Bob Dylan‘s June 29 show at the Moody Amphitheater in Austin was supposed to just be a standard stop on a long tour that’s scheduled to run through the end of the year. But after guitarist Doug Lancio left the band two weeks ago, replacement Julian Lage had a prior commitment in Brooklyn that night, and second guitarist Bob Britt suddenly quit the group with a “Sayonara Bobby” Facebook post a couple of days earlier, nobody knew who may be joining Dylan, bassist Tony Garnier, and drummer Anton Fig that night.
In the fan community, speculation ran wild: Might Jimmie Vaughan step into the void? Would Lancio return? Was there any chance that a beloved past member of Dylan’s group like Larry Campbell or G.E. Smith would come back for an encore run? Was there a scenario where Dylan, Garnier, and Fig play as a Ben Folds Five-style trio? Could Britt pull a reverse “sayonara” and come back to help Dylan out of his jam? And would Dylan have just one guitarist in the band for the first time since the John Jackson days of 1991, or might we see the debut of two new members?
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The answer came when the lights dimmed and Chicago-based blues guitarist Joel Paterson walked onto the stage to make his debut with Dylan’s band, and faced the difficult task of handling all of the guitar parts by himself. Paterson is hardly a household name, but he has a long history on the Chicago blues scene and has recorded with Dave “Honey Boy” Edwards, Wanda Jackson, Cactus Blossoms, and JD McPherson.
Up until this week, Paterson played every Monday with his jazz quartet at the historic Green Mill Cocktail Lounge in Chicago, which seats just about 150 people. He last performed there Saturday, June 27, two days before his debut with Dylan. Hours before Paterson made his debut with Dylan, his Joel Paterson Quartet bandmate Natalie Scharf wrote on Facebook that he’d be absent from the Monday gig for the next two or three weeks, and guitarist Andy Brown would take his place. She didn’t mention that he was about to play “All Along the Watchtower” and 15 other songs with Dylan at a 5,000-seat amphitheater in Austin.
According to early fan reports, Paterson did a stellar job with Dylan, and seemed remarkably confident. It’s unclear how much time he had to prepare for the gig, or when he learned that Britt wouldn’t be up there to help him. It’s also unclear how familiar he was with Dylan’s music, but he did play pedal steel on four Dylan songs (“If Not for You,” “To Ramona,” “When to See the Gypsy,” and “Tell Me That It Isn’t True”) on the 2022 Cactus Blossoms EP Bob Dylan Songs Vol. 1.
Not long before showtime, Britt posted a more detailed explanation of his exit from Dylan’s band on Facebook. “Apparently there are quite a few threads out there with people speculating about my departure from the Bob tour,” he wrote. “I’d like to clear it up. I was not fired but left of my own accord for reasons I would prefer to keep private. I will miss my band mates and crew. I am looking forward to getting back to doing sessions (give me a call) and also finishing up [my wife] Etta’s gospel record. As far as any touring goes, we will see what the future holds. Meanwhile, I have some flower beds to weed.”
He hasn’t written anything else, but his wife has revealed slightly more on her Facebook page. “Yes, but not because of Julian [Lage],” Etta wrote when asked if Bob left the band. “Julian has gone back to his tour. He enjoyed playing with him and said he’s a great guy.” Later in the comment thread, she wrote “word is he’s coming back” in reference to Lage.
We have also learned that Lage indeed plans on playing additional dates with Dylan this year when his schedule permits. He couldn’t make the show in Austin because he was booked at National Sawdust in Brooklyn for an hourlong Q&A with The New Yorker’s Alec Wilkinson, followed by an acoustic performance. Throughout the entire event, Dylan’s name was never uttered once. It seemed to take place in an alternate universe where Lage didn’t just wrap up a surprise stint with one of the most important artists of the century. (I was in the front row and put my hand high into the air during the Q&A portion. I was going to ask a multipart question that went something like, “You just spent a couple of weeks on tour with Bob Dylan. How did that come about, what was the experience like, and do you plan on going back?” But they never called on me. I felt like Tracy Flick in Election, desperately trying to get the attention of the teacher and failing miserably.)
Dylan’s tour resumes Tuesday night in New Braunfels, Texas. The U.S. leg wraps up Aug. 1 in Nashville. Lage’s schedule makes it possible for him to make every show besides the July 4 gig in Kansas City, Missouri. Things get trickier when Dylan goes to Europe in October, since Lage is booked up solid that month in America.
Nobody knows exactly how this will play out. Paterson could be a temporary replacement and will soon be back to his Monday-night gig at the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge. He might stick around as the sole guitarist. Dylan might hire a replacement for Britt, keep Paterson on a permanent basis, and return to the standard two-guitar lineup. Lage might parachute in and out when his schedule allows, leaving Paterson to handle the show by himself some nights.
We simply have no idea. What we can say is that the Never Ending Tour hasn’t seen this much drama in a very long time.
Holzman and Hughes at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.Courtesy of Ekko Astral
Holzman and Hughes in Brooklyn, May 2026.Griffin Lotz for Rolling Stone
There’s no immediate resolution in any of this. There’s no surrender either — and a lot of great escape. White’s slide guitar in “Dollar Bill” sounds like a National Steel on steroids until the solo, when it turns into what seems like a theremin gone postal. “I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing” has a great pop-wise chorus closer to the Pretty Things than Son House. And don’t miss White’s wry aside to the White Stripes’ old creation myth in the second verse of “G.O.D.,” on the way to the real business at hand. “Well, it’s the beginning of the world now,” he declares at the song’s end. “Let’s do it all over again.”
