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: Rock On!
Hit: 5 Stars
Okay, let's get one thing straight: acoustic music is such an overdone concept today that a little electricity seems like a novel concept. I imagine that Bob Dylan felt exactly the same way by the mid-60s; not just with the music industry in general, but with his own personal output as well. I mean there is only so much one can do with an acoustic six-string guitar and a harmonica!If you ask me, acoustic music is for people who have too much time on their hands and need to feel intellectualized. The very early Dylan records are okay, but pale in comparison to Dylan's 1965 and 1966 output. By the time of "Another Side of Bob Dylan" the man was creating personal music that was highly reflective and subjective, rather than the typical, expected folk anthems for tired old hippies.
Surely Dylan felt the hypocrasy and march-in-line mentality behind modern Leftism by 1964, and also realized that the Beatles had more to say than Peter, Paul, & Mary, Joan Bayez, and the Kingston Trio combined. Surely Dylan also has a sense of humor and a fun personality and realized that the principal usage of popular music is to entertain rather than to preach.
Hence this CD: a monumental music barrage of rolk/folk that combined, is worth more than either of its seperate components. True, the Byrds and others had been experimenting with blending folk music with rock & roll before Dylan traded his acoustic guitar for a telecaster and amp, but no one could sing a tune like Dylan.
The two CDs in this set are two sides of a concert tour: disk 1 is the first acoustic set of the concert, while disk 2 is the second half of the show when Dylan emerged with an electric backing rock & roll band behind him.
Personally, the electric set is what made this 1966 tour unique and is the whole reason to even purchase this CD. The first acoustic CD is thus kind of redundant (yet more live acoustic Dylan - like we all haven't heard enough of that!).
For those who will undoubtedly give my controversial review here a negative vote, I say poo! You are living in the stone age and refuse to accept the inevitable march of time - making you the exact opposite of a true individual like Bob Dylan! Indeed, the baby-boomer hippies who try & claim Dylan as their champion are the ones who understand him least. Sell-outs! Dylan's about the trial of the individual, NOT becomming a number in a quasi-democratic mass-generation of voiceless nobodies who all think the same.
Face it, the 60s are as dead as Jacob Marley! The brilliance of this live, electric rock set, [and the dismal state of all modern popular music] is proof of that.
Free Music Review: Received My Order, Listened, and Cried in Appreciation!
Hit: 5 Stars
My tears came right between I Don't Believe You and Baby Let Me Follow You Down. They flowed with passion and appreciation for the absolute mastery of the "sound," and the courage of Dylan as a young artist leading the world into the age of electrified rock and roll. I had heard bootlegs of this music before, but maybe this listening--and the associated emotions and tears--were all a matter of timing for me. I am a writer, and I had just returned from a hatchet-job TV interview on Oklahoma PBS, where the artist (me...loosely) had one agenda and the PBS interviewer and a completely opposite agenda. And in the process, I got beat up in the compromise. I was forced to whore myself for the sale of my books.
But....there is no comprise offered by Bob Dylan in these songs. Only HIS agenda. The RIGHT agenda! The artist (Dylan....completely!) basically taking the audience by the hand with each song, saying, "Here, this is the right road. Trust me. This agenda is good! We'll all get there and we'll all be happy about it." The music in this collection is all about the conviction of genius as it moves beyond the limitations of tradition. It's about the artist busting the mold into a million pieces because IT IS THE RIGHT THING TO DO!!!!
Dylan introduces I Don't Believe You with a few words to the effect of, "it used to go that way, but now it goes this way..." And he cranks out this beautiful electric masterpiece. At the song's end, the audience is booing and stomping, and heckling. They want the old! Dylan is looking only at the new! He answers their heckling with an electric version of Baby Let Me Follow You Down. And that's where my tears came flowing down. It was beautiful! It was the artist facing off against controversy with the conviction flowing right out of the soul of his art. "BOOOO! HISSSS! WE WANT THE OLD!!!"
NO! There is a new vision! And the song cranks out in a defiant way that, in that moment, in 1966, forever onward, connects Dylan to Shakespeare, Chaucer, Rimbaud, Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Twain, cummings, St. Paul, and every other writer who forged ahead against great odds created by the miniscule visions of the onlookers.
The songs on this CD are HISTORY! Looking back, and knowing where we are now, maybe its easy for us to shrug our shoulders and take our evolution for granted. But these songs stand as monuments in the thrust of that evolution.
I had to put the CD away for right now; I can't let my heart flow out of my eyes anymore today. Maybe tomorrow.... (Canyon Adams)
Free Music Review: Dylan Unplugged and plugged...
Hit: 5 Stars
Strangely, I was not a huge fan of Dylan's electric sets until I heard the second half of this recording. The tightness of the band is almost religious and Dylan's singing is some of the best I've heard (Dylan is more of an expressive singer than a technically accomplished one which is what truly makes him a great singer). If Dylan was trying to convert his "folky" fans by blasting rock music square in their faces it worked on me. The real edge of the concert is the fact that Dylan had completely turned his back on the "folkys." It was a complete and utter betrayal of all that was sacred in Pete Seeger's crowd. Had you been one of them, you would have been angry too. Rock was seen by that crowd as pretty much tantamount to satan and the great deceiver, and Dylan dove head first into the "evil". It takes massive guts to alienate your core audience. It's difficult to think of a modern day analogy, but imagining AC/DC setting up banjos and lapsteel guitars and cranking out country classics in front of their hardcore fans may capture the sense of betrayal the folkys felt.
