Bob Dylan: The 1966 Live Recordings - Sony 36-CD box-set - November 11th 2016

Maybe it's just me. I'm from the John Prine School - "Eat everything that they put on your dish". Be it '66 Dylan, "Get Back" sessions, or "armpit" tapes.

 

A lot of the "story" lies in Dylan's interactions with the crowds. "History" tells us that people booed and walked out and Dylan and The Hawks moved on ahead with a "Damn the torpedoes" attitude. But the box tells us that the story is far more complex than that. Near the end of the tour Dylan is openly baiting the crowd, and on the final night blows off much the steam that had been built up in the past year. And the listener can also hear the "mainstream" fans who are fairly new to the party react with excitement for "Positively 4th Street", "Mr. Tambourine Man" and (mostly) "Like a Rolling Stone". We also get a much clearer picture of how much medicine Dylan was mixing up - it's not just legend.

 

The tracks missing from the official "Live At The Gaslight 1962" release in 2005 were included on the "50th Anniversary Collection 1962" in 2012.

 

I chatted with Alderson for a minute after the Roosevelt House Q&A he did in December and asked him what drugs Bob was using on that tour. He said Bob only took speed, Danko and Manuel were already using heroin, and he himself took acid every day.

 

My first listen was chronological and I'm glad it was! As you say, there is a narrative to this tour and it is very moving, when you think about what lay immediately ahead (the disputed motorcycle accident, the retreat, then the emergence of a 'different' Dylan in late 1967). By the last note of LARS on the 2nd RAH night, you realise that Dylan was leaving something behind but moving on to he didn't know what.

 

In the Oval Office?

 

Bob snorts a line of coke in the opening sequence of Eat the Document. Considering how yellow and gaunt his face is compared to '65, I'd be surprised if he wasn't doing heroin as well. Mix in 28 packs of cigarettes a day ... it's incredible that somebody as frail and thin as Dylan didn't have a heart attack a week into the tour.

 

Maybe coke, maybe speed. Snorting speed was reportedly pretty common among the more needle-shy folks hanging around Warhol's Factory. Andy disapproved of heroin use at the Factory mostly because it interfered with people getting their work done, whereas the A-heads would work around the clock for days at a time. Dylan had a work ethic to rival Andy's.

 

I always forget about digging out the "50th Anniversary Copyright Collections" when looking for information, which is ironic considering the subject of this thread is a copyright collection by another name (although much better curated and presented than the first 3 copyright editions).

There was a nice boot released in 2001 containing the complete 1962 tapes which, in the liner notes, convincingly (to me) described three distinct "Gaslight Tapes".

• 6th September 1961:-

Man on the Street
He Was A Friend of Mine
Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues
Song To Woody
Pretty Polly
Car Car

• Late October 1962 first recording:-

Motherless Children*
Handsome Molly
John Brown
Ballad of Hollis Brown*
Kindhearted Woman Blues*
See That My Grave Is Kept Clean*
Ain't No More Cane*
Cocaine
Cuckoo Is A Pretty Bird
West Texas

• Late October 1962 second recording:-

A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
Don't Think Twice, It's Alright
Black Cross*
No More Auction Block*
Rocks & Gravel
Barbara Allen
Moonshiner

*According to bobdylan.com/Sony these were performed on 15th October, but I'd say it's a guess.

I think we have to assume that the latter two are the Richard Alderson recordings, and I guess he's saying (in 2006) that he has the original tape of the second one and that the original first October tape went missing, although, obviously, not before it was copied and distributed along with a copy of the second October tape. The only qualifier to that supposition is that RA describes the first recording as being mostly old traditional tunes, which is a fair comment, but that the second recording has plenty of original songs, which is not so obvious.

 

The "three" Gaslight Tapes were in circulation on boots and tapes for many, many years prior to the "official" release of the latter two. I bought this *import* CD at Tower Records, IIRC, sometime in the 1990s, way before that Starbuxx edition, the Copyright set, and all the gray market releases. Sound quality not bad, but not great, either.

Thanks for being there, Richard A.

 

I also have the boot you mention - is the quality better elsewhere?
I must admit that I didn't even realise there had been an "official" release! I get confused between the gray market and the "official" releases at times!

 

A telling indication of the importance of the October 1962 Gaslight Tape: three of the twenty vinyl sides of the classic Ten of Swords bootleg are devoted to the seventeen Gaslight Tape recordings.

And, just to bring this full circle, the last two of the twenty sides are given over to the "Albert Hall" 1966 electric set.

 

That Laserlight CD was the first CD boot I bought. It was on open display in a well-known record store here in UK for months! The Rattlesnake remaster (below) is better quality (with the songs allegedly in the correct order - more guesswork, I'd say, though). Best quality would be the official releases. The "Live At the Gaslight 1962" should still be available. The 1962 Copyright Collection is a bit more difficult to get hold of.