Jay-Z has turned the 30th anniversary of his classic debut album into a major marketing event
Jay-Z Knows the Past Still Pays
There’s a pleasant absurdity to the advertisements for JAŸ-Z30 that are currently found across New York’s subway tunnels. Their dramatic imagery — a stark black backdrop pierced through the center with a pair of hands, presumably Jay’s, fixed into the famous Roc diamond — invites a kind of religious authority that feels a touch ironic for anyone who’s old enough to remember all types of handwringing over those very hand symbols only a few years ago. And maybe that’s the point. By now, nostalgia’s grip extends layers deep. So much so that you could find yourself waiting for the train, reminiscing on the days when people still made jokes about the so-called Illuminati.
Jay-Z’s months-long campaign commemorating the 30th anniversary of Reasonable Doubt and the 25th anniversary of The Blueprint has indeed resurfaced the rapper-turned-mogul’s success story. Reasonable Doubt, released in 1996, positioned Jay as not only a resonant voice in hip-hop but also in the increasingly lucrative business around it. After major labels passed, the album was released independently through Roc-A-Fella Records and Priority Records, setting the tone for Jay’s career as a business…man.
And in the full-court press campaign around this summer’s anniversaries, culminating in this weekend’s trio of performances at Yankee Stadium, Jay’s business acumen is again at center focus. You’d be forgiven for throwing around buzzwords like “multichannel” or “cross-platform” to describe the slate of festivities. There was a Spotify-backed takeover of the J and Z trains; custom JAŸ-Z30 subway maps and a Google Maps guide; commemorative Brooklyn Public Library cards; and most recently Bowery Station and DUMBO pop-ups with archival footage and merch. (That these Yankee Stadium shows come on the heels of Taylor Swift’s wedding at MSG suggests some sort of mega-rich takeover of cultural institutions, but let’s leave that one for another day.)
The moves come as nostalgia continues to drive a considerable chunk of the music industry’s profits. In an era when old songs can circulate infinitely on streaming platforms, gaining new life in the form of everything from samples to memes, and when superfans are willing to spend on physical goods, limited merch, and live experiences, album anniversaries have become their own product launches. Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt campaign is only the splashiest recent example.
No wonder, then, that Beyoncé already appears to be setting the stage for her own run of commemorations for the upcoming 20th anniversary of her album B’Day in September. Over the weekend, she released her first new song in two years, titled “Morning Dew (Donk),” to tease the upcoming reissue. According to Luminate, older music still dominates attention, with only 43 percent of U.S. on-demand audio streams in 2025 coming from tracks released in the previous five years. This is also one reason why vinyl and physical formats have seen renewed value in recent years, with the RIAA reporting that vinyl sold 46.8 million units in the U.S. in 2025, compared with 29.5 million CDs. Luminate says superfans are 20 percent of U.S. music listeners and spend heavily on live events and physical merchandise; 73 percent of these fans purchase physical merch, versus 26 percent of general music listeners.
In today’s industry, having a major anniversary is like having a new product to promote, a way to participate in an already thriving marketplace for nostalgia. The demand is visible well beyond official artist stores: Vintage concert tees now trade as collectibles, with one 1967 Grateful Dead shirt selling at Sotheby’s for $19,300 and rare rap tees treated as wearable archives of hip-hop history. Anniversary campaigns give artists and labels a way to reclaim that energy, turning the secondary market’s appetite for old symbols into new, officially sanctioned products.
Jay-Z’s official anniversary store turns that logic into a menu of objects: a $1,500 collector’s crate, a $300 cassette box, $400 Yankees jerseys, and four-figure varsity jackets. Of course, Jay is far from alone when it comes to legacy acts cashing in on nostalgia. He’s more like one salient example of a much larger wave of artists and promoters marketing anniversary products that includes the Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness 30th anniversary super-deluxe edition, My Chemical Romance’s Black Parade stadium tour, and the returned Warped Tour, among many others.
Five years before Reasonable Doubt became the occasion for library cards, pop-ups, collector crates, and stadium spectacle, its 25th anniversary was marked by an NFT. In 2021, Sotheby’s and Roc Nation auctioned a one-of-one Derrick Adams artwork tied to the album, billed as the only official Jay-Z-authorized commemoration of the anniversary. Around the same time, Roc-A-Fella was in court over co-founder Damon Dash’s attempted sale of a Reasonable Doubt-related NFT, a dispute that ended with a judgment making clear that no shareholder could sell or dispose of an interest in the album — including through an NFT — without the company’s authorization.
That ownership question is becoming harder to avoid as music enters the AI era, where the archive is not only something to reissue, exhibit, or sell, but something that can be scraped, modeled, and trained on. Last week, SZA took to Twitter to express frustration with AI music company Suno, notably calling out Diplo by name as one of the company’s investors. “DO NOT GIVE AWAY YOUR VIBRANIUM !!! DO NOT TRAIN AI WITH YOUR GENIUS,” she wrote on Twitter. Her complaint was joined by Kenneth Blume, who said Suno’s workers were “stealing from countless struggling musicians.”
For an artist with a legacy as impactful as Jay-Z’s, the current anniversary boom feel like the latest phase of a longer project of deciding who gets to turn hip-hop history into intellectual property. Jay-Z’s legacy deserves preservation; few catalogs have made a stronger case for it. But the more that preservation arrives through limited-edition objects, auction platforms, luxury merch, and authorized experiences, the more it has to answer a harder question: When does protecting the archive become another way of extracting value from it?