doors open at 7 p.m. and the show begins at 8 p.m. Tickets are available here.
