Just two weeks after Bob Dylan guitarist Doug Lancio vanished from the tour and was replaced by jazz virtuoso Julian Lage, Bob Britt — who has played guitar in Dylan’s band since 2019 — has apparently left the group as well. Over the weekend, Britt wrote “Sayonara Bobby” on his Facebook page page along with an image of a plane flight from Austin, Texas, where the next Dylan show is set to take place at the Moody Amphitheater, to Nashville, Tennessee. In the comments, he told a fan “I quit.” (A shoutout to Dylan super fan Harold Lepidus for flagging the posts.)
The surprise announcement caused a huge stir in the Dylan fan community since Lage has an event June 29 at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, New York, meaning he’ll also be unavailable to perform in Austin. At this point, the only remaining members of Dylan’s band, at least known to the public, are bassist Tony Garnier and drummer Anton Fig.
The least likely scenario for the Austin show is that Dylan takes the stage without any guitarist, and is backed only by Garnier and Fig. The National Sawdust show has been on the books for quite some time, and Dylan surely knew that Lage wasn’t a long-term band member. He has way too many other commitments. It’s likely that either Lancio is returning or Dylan hired a new, full-time guitarist.
But if Britt quit the band as abruptly as his Facebook post seems to suggest, Dylan had little time to hire a second new guitarist. He hasn’t played with a bare lineup of a drummer, bassist, and just one guitarist since the earliest days of the Never Ending Tour. Once pedal steel player Bucky Baxter joined the band in 1992, there’s also been at least two guitar players.
As is often the case with the Never Ending Tour, we’ll have no clue who is in the band until the lights dim and the musicians walk on the stage. We can say that the setlist is unlikely to change dramatically. Despite the shock appearance of the Basement Tapes supreme deep cut “Baby, Won’t You Be Me Baby” at a couple of shows earlier this month, shattering the record for the longest gap between the recording of a song and the live debut, the sets have been largely static.
Expect to hear him open with either “To Be Alone With You” or “Watching the River Flow,” and then break out “All Along the Watchtower,” “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” “Under the Red Sky,” and oddball covers like Bo Diddley’s “I Can Tell” and Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Share Your Love With Me.”
Somewhere in Austin, a couple of guitarists are quite possibly taking a crash course in these songs. We wish them both the best of luck. And we hope neither of them end their Dylan story with a “Sayonara Bobby” post on Facebook.