 

Since we're on the Gaslight Tapes now, what was the evidence that the October '62 tapes are from two separate nights?

The best info I could find in a brief search was none too conclusive:
"After much thought and investigation, it is now believed that there were actually three performances at the Gaslight. It has also been suggested that the final two shows might have occurred on the same day, or within a day or so of each other... Oddly, the date of this concert has never been pinpointed. It is now known that there were actually two separate appearances at the Gaslight in late October of 1962... The dates of the two concerts are still not known for sure, but they were definitely late in the year 1962, and possibly even on the same day."
Gaslight Tape »

Bjorner's site still puts it all (perhaps randomly) as October 15.

Some interesting discussion here, debating whether it's a compilation from separate performances, or all selections from one night:
Google Groups »

I take Alderson's comment to mean that his first Gaslight tape is actually lost:
"The first one, he wasn’t as “on”, and I didn’t use my own microphone. It wasn’t as well focussed, and he was mostly singing older folk material. But the second one, where he was singing his original stuff, that was really captured very well. The first tapes have been lost. The second tapes, I have much better versions than the ones they issued."
I think he'd phrase that differently if the "lost" first tape was actually partly on bootlegs and the official release!
The funny thing is that this second tape is "mostly older folk material" - even if it is from two separate sets, he only sings two original songs in each set.
It's tantalizing to think that Alderson's original tape might be more complete than the selections that circulated.

 

Thank you. Much appreciated.

 

It's intriguing, alright. We need to talk gently to RA and get him to hand over his tape(s)...!

 

Richard Alderson Speaks! - Part Two: The 1966 World Tour


Here are more extracts from the interview with RA included as an extra feature on the 2006 re-make DVD of Mickey Jones’s 1966 Tour Home Videos. The interview would have been conducted soon after the release of BS7 and the accompanying Scorsese film. Frankly, since the release of the tour box last year and all the publicity surrounding it, there’s not a lot here that is new to us; it would be surprising if there was. But there are one or two interesting snippets which you might enjoy...


A. The Sound Equipment

“After I’d worked with Harry for a couple of years I had the beginnings of a recording studio on West 65th Street…and Bob’s manager asked me if I wanted to do the World Tour, and I said, “Absolutely”, and so I built the entire sound system for that in New York City.

“The theatres we were playing were all fairly small venues and they didn’t have sound equipment to reproduce rock ‘n’ roll music; it just was unheard of. So we brought this along to supplement what we were going to encounter. As it turned out, it was more than adequate for the acoustic set but the equipment that I assembled was really not enough for the rock ‘n’ roll because we could never get it loud enough to project into these halls and we were constantly faced with technical hassles.

“It kind of got worse as we went along and I’ll explain to you why… there were a lot of ups and downs. For the most part in Australia, which wasn’t documented because it hasn’t been recorded, I would say the halls were more suited to the amount of equipment we had; they were smaller, with the exception of Sydney where we played in an old boxing ring which was utterly hideous.

“My memory says that the sound in Hawaii, which was in a University Auditorium – I can’t remember what the venue was – was pretty good, and the sound in Australia was remarkably decent. We did the tour in Australia and then Grossman got the bright idea that he would save money and not ship all the sound equipment to Stockholm…. that he would sell all the equipment that I put together and leave it in Australia,… and he would send me back to New York and in two weeks I would fully assemble the system..We had six Klipsch speakers and a couple of mixers and all the microphones and cable and I was a one-man show.

“They all went west and I went east back to New York City and completely put together the whole system and flight boxes and everything. Because I had to do it over a two week period without any sleep there was some glitches in the machinery…that never got really fully ironed-out. It was put together under enormous pressure. The system that worked pretty flawlessly in Hawaii and Australia was quirky in Britain. It was also tested harder in Britain because we were playing bigger halls. Dylan’s approach to the rock ‘n’ roll set got more aggressive so the more they got booed the louder they played, …and, you know, none of this made the sound better. The sound always stayed good for the acoustic set because that was fairly simple no matter how big the hall was.”


B. The Recordings

“The recordings came about because Howard Alk was shooting footage for a film in the British Isles and he provided the Nagra tape recorder. It isn’t a recording per se, it was just a feed off the PA line from my mixer, so it was just what was going out to the house; there was no attempt to make it a serious recording. It was a document that was supposed to be the sound for the film, which in fact did get made but has never been commercially released – that was “Eat the Document”.

