WHERE ARE YOU TONIGHT?
"I don’t know if I could name all twenty-nine of my records, but I could name some of them. I liked a
bunch of albums I did in the eighties. I liked Street-Legal a whole lot. I did that in the seventies. "That's
what Dylan says in a 1985 interview, at home in Malibu. Partly posed, no doubt. Dylan can probably list
more than "some of" his own albums. But it's telling that Street-Legal is the only one he mentions. At
the time, in 1978, Street-Legal was burned to the ground in his own country. It bothers him. From
September through December '78, Dylan tours the United States. He performs songs from the new
album, but not that much and not wholeheartedly. And when he does, he remarkably often announces
them with a somewhat sour introduction, even when announcing the album’s highlight, on December
9, 1978 in Columbia, the last time Dylan will perform the song: "Thank you. We’d like to do a song from
the new album called Street-Legal. This was a single. I know it sold about 100 copies. Anyway, I think it
just sold 25, but I guess that we can play it anyway." That’s not true. "Where Are You Tonight?" did not
sell a hundred copies. Not even twenty-five. The song, one of the Very Great Songs in Dylan's oeuvre,
has never been released as a single at all. Anyway, after December 9, 1978, Dylan will never look back
at this monumental song, the song that belongs in the lineup "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall", "Desolation
Row", "Visions Of Johanna", "Tangled Up In Blue", "Blind Willie McTell", the songs that justify Dylan's
Nobel Prize for Literature. In his eighth Dylan book, Markhorst demonstrates the power and richness
of this disregarded and forgotten masterpiece - and why the song deserves a place in the canon