Photograph courtesy Stu Levy
Of the many, many books written about rock icon Bob Dylan to date, it’s probable that none have made a connection between his rise to fame and a stenographer shortage in Cincinnati when he first performed here in 1965. None until now, that is.
It’s a key point that Graley Herren, an English professor at Xavier University, makes early on in his book-in-progress, tentatively titled Dylan in Cincinnati. He’s detailing every local concert appearance by Dylan to date. The musician—now 83 and a towering éminence grise of popular music and American and even world culture—has visited this area 20 times and given 21 total concerts, including two shows at Music Hall in 1981. He’s still active, playing here as recently as a September show at Riverbend.
Herren is interested in exploring how these Cincinnati shows over the decades reveal the ways both Dylan and the city have changed with time. He’s so far written 15 individual installments, each in the range of 8,000–12,000 words, and published them as freely accessible posts on his Substack, Shadow Chasing.
Dylan first played here at the Taft Theatre on March 12, 1965. Then a 23-year-old folk singer and songwriter, he was on his last exclusively solo and acoustic tour before going electric and becoming a rock superstar and cultural juggernaut via the landmark Top 40 hit “Like a Rolling Stone.”
In 1965, Dylan was already followed by the college crowd and other young idealists for the political dimension of his songs, which supported the Civil Rights movement of the time and decried Cold War threats, like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” By early 1965, he was also was writing more personal songs like “My Back Pages” and “It Ain’t Me Babe.”
That brings us to those stenographers. On the afternoon of the Taft Theatre concert, the front page of The Cincinnati Post and Times-Star featured a story headlined, “Lack of Schooling, Sloth Blamed in Stenographer Shortage.” The article said, “If there were enough girls to go around, with adequate skill, more than 1,000 steady jobs could be filled overnight.” It also observed that “employers don’t think high schools teach enough typing, shorthand, business arithmetic” and that “they think many of the graduates who want jobs don’t want to work. Many who do want to work overestimate their abilities and think they’ll get by with what is really mediocrity.”
Photograph by Chris Von Holle
Herren sees in this report a pile of sexist assumptions and finds it a good example of Cincinnati’s prevailing conservative climate circa 1965. But where does Dylan fit into this narrative? He was the harbinger of change in the mid-1960s, which would mean that media stories with built-in assumptions of gender roles would no longer be go unchallenged.
“I was trying to conceptualize the conservative social atmosphere when Dylan arrived here, because nothing could be less conservative than the wild-eyed crazy-haired Bohemian Dylan who landed like an alien from another planet in 1965,” says Herren. “Dylan was on the cutting edge of a cultural revolution, but that’s not to say he was trying to be that. In fact, sometimes he felt very much saddled with the burden of being the conscience of his generation. I was simply looking up what was going on when Dylan arrived, which felt relevant in an unexpected way.”
Dylan’s second Cincinnati concert of 1965, at Music Hall on November 7, was also relevant in unexpected ways. He had gone electric, which confused and angered some of his older fans, and was now performing with a backing group that later came to be known as The Band. But he had plenty of new fans here who were thrilled by the success of “Like a Rolling Stone.”
One of those new fans was Carole Winters, who recalls hearing Dylan’s breakthrough hit on the radio that summer, around the time she moved with her mother and younger brother and sister to the Cincinnati area from Buffalo ahead of the upcoming school year. “I loved the song the first time I heard it,” she says. “The sound of it, the length of it, Dylan’s unconventional but powerful voice, the confrontational lyrics. We were in the process of leaving a beloved home in New York and moving to a strange new place, and I completely identified with the song’s lyrics: How does it feel, how does it feel / To be without a home / Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone? I found great comfort and reassurance at that point in my life, at age 14. I’m happy I got to hear it performed in person in November 1965.”
The Music Hall show now is considered as important a Cincinnati popular-music moment as The Beatles’ appearance at Cincinnati Gardens in 1964. That the Dylan concert occurred at one of the city’s historically significant buildings is important to Herren, who muses in his newsletter on the location’s appropriateness and irony.
“By the mid-’60s when Dylan arrived, Music Hall stood as a point of civic pride for some Cincinnatians and an emblem of social inequality for others: a lavish palace attracting the city’s elite for evenings of leisure and jewelry rattling, situated in the heart of Over-the-Rhine, one of the most impoverished neighborhoods in the city,” he writes. “On one hand, this elegant home for classical music may seem an unlikely venue for Dylan to go electric in Cincinnati. This was in fact the first rock concert ever performed at the venerable institution. On the other hand, its combination of grandeur, variety, vitality, and controversy made Music Hall the ideal setting for Dylan’s traveling revolution of 1965.”