“The concert that has been issued as “The Albert Hall Concert” [“BS4 – Live 1966”]… that was recorded by Columbia. They sent over a team of engineers and equipment to record it. All the other recordings that are out there that I’ve ever heard, none of them came from me. They came from people who got copies of the tapes because I never retained any of the tapes of that ’66 tour – I turned them all over to Howard Alk at the end of the thing and I never made copies. All of those recordings on that tour, unless somebody stuck a microphone up in front of the speakers somewhere, which is possible, were just off my PA feed. [The number of microphones used were]… two during the acoustic set, and I think there were ten or eleven mikes on the electric set.”


[In answer to a question here, RA states his preference for using a microphone for an acoustic guitar rather than a pick-up.]


“We listened [back to the tapes] a fair amount. We were listening to the music and the songs and the performances… and we were for the most part happy with it. Bob was occupied, when we were in Europe, with listening to the mixes of “Blonde on Blonde” because he had recorded that just before the tour started… but we did listen to a lot of the live concert stuff.

“There wasn’t really any mixing; it was what was coming out of the speakers. The concert was what went on the tape, and there was really no way to mix it. Now we have ways to take a mono recording like that and improve it but at the time there wasn’t much they could do with it, which is why the early CD releases of that material from that tour sound really bad. But the last stuff that was remixed for the Scorsese documentary sound much better because it was mixed in a modern studio with good equipment and there’s a lot of processing that you can use now that we didn’t have then…”

[Here, RA talks briefly about Mickey’s role]


C. The Booing

“It started back in Newport; it had been going on for close to a year before we did the tour. The Australians are just more polite and it didn’t really develop into shouting matches until we got to Britain.

“[Bob] would react by playing the “Mr. Jones” song with a great deal of vigour, … I always thought that was a wonderful way to react because it was talking right back to the audience about how off the mark they were. He was always very subtle about getting his way. Sometimes he would make wisecracks but it would never be back to the people in the audience. They were very unhappy because they had paid a lot of money…to come to see Bob and they expected him to stand up and sing folk music, and when the band came on they were really angry…

“There was such a dichotomy between what was going on onstage – here was this beautiful, incandescent, wonderful rock ‘n’ roll going on and great songs… and the audience is in another world, artificially created with these expectations they have that are not based on anything real at all…”


D. The Acoustic and Electric Sets

“The Press leaned on the fact that Dylan was abandoning his true idealistic acoustic folk music roots for hard rock ‘n’ roll….he music was way ahead of its time. So the audience came primed. When the band came on and started banging away… the audience was, I would say, at least 50%, alienated from the whole process. It was a totally different vibe, anyway. I’m not sure how much of the audience in Britain and Europe understood what was going on, and Bob had slipped into the process of egging the whole thing on. When he hung the American flag behind the band in Paris it was obvious he was trying to incite quite a reaction…

“It was impossible to understand … because the performances with the band, as far as I’m concerned, are unequalled music…the sound wasn’t that great but that shouldn’t have gotten in anybody’s way. But the audience just wasn’t ready for it.

“I think towards the end of the tour [Bob] wasn’t giving his full attention to the acoustic set because he got so frustrated with people reacting to the electric, but for most of the time he put a tremendous amount of artistic energy and real feeling into the acoustic part – it wasn’t that he was trying to short-change anybody… I liked the stuff with the band a whole lot better than the folk music; I think musically it was unparalleled…I’m really sorry that it wasn’t documented better or recorded better, but I’m glad we got what we got…

“The rock ‘n’ roll was more definitely what Bob was about… the folk singing was a period that he went through and it was more of a pose than the rock ‘n’ roller. I think the rock ‘n’ roller was the real Bob; that’s where he felt the most comfortable…I never felt he was super-comfortable with the troubadour thing. His personality seemed to flower when the group was behind him…”


E. The “Judas” Shout

“I was usually stage left – somewhere near the stage. Once I had set up for the acoustic set I would walk around the hall and listen, and a fair amount of the time during the set with the band I would move around the hall and try to see what it sounded like in various places. But most of the time I was stage left with the portable rig that I had… and Albert would usually be somewhere nearby with me.

“To me, it was just part of the general dissatisfaction of the audiences … there was a lot of shouting. I was never really sure if the person was yelling “Judas” or not until it was remixed for the Scorsese version where you really hear it, but it was really buried in the background originally and they brought it out and made a point of it. There was so much of that, you know, that’s not documented, so much yelling and carrying-on, and people objecting, that was a thread through that whole thing… that instance, because it was so well captured, has become the famous one. It’s really just part of a continuous thing. I think there were concerts where the problem was much worse than anything that’s been documented. There were some performances where the audience looks like they were going to revolt!"


