Bob Dylan bringing 'Never Ending' tour to Rochester

Troubadour. Lyrical raconteur. Musical auteur.

Call him what you will, one thing is for sure: Bob Dylan is always on tour.

Dylan is scheduled to bring his latest tour to Rochester's Auditorium Theatre on Tuesday, Oct. 24 at 8 p.m. This tour is named after his latest album, 2020's "Rough and Rowdy Ways," and is a subset of what Dylan has dubbed his "Never Ending Tour," his worldwide travels that began in 1988 and, by reliable estimates, has now reached more than 3,600 performances.

Ticket information is available online at rbtl.org/events/bob-dylan or at the Rochester Broadway Theatre League box office. Tickets go on sale to the general public Friday at 10 a.m. with costs ranging from $62 to $136.50

Dylan is now 82. His voice is even raspier; his stage presence can one moment be playful and the next detached; and the music from his recent albums (he is prolific) remains ― well, since there are few if any apt comparisons ― decidedly Dylanesque.

His lyrics still shift from poetically precise to nomadically meandering, and his live shows should come with a warning for the uninitiated: If you want note-by-note retreads of classics, this is not for you. Instead, Dylan treats his creations like Play-Doh, reshaping them until they occasionally become unrecognizable until the refrain.

(About his stage presence, my daughter still has not forgotten a Rochester show from years ago in which the only words Dylan spoke from stage related how snakes on a car could be used as "windshield vipers.")

It is tempting to write that this could be one of the last opportunities to see Dylan live but such a prediction would surely be destined for the dustbin.

After all, it has been nearly 60 years since he shed the name Robert Zimmerman and became a young folk phenomenon in the Village. It has been nearly 50 years since the brilliance of "Blood on the Tracks." It has been nearly 40 years since he decided to spiritually and musically sample Christianity. It has been nearly 30 years since he had a rare fallow period with, for him, fewer original songs. It has been nearly 20 years since he reminded the world that there is only one Bob Dylan and created acclaimed albums like "Modern Times" and "Love and Theft." And it has been nearly 10 years since he decided to again veer off into something new, as if going "electric" didn't once upend the pouting purists enough, and brought us a Christmas album and an album with his versions of crooning Sinatra classics. (Let us also not forget the 2016 Nobel Prize for literature.)

Whatever the era and whatever its crises ― wars, inflation, insurrections, the Yankees ― there is one reassuring constant: Bob Dylan will be on tour.

This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Bob Dylan bringing 'Never Ending' tour to Rochester NY