Expecting Rain

Several biographies state that Albert Grossman had scheduled an "extensive" concert tour for Summer and Fall `66 before Dylan's motorcycle accident in July of that year derailed those plans.

Does anyone know if a list of those venues that never happened exists? I presume it would have been a U.S. tour, given he had completed European and Australian legs earlier that Spring.

i know they canceled his next concert at the Yale Bowl

Barney Hoskyns, "Across The Great Divide", said Grossman had scheduled sixty more shows for Dylan and the Hawks. That may be somebody's stated number (but what's the basis?). "Scheduled" implies that at least a rough list of dates had been developed, but to my knowledge, no such listing of projected shows has ever surfaced.

According to Hoskyns, things were to kickoff with major dates at the Yale Bowl and Shea Stadium. Hollywood Bowl and Moscow have also been mentioned. I don't recall any others.

Mickey Jones (ISIS#79): "I was getting ready to come back [to New York from LA] to rehearse for Shea Stadium. We were going to do Shea Stadium with Peter, Paul and Mary doin' the first act, and Bob Dylan electric doin' the second act. Bob was not goin' to play acoustic on that show at all. And then we were goin' to Moscow to do a concert, and I was all excited about that. And about two days before I was due to get on a plane to go to New York to rehearse for Shea Stadium, I got a call from Bob, and he was in the hospital, and basically said, 'I'm in traction, I crashed my motorcycle, I broke my neck, ... we're not doin' Shea Stadium, we're canceling everything until you hear from me'".

Possibly, some of the early US dates had been firmed up. As we recall, the modus operandi for creating the previous tour of shows in the US (Fall 65 & Winter 66) had been pretty loose - with some dates being firm and others added or dropped as it all developed. The thing in Moscow (plus more of a World Tour?) seems less likely. Moscow in 1966 seems like a major stretch ... or could be little more than loose talk by Grossman, Dylan, and the musicians while on tour the previous spring.

Here are two articles about the Yale Bowl date. And the first ones to appear about the accident.
It looks like there was only a date scheduled for the Summer, with a bigger tour planned for the Fall.
Next time I am in New Haven, I'll look at the library to see if there's something more written in Yale's magazine/newspaper, but I doubt.

Thanks, bstacy and Andrea! It appears that Grossman's offices -- through his PR person, a "Jim Mosby" announced the news on Monday, August 1, late enough that the media didn't do the pickup until the next morning:

The timeline appears to be:

Dylan has motorcycle accident Friday, July 29, 1966

Grossman's offices announce accident, cancellation of Yale Bowl concert and possibility of Fall tour cancellation on Monday, August 1

First(?) media reports of accident on Tuesday, August 2, 1966 noting cancellation of concert

Concert scheduled for Yale Bowl on Saturday, August 6, 1966 cancelled

It'll be interesting to see if there's any evidence of the Shea Stadium concert, which logically would probably have been the next stop after the Yale Bowl, exists.

I think (just guessing) that the rehearsals were for the Yale Bowl date, possibly a warm-up concert with no other dates scheduled.
According to the schedule, Jones should have gone to the East Coast two or three days before the show (3/4 August), and had news about the cancellation on July 31st/ August 1st.

I agree - Yale would've been the logical starting point. At least, Yale before Shea Stadium. Mickey probably didn't have the full story except that he was to be traveling back east for tour rehearsals ... until Bob called.

So, now we have one (maybe two shows) nailed down ... but what about the rest?

It'd also be interesting to track down when Grossman "officially" announced that the Summer/Fall tour was cancelled. I haven't been able to find any reports of the reported Shea Stadium booking/cancellation, yet.

It's more personal curiosity than anything else about the abortive Summer/Fall tour. I've always felt, especially after seeing No Direction Home, that Dylan wouldn't have survived that tour. I think he probably knew it, too. It makes you wonder what would have happened in some alternate universe: We wouldn't have the Basement Tapes and probably not John Wesley Harding or Nashville Skyline. What would we have had?

a forever young dylan who died before post-accident deterioration set in; a remembrance of the peak and not the decline

When exactly set in this deterioration?

the instant his head hit the pavement or when he quit speed. the two may be related. or these things may never have happened. he just may have said "no mas" after reading his contract with albert

I recently read, in Shelton's No Direction Home, that Dylan's parents had only heard about the accident from a local radio report, not from Sara, Bob, or Bob's management. If Grossman didn't put out the news till Monday August 1, Bob's parents couldn't have heard the report until then. Weird that no-one would phone them in the three days between the accident and the news release. That's why I have this feeling that the story broke the following day, Saturday July 30. I'm sure I saw it somewhere, sometime.

As for any Summer/Autumn schedule I can't imagine Grossman getting Dylan to agree to another US/ World Tour, commencing barely 2 months after the last brain-frying one ended. Perhaps some US stadium concerts and one-offs like Moscow, but not going through the mincer of the whole '66 shebang again.

I can hardly imagine a Dylan show in the 1966 Moscow, i.e at the Luzjniki Ice palace when he performed in 1985. They would cut the cable at the first minute of the electric set. Not because he was electric. Because he wouldn't sing the way Paul Robson had sang, because he was young and hot and out of control and breaking all the rules. If Grossman should talk to somebody from Moscow about the show, and they should agree, they would imagine he was talking about the protest singer.
In the 60s Moscow you could have manyy problems by having some Elvis records...

remember bob's brother said there was no accident

of course, there was no accident ...

