Bob Dylan's historic performance in Locarno, Switzerland (1987) [AI upgrade + stabilised]

On October 5, 1987, at a concert in Locarno, Switzerland, Dylan experienced a career-changing epiphany that he first explained to David Gates in a 1997 Newsweek interview and he later wrote about in Chronicles. It was a fiercely windy evening at the Piazza Grande Locarno, and in the thick of a song, Dylan suddenly couldn’t sing—his mouth opened and nothing came out. “There’s no pleasure in getting caught in a situation like this,” said Dylan. “You can get a panic attack. You’re in front of thirty thousand people and they’re staring at you and nothing is coming out.”


Dylan doesn’t identify the song when this incident happened. After listening to the tapes, I surmise it may have occurred in a gap where Dylan misses a few lines in the second song of the concert, “Like a Rolling Stone.” Dylan fought through the stressful situation, and suddenly, he was revitalized. “Everything came back, and it came back in multidimension. Even I was surprised. It left me kind of shaky…It was like I’d become a new performer, an unknown one in the true sense of the word. In more than thirty years of performing, I had never seen this place before.”

In the interview with David Gates, Dylan gives a clearer vision of what happened when he stepped up to the mic and he couldn’t sing: “It’s almost like I heard it as a voice. It wasn’t like it was even me thinking it. I’m determined to stand, whether God will deliver me or not.” And all of a sudden everything just exploded every which way. And I noticed that all the people out there—I was used to them looking at the girl singers, they were good-looking girls you know? And like I say, I had them up there so I wouldn’t feel so bad. But when that happened, nobody was looking at the girls anymore. They were looking at the main mic. After that is when I sort of knew: I’ve got to go out and play these songs. That’s just what I must do.”