Bob Dylan - The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live, 1966: The "Royal Albert Hall Concert"
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Free Music Notes for The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live, 1966: The "Royal Albert Hall Concert"
Free Music Review: Where is Hansen these Days?...10 stars
Hit: 5 Stars
Transport yourself to another place and time. A time before computers, when music was important. Beforewe took music for granted. A time when people felt strongly about music, a passionate time. Hear this record. Realize that people can get excited about music, not elevator music, not "Top 40" music, not "Oldies" music, not "Rap music", just music for music's sake. Every song on this record makes you feel something, not fake Celine Dione/Mariah Carey something, but something primal, the roots of your soul. It makes you want to dance and listen carefully at the same time. I makes you want to jump for joy and cry simultaneously. Track after track it pulls you in, you want to hear what comes next even if you know the song, the words and the tune. Where were you 33 years ago? I think I was just starting Kindergarten. Many of you reading this review weren't even born yet. It doesn't matter. The music on this record is timeless. It could have been made today, or it could have been made a hundred years ago, or a hundred years in the future. To say this is a cronicle of the best concert ever is an understatement. I have heard this record a hundered times (yes, I did have the bootleg, but the quality of this is unsurpassed even for modern live performances), and every time I listen, I hear something more, and it never fails to make my hair stand up.
The acoustic set is riviting, it draws you in, you hang on every word, the enunciation and intonation is perfect, imparting a passion that is unparalelled in acoustic performances. It is literally poetry put to music in a style "often imitated, but NEVER duplicated". The electric set is unlike anything you have ever heard. It "ROCKS" and is at the same time subtle, the guitar riffs put Eric Clapton to shame, make Pete Townsend look like an amature garage guitarist, and makes Eddie Van Halen look like the town fool. If you want music to move you, this will, again and again.
In todays music industry, if an act is "booed" at a concert, I don't think the record would ever be made, and the tapes would be destroyed (regardless of the quality and artistry of the music). Fortunately for us, these tapes were not destroyed. Somebody had the foresight to keep them hidden from the executives, and the sons and daughters of the executives, and today we can hear this piece of history, in it's entirety, beautifly recreated/preserved. You actually feel like you are there. Choose your camp; boo or cheer. I think you will cheer.
If you don't have any records, have never heard of Bob Dylan, never heard Bob Dylan, or you know everything Bob Dylan has ever done, buy this record. Buy this record.
Free Music Review: Five stars for a blazing electric set
Hit: 5 Stars
This has got to be the most hyped live recordings in history, and I can't help but suspect that the magnificent reputation of this recording weighs in when people throw superlatives around.
But that doesn't change the fact that "Live 1966" has an awful lot to offer, not just to hardcore Dylan-philes, and the electric second set in particular is simply magnificent.
Recorded on May 17th in the Manchester Free Trade Hall in England, "Live 1966" finds Bob Dylan at 24, backed by a certain Canadian combo which was not yet known as the Band.
The two discs are packaged in box set fashion, accompanied by a 55-page booklet, and the sound is as good as you could reasonably hope for. And the music. Well, the music is worthy of as much attention as anything Dylan recorded during the 60s.
Sure, there are a couple of slightly pedestrian performances on disc 1, but the acoustic set also includes a very good "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" and nice, mellow renditions of "Mr Tambourine Man" and "Just Like A Woman". I just can't make sense of the claim by my fellow reviewer from Freeland that "Baby Blue" and "Desolation Row" have been omitted...they certainly aren't missing from my disc, and it's a good thing that they aren't, 'cause the 11-minute "Desolation Row" is one of the highlights of the entire album.
Still, disc 2 is the real revelation. Dylan had just "gone electric" the year before, and here he tears through blistering hard rock renditions of songs like the gritty "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" and the tough, driving "Tell Me, Momma", a virtually unknown song which has never been recorded in the studio.
Previously acoustic numbers like "I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)" and "One Too Many Mornings" are played like grinding electric blues rock, and these are some of the liveliest, most stimulating performances Dylan has ever recorded.
Hell, these are some of the liveliest, most stimulating performances ANYONE has ever recorded!
Most of the little details have been kept in, from Garth Hudson playing the first eighteen notes of "An English Country Garden" during sound check, to the famous exchange between Dylan and a heckler in the crowd: The famous "I don't believe you" and the slightly less famous off-mike "play f***in'" loud" to the band, followed by a majestic eight-minute "Like A Rolling Stone" which will leave anyone with an ounce of taste deeply in awe.
Pick up this album. Even if you hate acoustic Dylan, you will want to hear the amazing second disc. The angriest grunge rock band ever wish they could put on such a performance.
Oh, and get "Live 1975" and "Hard Rain" as well!
Free Music Review: They Are Selling Postcards....
Hit: 5 Stars
Of all the bootleg, genuine basement tapes, fake basement tapes, etc. that have come out of over the years detailing the career of the premier folk troubadour of his times, Bob Dylan, this volume that contains the bulk of the famous (or infamous, if you are one of those old folk traditionalists who never moved on) English "Royal Albert Hall" Concert of 1965 may be historically the most valuable. Certainly after Martin Scorsese used the concert as a central backdrop to his Dylan documentary "No Direction Home" the argument for its importance in the folk pantheon has been enhanced. The CD issued many years ago prior to Scorsese's effort only confirms that judgment.
