Features

Something Pure: The Wallflowers Live

Golden State Theatre; Monterey, CA, USA; April 25, 2026

by Jason Warburg

“It’s amazing that guy is still alive,” said my concert buddy KayGee between songs last night.

The guy in question is Jakob Dylan, up on stage ten rows in front of us, who woke up one day in the late 1980s and decided to choose one of the hardest paths in life he could. As the son of the most famous, lauded and laureled singer-songwriter of the last century, Dylan the younger decided, after initially envisioning a future as a visual artist, that what he really wanted to be was... a singer-songwriter.

KayGee isn’t wrong; it’s a monumental challenge for a person to try to walk in footsteps that big and not be swallowed whole by them. Many have been. Jakob Dylan is the exception, enjoying a fruitful career that’s extended long enough that his current tour with his band The Wallflowers celebrates the 30th anniversary of the group’s 1996 hit album Bringing Down The Horse. The decisions he makes about shaping the resulting set list, though, are where Dylan most resembles his father: quirky and defiant.

In the meantime, singer-songwriter Aaron Lee Tasjan acquits himself well opening the show in a solo acoustic format. He’s a good singer, a clever songwriter, and a terrific guitar player who earns warm applause from the crowd while not overstaying his welcome with a tight 40-minute set.

Jakob Dylan's choice to commemorate Bringing Down The Horse by opening his set with the entire album played front to back turns out to be both conventional and subversive. Conventional, because it’s become common practice; subversive, because it results in kicking off his set with the two biggest hits of the man’s career—most likely, his lifetime—which are the first and second songs on the album. The ringing, surging “One Headlight” and the pensive, charming “6th Avenue Heartache” are rendered beautifully, and it’s a joy to hear them played and sung by Dylan and his very capable band—no originals other than Dylan himself, but a stacked band of pros.

If we’re being honest, though—and that’s why I get the big bucks, haha—the rest of Horse does not fare as well. The issue goes to the evolution over the past 40 years in how music is typically presented. Bringing Down The Horse came out in the first decade of the CD era, which means the best songs on it are front-loaded rather than spread out. The other two singles from the album—the longing, mid-tempo “Three Marlenas” and the driving, snarky “The Difference”—are superb, but once you get past them and the luminous ballad “Invisible City,” the drop-off in memorability is unmistakable.

So you’re 25 minutes or so in and the crowd is happy—especially the dancing diehards up front—but growing less engaged by the minute. After another 25, halfway through the main set, Dylan addresses the audience for the first time, announcing the second half of the set. In said second half, the Wallflowers play an entire Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers album. This is undeniably cool, inasmuch as Jakob’s dad toured with TP and company as his backing band when Jakob was in high school back in 1986, and TP and Bob subsequently teamed up together in the Traveling Wilburys. The kind of rootsy, intelligent classic rock the Wallflowers have consistently delivered suggests that Jakob has likely been a Petty fan for a very long time.

The Petty album Dylan chooses to play front to back on this tour, however, is not the obvious choice—not Damn The Torpedoes, or Full Moon Fever, or even Hard Promises or Into The Great Wide Open. No; it’s Long After Dark, a relatively neglected early middle period album, but one whose style and sound syncs up nicely with Bringing Down The Horse. It also happens to be the TP album that came out when Jakob Dylan was 13 years old; this does not feel like a coincidence. Regardless, it’s long been something of a stepchild in TP’s catalog, with just the one big hit single (“You Got Lucky”) nestled among a lot of very good but perhaps underappreciated material.

Unlike Bringing Down The Horse, Long After Dark came out back in the LP era, with the result that the pacing actually holds up better in a live setting: there are strong songs at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end. That said, while it’s indisputably fun for this TP fan to hear Dylan and band deliver affectionate renditions of these songs, it’s not why most people come to a Wallflowers show. As a result, somewhere in the range of a quarter to a third of the crowd melts away over the course of Long After Dark, including my pal KayGee, who turns to me with a smile after “One Story Town” and announces “I’m just not into watching him play Tom Petty songs,” before disappearing into the night.

For the encores, Dylan and band pull out an album track from 2000’s (Breach), “I’ve Been Delivered,” before closing out the evening with a pair of Petty classics: “Refugee”—which in this context feels like a template for the Wallflowers’ entire sound—and “The Waiting.”

It’s all performed with enthusiasm and care, but it is odd, and speaks to Jakob Dylan’s unusual circumstances. The reality is that at this point in his life Dylan—who has toured the nation dozens of times over the years, and whose father recently cashed in his songwriting publishing rights for an eye-watering fortune—can do whatever he wants.

In the end, this underscores what feels like the main takeaway from this evening: Jakob Dylan is out here playing Bringing Down The Horse and Long After Dark front to back with a smile on his face because (a) he loves these songs, and (b) that’s what he wants do to right now. There’s something pure about that. I’m glad Jakob is still with us, still playing, still singing, still searching for that sound that can bring a room full of people to their feet.