F. “Play Effing Loud“

“It wasn’t me… and it doesn’t sound like something Bob would say either – it’s not Bob’s way of talking. I mean, I can hear Bob encouraging them to play really loud but he wouldn’t shout it to the band. What he would have done, he would talk to Robbie and indicate that he wanted everybody to play louder…I mean it’s possible but very unlikely in my scenario, and I have no idea who said it but my guess is it was not anybody on stage…”


[At this point the filming ends abruptly.]


There is also a new 26 minute interview with Mickey Jones featured as an extra on this DVD. Maybe there is scope for a 5th instalment of my “Mickey’s Home Movies Series”!! I’ll check it out.

#

 

Good to have those Alderson transcripts off the Mickey Jones DVD!

I also did some additional research on the sound system and corrected/amended Alderson's 1966 sound system list that I posted earlier:

Microphones (said to have been 10 in all or 11* acc. to Alderson interview on 2006 Mickey Jones DVD):
[*not possible since the two Altec mixers combined only had 10 channels]

1x Bob vocal
1x Bob acoustic guitar (removed from stage before electric set)
1x Bob electric guitar
1x Robbie guitar
1x Rick bass
1x Garth organ
1x Richard piano
1x Bob vocal piano
1x Mickey bass drum (visible in Sony promo film "The Untold Story (...)" at 03:59/09:22)
1x Mickey overhead (visible in Sony promo film "The Untold Story (...)" at 09:33)

Sennheiser MD 421 or 441 – on the instruments
Sennheiser MKH 404 with wire mesh cap – Bob vocal
Neumann U-67 – Mickey overhead

(additional microphones can be seen in footage from the shows taped by CBS)

---

Mixers/compressors/amps:

2x Altec Lansing 1567A mixer [pre-]amplifier
1x McIntosh MC275 amplifier
1x Teletronix LA-2A leveling amplifier ("compressor“)

"The hook up would have been: bass, drums, piano, organ, & Robbie guitar in one mixer, and Bob’s vocal and guitar in the other with the compressor in line." (Alderson in "Percy Song" interview pt. 1)
[Note: Since there were two microphones on Mickey, he could not have hooked up all of the band to one mixer and must have moved one instrument (maybe Manuel) over to Bob's mixer.]

---

Stage monitors:

2x Altec Lansing 604 loudspeakers in Altec Lansing 612 cabinets
1x unknown "audio transformer" (?)

[The onstage monitors were probably fed a direct signal from the McIntosh amp, so there must have been an additional compressor in line to tweak the sound for that purpose. Maybe Alderson used three Teletronix compressors in all (one for the tape recorder, one for the onstage monitors, one for the house sound).

Btw all of the equipment that Alderson used is still revered by analogue enthusiasts today, which shows how cutting edge it was back in 1966.]


---

House speakers:

4x Klipsch La Scala (6 acc. to Alderson interview on 2006 Mickey Jones DVD)

---

Recording equipment:

1x Nagra III NP
1x Beyer headphones
1x unknown "audio transformer"
Scotch tapes

"The tape feed would have been the tape outs of the mixers, again combined with an audio transformer. The 1567 has five main channels and a tape out which bypasses the volume and eq." (Alderson in "Percy Song" interview pt. 1)

[I think that there was a second Nagra III NP used by the film crew, mainly Jones Alk.]

 

Alk provided the Nagra? I was under the impression this whole time that Alderson bought the Nagra in NYC at the same time as the rest of the equipment.

 

This is the one I have!

 

I just wanted to reiterate how much we appreciate all of the wonderfully informative -- and entertaining -- posts that you've generously added to this thread. I can only imagine how time-consuming it must have been to transcribe the Richard Alderson and Mickey Jones interviews from DVDs, and then frame them with such thoughtful and illuminating commentary. You dig deep, and never seem to come up empty-handed, and for that, we thank you, Percy Song.

And, yes, bring on "Mickey’s Home Movies Series #5”

 

Thanks for the transcript! As you say, not a lot of new stuff for us now that we've been poring over all his available interviews for a while, but this may be the best single one, and there are lots of interesting little tidbits.

 

Thanks so much for your efforts, this is very interesting reading!

 

I finished reading Heylin's "Judas" the other night. I quite enjoyed it, not sure why it got flak on here quite a bit, although I admit I haven't read many books on Dylan, so I have not much else to compare it to.

I recently picked up a book written by the late Paul Williams of "Crawdaddy" magazine that I look forward to delving into: "Bob Dylan Performing Artist 1960-1973 The Early Years"

What other books are out there that cover this period of Dylan - the 60's - particularly '65 through '66 that are particularly good reads? Anytime I pick up a book on Dylan I can't put it down, the man is fascinating.

 

Damn, doing LSD on that tour with those shows! What a trip that musta' been!