Here, in a quick summary, is what the hullabaloo was all about. Many early 1960's folkies were looking for a new "king of the hill" to continue the tradition established by the likes of Woody Guthrie (an early Dylan hero, by the way) and Pete Seeger. Certainly off the first few years of Dylan's rise it looked to one and all, including this reviewer, that Dylan would fill the bill. Then, he switched gears and started to write more starkly personal songs (rather than quasi-political songs like "Blowing In The Wind") and, oh lord here it comes, to use the electric guitar as backup. And worst of all, an electric backup band (the now immortal Band). You know, with drums and all. "Albert Hall" was one of the first major venues where he presented both concepts, acoustic and electric. The British traditionalists (or at least some of them) were not pleased. But as I have noted elsewhere in earlier reviews of Dylan's work everyone else should be glad, glad as hell, that he made that move.
Needless to say this concert is divided into an acoustic section where he plays some great numbers like "Visions Of Johanna", "Mr. Tambourine Man" and the like. His highlight here is "Desolation Row" an incredible almost surreal use of words and phrases that read more like a poem than a mere song. If I had not been a Dylan fan before this song then the first time I hear "They are selling postcards of the hanging. They are painting the passports brown. The beauty parlor is filled with sailors. The circus is in town" would have caught my attention for life right then and there.
The second, more controversial electric part, includes the 1960's semi-national anthem for the countercultural generation "Like A Rolling Stone" and a good literary companion piece to "Desolation Row" the very fine "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues. Finally, as an extra bonus if you want to hear Dylan without the slurs that make understanding some of the lyrics in other albums this is one for you.
Free Music Review: "If I'd thought they were any good, I'd have released them!"
Hit: 5 Stars
Back in 1966, it took a lot to get bunch of 16 and 17-year-old high school kids to make an expedition from the cozy suburbs to the wilds of Philadelphia...especially at night! But one of my friends organized it and got the tickets and we all went along, in part because it was a kind of grown up adventure, but mostly because every one of us was just mad about Bob Dylan. I can still see him standing on stage, wearing a slightly-ridiculous Carnaby-Street suit with a pattern of oversized houndstooth checks, endlessly tuning his guitar and confiding, "There really is somethin' wrong."But the music was incredible, especially the long piece of poetry we later learned was called "Visions of Johanna." And then, for the second set, the band came out and we were swept away by a tidal wave of sound and images--both crashing together into our consciousness in a way that would leave us forever altered. I know that I wasn't the only one present that night who felt this, because afterwards the local rock station started playing "Leopard Skin Pill-Box Hat" regularly--something no sane program director of the time would ever have allowed.
Anyway, about five years after that, a friend introduced me to a little hole-in-the-wall record store in Maryland. Their main claim to fame was a framed copy of the Beatles' notorious "butcher-block" album cover, but they also had a selection of the latest underground sensations: bootlegs. That was where I found "GWW Royal Albert Hall."
In those days (and is now so different?) attitude was everything, and one of the manifestations of record bootleggers' attitude was the conceit of referring to Dylan as "the Great White Wonder" or GWW for short. Later, of course, we learned that the concert in question had actually been recorded, not in London's fabled Royal Albert Hall, but in Manchester. But by that time, this incredible noise, the same one that had overwhelmed me in Philadelphia, had taken on a life of its own. Then digital recording techniques became available; then Robbie Robertson cleaned up the Basement Tapes for commercial release; then Dylan released the first "Bootleg Series" CD's--all of it was leading up to October 13, 1998, when the GWW concert would finally be unleashed upon an unsuspecting world.
So far, I've only heard one track, and that was one that's been released before: "Tell Me Mama," which surfaced as part of the Biograph boxed set. But if the rest is that clean and clear, while still as powerful as before, y'all should sprain a finger placing your order.
And that's all I have to say about that.
Free Music Review: BOLD, BRILLIANT PERFORMANCE OF AN EVOLVING ARTIST
Hit: 5 Stars
Bob Dylan Live, 1966: The "Royal Albert Hall Concert" is a gem that has been added to the greatest recorded performances of all time. It is not just a reproduction of a great concert from over forty years ago; it is also a landmark display that Mr. Dylan, then 24 or 25, had acquired new musical tastes and sounds and, as a result, was about to go into a new, multifaceted direction in his career.
Interestingly enough, the set is divided into two isolated, contrasting portions. The first half, encapsulated in Disc 1, contains the acoustic only portions of Dylan's landmark hits that fans and followers alike were accustomed to, including Mr. Tambourine Man and Desolation Row. Sure, there was the electric guitar and organ in the studio work, including Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, but never on stage. So the first forty-five minutes or so was outstanding business as usual.
The second half, whoa! What is that in Disc 2?!! Not just Dylan but a backup band! And amplifiers!! Woo hoo! Not just the second half but what would be Act II of Dylan's prestigious, prodigious and prolific career and the inauguration of the band that would later become known as The Band! Combining forces, Dylan and his mates on board produced an electric, electrifying sound starting with Tell Me Momma and continuing with numbers in between, including Baby, Let Me Follow You Down and Ballad of a Thin Man.
As the minutes passed, Dylan would hear the audience clapping louder than usual, but was this particular conduct of cheer or that of a sarcastic, less-than-receptive bunch, or both? Dylan did not waste his time pondering; he maintained course, continuing the guitar jamming, refusing to go back to Act I! It is by this audacious maneuvering that Dylan would be caught in a momentary dilemma.
As one song proceeded to the next, Dylan increasingly found himself facing a somewhat mixed but mostly accepting audience. Before the electric set, it was unanimously positive, and then, there was Mr. Dylan listening to "You've sold out!" and "Judas!" emanating from those who wanted and expected Dylan to remain acoustic only. In retort, Dylan exclaimed,"I don't believe you!" and told the others on stage to "play it (expletive) loud!" It is at that moment that we would witness perhaps the most sudden transition from the lowest point to the most climactic!
And this ultimate triumph would occur at the end, where Mr. Dylan delivered a loud and proud Like a Rolling Stone, which, with an in-your-face authority, brought the house down. Never again would Dylan or the world of music remain the same. And are we not fortunate!