... well, we have anyway a "forever young dylan at his peak", and fortunately we have also all the rest, decline or not...

Hard to imagine Dylan & The Hawks + PP & M filling Shea Stadium to much more than half its 55000 capacity. The Beatles played there on August 23, and managed 44500, having filled it the year before.

Dylan writes something in Chronicles about this. Don't have it in front of me, but I thought he said something like "the truth is I just needed time away." As i read it, I remember thinking that was a pretty big revelation, but it was never much commented on by other readers.

He devotes a one-liner to the incident: "I had been in a motorcycle accident and I had been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race." (page 114)

Leaving aside the fact that as far as Chronicles as concerned, Bob Dylan is the most unreliable first-person narrator since Huckleberry Finn, the statement, as brief as it is, pretty much aligns with what he's claimed over the years: that there was an accident (of varying degrees of severity), but that he also used that accident as an excuse to "get out of the rat race."

I think the "rat race" might have been as much an allusion to the Chief Rat, Albert Grossman, as to the pressures Dylan was under. If memory serves by July 1966 Dylan had discovered Grossman was taking 50 percent of his publishing royalties (reportedly finding this out when he wanted to change the name of his publishing company to celebrate the birth of Jesse Dylan and was told that he'd need Grossman's permission as co-owner to do so). Given that Grossman seemed not to care all that much that he was beating the Dylan horse to death, maybe Dylan decided it was time to split the scene in a way that his manager couldn't easily overrule. Maybe there was an accident, maybe there wasn't. Maybe it wasn't as bad as some reports had it. Only Dylan, and possibly Sara, know for sure.

the changing of the company name when bob found out that ab owned half of it, was later in 68 and it dealt with sam and not jesse, but by that time bob and albert were on the outs, i guess bob already did the math-with Saras advice without a doubt-that the books didnt add up.
my best guess was that bob decided to stop working so much and only later in 66/67 when he had time to think came to the conclusion that grossman was taking him for a ride.

That little one inch clip from the NY Times and the equally small clip from Hartford Courant, which I've never seen before was all there was. There was no big grand announcement. There was no front page story. After that you didn't hear anything period. For months and months. Finally, the following spring a NY Daily News Reporter managed to track Dylan down in Woodstock, and wrote a story, Scarred Bob Dylan Okay, or something like that. I know it's in one or more of the bio's, and probably online somewhere. Then the following fall, it was announced that Dylan was recording a new album, and almost at the same time it was announced the Columbia Records had suspended Dylan's contract. But that was it. Nothing! For those in the NYC area, who listened to the late night radio show, "Radio Unnameable," the host Bob Fass would occasionally had a little story like, "I was up in Woodstock this weekend, and I was driving down this curvy mountain road, and this other car came around a curve really fast and almost ran me off the road, and I raised my hand in a fist, but the fist turned to a wave because driving the other car was Bob Dylan."

Today of course, the media would have tried to set up camp in Woodstock for as long as it took. Back then, it was a different story.

As for the Moscow stuff, I'm dubious about a lot of the stuff Mickey Jones says.

My theory, for what it's worth, is that Dylan was laid up for a few days (and off the drugs) and sat down to fulfil his contract to finish 'tarantula' and, reading it, thought 'what is this shit?'

This abrupt objective distance not only stopped him writing that book, it changed the way he wrote anything. He no longer trusted his first instincts as he had before. That was the turning point, and it was nothing to do with management or business, although Dylan's new perspective may have meant he was more attuned to that aspect of things now he was at a distance from his instinctive-artist self.

for peter: michael iachetta

i'm sorry but i think it takes more than "a few days. . .off the drugs" to deal with methedrine addiction.

bob later alluded to his change saying he now had to think about what used to come intuitively (in terms of writing) you can look it up and as anyone will tell you once you start thinking about these things you're dead artistically

I'm lazy, and will have to research this, but just how excruciating was Bob's tour before the motorcycle crash? I'm wondering if it was more excruciating due to the recreational (drug) excess than the actual performing excess.
I mean, has anybody compared Bob's tour (pre-crash) to, say, The Beatles tour schedule in '66?
The Beatles bitched about not being heard, and that was pretty much it.
Bob complained about being ground down.

The Beatles final tour to the US, in August 1966, comprised 14 shows in 17 days, including two in one day- Cincinnati and St Louis. Prior to this they had played just 8 concerts in 1966, in London, Germany, Japan and the Philippines. By this point they were able to taper down their touring- which went unheard, anyway- and spend more time in the studio, plus more time enjoying their money and some time off. They'd put in the hard miles already. Their 1963 schedule was staggering: 232 shows across that game-changing year, one and two concerts a day, in month-long blocks, from January 3 to December 31.

Dylan played 20 US concerts in 50 days, through February and March of 1966, then 25 concerts in 48 days on his World Tour. These comprised: Honolulu 1, Australia 7, Europe 17. The Beatles had each other to lean on throughout, of course, whereas Dylan carried almost everything, from his solo performances, to fronting a band, on his one set of shoulders. Similarly, the other causes of his burn-out and wasted physical state rest firmly on those same shoulders. The World Tour, with its average concert every two days, didn't constitute a ludicrously punishing schedule, but whatever, without that self-assisted 'condition' that Dylan propelled himself into whenever show time came around, we wouldn't have the swirling, dream-like solo performances and totally wired, punched-out electric ones that we are able to listen back to, 44 years later, in wonder.