The Bob Dylan Week In Review
Daily Dylan Quiz October Winner | Brussels and Paris Reviews | Bootleg Series 18 | The Road Ahead
Daily Dylan Quiz: October Leaderboard
Congratulations to our October 2025 winner Jeremy Rutter, who topped the Daily Dylan Quiz with a perfect score and a blistering 1 minute 12 seconds. Rounding out the Top 10 this month: Mary Fergus, gerald, Lyle, Rebs, bill windsor, Henry Bernstein, MaryJo, Nanabanan, and Linda—all with 100% scores. See the attached image for the full Top 10 and times.
We want continue building the most comprehensive Bob Dylan quiz out there—by fans, for fans—so f you want to, feel free to send your Dylan questions for future rounds to info@daily-dylan.com or via private message on our social accounts. We’d love to include them.
The new leaderboard for November is already live, so let’s go for another round!
Brussels and Paris: Week-in-Review
Brussels delivered three amazing nights that drew traveling fans from across Europe, with nuanced vocal phrasing, tight band interplay, and a room that rewarded attention to dynamics. I will add my full Brussels write-up below.
Paris followed with two shows at the Palais des Congrès that balanced setlist consistency with fresh coloration in the arrangements and a striking ”It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” the second night. We will also add the excellent combined review of both Paris nights by Matthew Ingate for Ray Padgett’s “Flagging Down The Double E’s.” The best photos from both tour stops will be embedded in this section.
Read my own review about the days in Brussels here!
Read Matthew Ingate’s review about the two Paris shows here!
Daily Dylan Lunch in Brussels
Our Brussels Lunch was a joy! 30 fans gathered, a mix of old friends and first-time meetups, trading stories from the road and memories stretching back decades. The room buzzed from start to finish, and for us it stood out as one of the true highlights of the year!
Bootleg Series Vol. 18: Through The Open Window (Out Now)
Bootleg Series 18 officially arrived on October 31, 2025, documenting Bob’s earliest recordings from 1956 to 1963 across multiple formats (8CD, 4LP, and a 2CD highlights set). The release focuses on the Greenwich Village years while reaching back to formative Minnesota tapes, and comes with an extensive essay by historian Sean Wilentz. It’s a revelatory portrait of Dylan’s rapid evolution—from coffeehouse newcomer to a writer capable of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” and the full 1963 Carnegie Hall performance.
One long-whispered rarity, “Liverpool Gal,” finally surfaces here. The song has often been linked by researchers to British pop artist Pauline Boty, a plausible muse from Dylan’s early-’60s London orbit, though the evidence remains circumstantial and debated. The new appearance lets listeners weigh the lyric’s details against the Boty theory with fresh ears, adding texture to a story that has lived for years in notes, footnotes, and archives rather than on an official release.
We also published a deep-dive on “Liverpool Gal” last year as part of our London Series; you can read it here!
You can also follow Ray Padgett’s track-by-track guide for the new Bootleg Series here!
Looking Ahead
The new tour-week kicks off tomorrow (Monday) in Cologne, then moves to Amsterdam on Tuesday and Wednesday. We will be on the ground in both cities with live coverage for Daily Dylan. We still have some merch left from the Daily Dylan lunch, including stickers; if you are interested, let us know and we will bring a limited batch to the second Amsterdam show. On Friday the tour reaches Brighton, a hot ticket for many fans given the proximity to London, before the week closes on Sunday with the first of three Swansea concerts in Wales. There is plenty to look forward to as this European run continues, and with Daily Dylan you are right there with us in the middle of a wonderful tour by the greatest artist of all time.
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Thank you and best wishes,
Daniel
https://open.substack.com/pub/johnnogowski/p/that-voice-that-calm-that-magic?r=7pf7u&utm_medium=ios
https://open.substack.com/pub/johnnogowski/p/that-voice-that-calm-that-magic?r=7pf7u&utm_medium=ios