So why did he do it? He wasn't just trying to irk them. Perhaps he saw and felt the limitations of the folk scene (it still hasn't completely died, but it hasn't progressed much either) and saw an end in sight. More likely he just changed visions and couldn't pretend anymore. In either case, he let everyone know he was evolving in an anything but subtle way.
The audience unease isn't completely obvious until half way through disc two. Incessant clapping and shouting permeates the space between songs until right before "Like a Rolling Stone" the infamous "Judas!" is shouted. Bob is vindicated by an amazing version of the song which sadly gets lukewarmly received.
Overall the sound quality is incredible. In headphones it's easy to hear where two of the songs had to be spliced together since the original tapes ran out. Without headphones it's nearly untraceable. Some amazing engineering was done on these tapes from 1966.
The acoustic set is also amazing, and many of the songs have a very different feel to them than the album versions. "Just Like A Woman" sounds more introspective and brooding, and there's a great version of "Mr. Tamborine Man."
This set gives you the best of both worlds of Bob. He never completely abandoned folk music nor stopped playing solo acoustically, but his scope definitely changed in 1966, and it is announced loudly and brusquely in this set.
Free Music Review: Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the show
Hit: 5 Stars
Others are going to write (and rightly so) about the historical context of this CD, and about the awesome confrontation between Dylan and his audience. All of that is worth experiencing, at least once. But the reason to own this CD and to keep coming back to this CD is the performance itself.
It's difficult to get such an emotive and evocative reading of "Desolation Row" out of my head, it feels like I've vacationed there by the end of it. "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" seems to have found its sense of empathy for Baby. "Visions of Johanna" is absolutely haunting.
And even though Dylan delivers a stunning acoustic set, it's on the electric set that he catches fire. "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" is an intense slow burn right to the moment he finally gets to deliver the line that he obviously aims squarely at this hostile English audience, "I'm going back to New York City / I do believe I've had eeeeeeennnnnoooouugh." The Band (actually "The Hawks" at this point in their career) stand and deliver on "One Too Many Mornings" like a determined but doomed Confederate brigade, and the result is brilliant.
The wit and verve of the confrontation make the between song banter as entertaining as the music is brilliant. And that serves to enliven and high-light the humor within the lyrics of songs like "Leopard-skin Pill-box Hat."
The sound quality is excellent, especially given the year and the circumstances for the recording. Only one song sounds truly "bootleg" quality; "Ballad of a Thin Man" is slightly impaired by what sounds like problems with the vocal mic they were using at the piano.
There are some songs I could do without (do I really need another rendition of "Mr. Tambourine Man"?). "Tell Me, Momma" and "Fourth Time Around" aren't favorites of mine, even when they are this well done. But I like having this concert intact.
This is THE Bob Dylan live album to own. He was at an amazing peak on several levels during this tour, and this CD captures it all. Without the packaging, the historical significance and the mystique, the music simply holds up on its own as a great recording. Add those elements to the mix, and this is a very satisfying release.
Watching the film from this tour in "No Direction Home" greatly enhances the listening experience, since it makes it easier to visualize the performance, and what an amazing total performance this is!
Free Music Review: brilliant and idiosyncratic
Hit: 5 Stars
This is a brilliant concert, but perhaps needs some historical context to be fully appreciated. For those who need some history, this 2 cd set includes a beautifully written booklet describing Dylan's '65-'66 transformation from folk troubadour to electrified rock sensation, and the vilification this change inspired in some of his folk fans. This presumes, of course, that people know how to read. Otherwise listeners may be perplexed at hearing some audience members booing and heckling during the electric set (the second disk of the set).
Some of the folk fans were particularly irked at hearing some of their Dylan folk favorites electrified and rocking (Baby Let me Follow You Down), and some of his rock songs sung with only guitar and harmonica during the acoustic set (Desolation Row). The acoustic performances are beautiful, passionate and haunting, and the electic performances, with bristling backup from The Band, are blistering and furious. It is evident throughout that Dylan is wasted (both in terms of exhaustion and drug use). I suppose this might bother some listeners; to me it just adds to the poignancy of the music, and makes the brilliance of the performances even more amazing. The acoustic version here of "Visions of Johanna", one of my favorite Dylan songs,I now prefer to the studio recording on "Blonde on Blonde".
This is a historic recording that circulated on bootlegs for many years. Consult the booklet, and watch Martin Scorcese's "No Direction Home" to get a sense of the kind of pressure that Dylan was under during this watershed period of his career.
Hearing Dylan do battle with the naysayers in his audience is part of the excitement of the performance. That gutsiness in sticking to his artistic vision is one of Dylan's most admirable qualities, but this might be lost on some listeners. Newcomers to Dylan's music, or those who have trouble with performances that sound different from the studio recordings, or those expecting the smoothed out and heavily produced sound of many current recordings, may have some trouble with this one.
Well, I agree with Van. I truly pity anyone who can't appreciate Dylan's music. For those who dismiss it as "old folk's music", that's their loss. Someday they'll be old. How well will the stuff they listen to now hold up years from now, compared to Dylan's music?