Bob Dylan Played a ‘Basement Tapes’ Song for First Time in 59 Years

Bob Dylan kicked off his 2026 summer tour Thursday night in Troutdale, Oregon, and he stunned his most hardcore followers fans near the end of the night, and surely left the rest of the crowd baffled, when he broke out the Basement Tapes extreme deep cut “Baby, Won’t You Be My Baby” for the first time since recording the original with the Band in the basement of Big Pink back in 1967.

“Baby, Won’t You Be My Baby” wasn’t included on the official release of The Basement Tapes in 1975, and was only known to bootleg collectors until 2014, when it appeared on The Bootleg Series Vol. 11: The Basement Tapes Complete. This new live rendition is remarkably faithful to the original recording.

Dylan has been playing Basement Tapes songs for decades, but this is the first time he’s done one that didn’t appear on the 1975 package. In his entire career, this is the longest he’s gone between recording a song and debuting it live, and there’s not even a remotely close second. It’s also the first time in recent memory he’s debuted any original song besides the material on 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways.

The rest of the set was quite familiar to anyone who saw Dylan on the Outlast Festival in the past couple of years. In includes tunes from throughput his vast catalog (“To Be Alone With You,” “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” “Under The Red Sky,” “Man in the Long Black Coat”), obscure covers (Bo Diddley’s “I Can Tell,” Jerry Lee Lewis’ “I’ll Make It All Up to You,” Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Share Your Love With Me”) and just two songs (“All Along The Watchtower” and “Rainy Day Women’s #12 & 35”) that a casual fan would would likely recognize.

This kind of setlist caused even Paul McCartney to complain recently. “I’ve been to see a couple of shows of Bob’s, and I couldn’t tell what song he was doing,” McCartney recently said on The Rest is Entertainment podcast. “Now that’s a bit much, because I know his stuff. I get it if he doesn’t want to do ‘Mr. Tambourine Man.’ Maybe he’s fed up with that, but I would like to hear it. And I’ve paid.”

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Dylan did play “Mr. Tambourine Man” at a single concert in 2025, but he otherwise hasn’t done it since 2010. And he jettisoned nearly all of his other hits many years back. He also largely stopped changing around his setlist from night to night. That’s why “Baby, Won’t You Be My Baby” is such an enormous surprise. If a song that rare is now in the mix, nearly anything feels possible.

Hey Bob, if you’re diving back into the Basement Tapes, might we recommend “I’m Not There,” “Goin’ to Acapulco,” “I’m Your Teenage Prayer,” and “Sign on the Cross?” Any one of them would sound sensational with this band. We won’t get crazy and request “See You Later Allen Ginsberg.” There’s no world where that happens.