Cincinnati and the world had changed immensely by the time of Dylan’s next visit, when he played the three-year-old Riverfront Coliseum (now known as the Heritage Bank Center) on October 15, 1978. Traveling with a large group that included three singers, his show stressed the big sound and spectacle of arena rock, perfect for the flashy new venue. And Cincinnati, too, had a flashy new kind of civic leader in then-Mayor Jerry Springer.
Photograph courtesy Graley Herren
Herren writes about that connection, partly expressing his own observations and partly quoting Springer, who died in 2023: “Mayor Springer was a big Dylan fan and arranged to meet the star backstage to present him with the key to the city. Springer later recalled: ‘That’s how I got to meet all these celebrities I wanted to meet. I said, If you come to Cincinnati and give us a concert, I’ll give you a key to the city. So in 1978 we had Dylan, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, The Eagles, Kenny Rogers. I mean, we had all these people coming in. It was just so I could meet them.’ ”
Cincinnati is by no means unique in having hosted Dylan so many times. While other musicians of his stature tour infrequently and only at large venues when they do, Dylan has been actively touring for decades now, performing at venues big and small, indoor and outdoor.
In that regard, he’s living the words of one of his idols, the troubadour Woody Guthrie: This land is his land. Conceivably, you can hear America singing—and changing—by using Dylan’s shows in almost any American city of moderate size as a reference point.
“He’s played everywhere,” says Herren. “And I don’t think it’s because the guy needs money. I think it’s because he is originally from Hibbing, Minnesota, a small town very few people would have bothered to come and play. Part of his inspiration is that he believes people from anywhere deserve a good show.”
While some may find Herren’s quest simply a deep dive into Boomer music history, in some ways his work couldn’t be more current, thanks to Dylan’s knack for continually remaining relevant. A new biopic, A Complete Unknown, is slated for release on December 25, a prime spot for movies with both commercial potential and award ambitions. The story follows Dylan’s early career leading up to the recording of “Like a Rolling Stone”; stars one of the hottest young actors in the business, Timothée Chalamet; and is directed and cowritten by James Mangold, whose Walk the Line brought Johnny Cash’s memoirs to life.
Meanwhile, the Bob Dylan Center, a major museum dedicated to his life and art, opened in 2022 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And in 2016, in an event that stunned even his biggest fans, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first songwriter to receive it.
Herren’s book-in-progress will be his second about the music icon. He published Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s “Time Out of Mind” in 2021, the title referring to a celebrated album the songwriter released in the late 1990s.
Because of his novel approach to studying Dylan, as well as the singer-songwriter’s own continuing relevancy, Herren has won admiration within the world of “Dylanologists.” One is Ray Padgett, who in 2020 started a Substack, Flagging Down the Double E’s, devoted to Dylan’s live performances that now has more than 12,000 subscribers.
“I wish every city had a Graley Herren writing about Dylan, because the way he does it is so interesting,” says Padgett. “I’ve never been to Cincinnati. I have no connection to Cincinnati. But the way he does it is to incorporate this specific slice of Dylan history—which is the concerts and the music he performed there—and then brings in all this regional culture, all this local sociology. It’s fascinating.”
Photograph courtesy Stu Levy
Another supporter is Laura Tenschert, who created Definitely Dylan, a London-based podcast since 2020 and a radio show for several years before that. “His Cincinnati series is unique in that it puts the focus on only one city—a city to which Dylan, superficially, has no particularly deep ties—and uses it to take the temperature of Dylan’s performances through the years,” she says. “In other words, the series’s narrow focus paints a surprisingly representative picture of Dylan’s work on stage on any given night. And, of course, each installment is a love letter to Cincinnati.”
It’s unknown what Dylan himself thinks of Herren’s work, if he even knows it exists. He’s a busy man. Reached by e-mail, his manager, Jeff Rosen, says he declines to comment on writings about Dylan.
Herren, 54, divides his time between his Dylan studies and his teaching and personal devotion to literature, particularly contemporary fiction and drama. He started teaching English literature at Xavier in 1998, and students look up to him for advice. He and his wife, Cathy, have a son named, naturally, Dylan.
On the day of our interview, I wait in the hallway outside his Hinkel Hall office as he gives encouraging, friendly advice to a student working on a term paper about Blanche DuBois, a key figure in Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play A Streetcar Named Desire. A positive man given to a happy, jovial way with words that never seems pedantic, Herren laughs when I tell him I plan to use that Streetcar anecdote in this story. He quickly offers up an off-the-wall Dylan-DuBois connection.
“Dylan occasionally has made a Tennessee Williams reference in his songs,” he says. “In the song he won the Oscar for, ‘Things Have Changed,’ there’s a reference to ‘Don’t get up gentlemen, I’m only passing through.’ That line is from Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire.”
