It’s an occasion any time two of the greatest living songwriters share a stage. When that stage happens to be one of the most beautiful venues in the country, there’s bound to be a little magic. Such was the case Saturday, when Willie Nelson’s always-stacked Outlaw Music Festival tour pulled into the Gorge Amphitheatre.
The current run pairs the country icon with one of the few artists he can legitimately call a peer in Bob Dylan, uniting the two friends and kindred-spirit songsmiths with vastly different personas. We were one Joni Mitchell away from unlocking some sort of cosmic portal over the Columbia River, but there was more than enough supernatural alchemy in the air when Dylan took the stage as the scorching Central Washington sun was mercifully setting. There’s a never-know-what-you’re-gonna-get factor with a Dylan show, which has only added to the mystic and mercurial folk legend’s lore.
Last night was a good night; the 83-year-old sounded even stronger than he did two years ago during his savory Paramount Theatre date on his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, and he pulled out a handful of heyday crowd-pleasers — something the uncompromising artist isn’t always wont to do. A tousled “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35” to start the 75-minute set felt like an opening bone tossed to some of the more casual Dylan fans at the festival-esque tour stop, with the recognizable “everybody must get stoned” lyric befitting a night when he was touring with a guy who has.