Photograph courtesy Stu Levy
Herren’s XU office displays a bit of prominent Dylan memorabilia. On a wall next to a window that lets in the morning light is a poster for Don’t Look Back, a 1967 documentary about Dylan’s tour of England shortly after his first Cincinnati visit. Just below is another famous image of Dylan walking with his then-girlfriend Suzi Rotolo down a snowy, wintry Jones Street in Greenwich Village, which was used on the cover of his 1963 album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Herren’s copy of it promotes a 2006 Cincinnati Art Museum show called The Photograph as Music Album Cover.
But Herren does most of his Dylan writing at home, so most of his Dylan resource material is there. His campus office displays a collection of books by and about another of his great artistic loves, the radically modernist Irish writer Samuel Beckett, best known for the play Waiting for Godot. Herren wrote his dissertation on Beckett for his English doctorate degree from Florida State University.
Since Beckett won the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature, I ask Herren what he thinks of Dylan’s similar award. Does he deserve it? “I never even considered the possibility that Bob Dylan could win the prize,” he says. “That was amazing and a wonderful surprise. I love it and totally support it. As someone who writes so much and talks so much and teaches so much on Bob Dylan, I have to say it felt like a moment of vindication. See, I’m not just some weird crank with this odd eccentricity.”
While Herren knew early in his school career that he enjoyed studying English literature, his affinity for Dylan took a while to develop. Growing up in the small town of Baxter, Tennessee, he remembers being startled by Dylan’s appearance on the televised 1985 Live Aid concert, for which many of rock’s top artists performed to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. He was not impressed.
Why is this guy so important he’s chosen to close the whole shebang? Herren recalls thinking. “His performance sounded bad. Why did so many people think he was so great?”
His interest in and admiration for Dylan grew, though, when he saw him live for the first time in Nashville in 1989. Ten years later, Herren attended his first Cincinnati Dylan concert at Bogart’s. Because it was a comparatively small venue for an act of his stature (capacity of just 900), there was keen competition to get a ticket for the show.
The 2001 show at Xavier’s Cintas Center also left a powerful impression. It was held on November 4, not even two months after the cataclysmic events of 9/11, and became “a good example of where what’s going on outside the concert venue casts a shadow on what’s going on inside, in ways you couldn’t control,” says Herren. “Our minds were elsewhere. The world had changed after the attack. There was a lot of fear and tension in the arena that night, because we brought it in with us.”
Dylan, he says, tapped into the angst with his song selection, which included ominous songs about war and loss such as “All Along the Watchtower,” “Searching for a Soldier’s Grave,” and “John Brown.” But he also did other songs that provided a sense of hope or solace, like his first number, the gospel song “Wait for the Light to Shine.”
“He was acknowledging that these are dark times but also singing reminders of some hope,” Herren says. “Bob Dylan was aware of this situation and curated a setlist that spoke to the audiences he was encountering at that time. Partly, though, it’s what we were bringing to it through our own individual responses.”
Herren last saw Dylan at Riverbend a few months ago, ironically on September 11, when he was part of the Outlaw Music Festival that included Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Southern Avenue. Herren went with his wife; their son had to bow out at the last minute. “That was a good show with certain highlights,” he says. “He did a powerful version of ‘A Hard Rain.’ It was like a funeral oration, really deep.”
He’ll be writing up his review of that show soon as he completes his chronicle of Dylan’s history in this city. “I love Cincinnati,” says Herren. “I’m not originally from here, so it’s given me a chance to learn so much more about the city I love by doing this research.”
Herren is teaching us—and, he hopes, a much wider audience—that change is always blowing in the wind.
Photograph by Ron Valle
Bob Dylan’s Cincinnati Shows to Date
- March 12, 1965 Taft Theatre Downtown
- November 7, 1965 Music Hall
- October 15, 1978 Riverfront Coliseum Downtown
- November 4 & 5, 1981 Music Hall in Over-the-Rhine
- June 22, 1988 Riverbend Music Center in Anderson Township
- August 10, 1989 Riverbend
- November 3, 1992 Music Hall
- February 19, 1998 Cincinnati Gardens in Bond Hill
- July 11, 1999 Bogart’s in Corryville
- July 11, 2000 Riverbend
- November 4, 2001 Cintas Center at Xavier University
- October 15, 2007 Taft Theatre
- August 22, 2008 Riverbend
- November 3, 2010 the Bank of Kentucky Center at Northern Kentucky University
- August 26, 2012 Riverbend
- July 6, 2013 Riverbend
- November 8, 2019 BB&T Arena at Northern Kentucky University
- November 9, 2021 Aronoff Center Downtown
- October 20, 2023 Andrew J Brady Music Center Downtown
- September 11, 2024 Riverbend
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