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

Which of them have brickwalling and can you confirm the DR values for each?

 

Didn't he claim to have saved Bob's life by pulling him out of a bath on this tour too?

 

But the Bootleg Series release was basically just the songs Dylan sang - so of course the band didn't get many writing credits or vocals in those. The band was also recording quite a few song demos without him. If we think of the Basement Tapes as the Dylan release, the band was not an equal partner in composing (or choosing) those songs; but in the basement recordings as a whole, Dylan was often absent.
That said, Robertson was certainly revisionist in creating the original Basement Tapes album by plunking in later Band outtakes instead of what they were actually recording in '67!

 

I would guess Dylan would not care how the credits are posted. Perhaps it sells just a few extra copies, though I doubt it.

 

Today: Newcastle. Doesn't get old.

 

This thread has had amazing research and contributions. But what we haven't seen yet is a version-by-version, performance-by-performance look at "Tell Me Momma." We now probably have access to all the renditions we'll ever hear, so maybe they should all be documented (and yeah, I'm not volunteering myself. I don't pretend to be attuned to all the subtleties). The song seemed to change from night to night in a very interesting way.

 

Good choice but don't forget to switch the switch -- Cardiff's Like a Rolling Stone is actually Newcastle and vice versa.

 

Oh, yeah.

It's a funny thing. In that case, the tape was clearly swapped. But it's still amazing we now have them all at our fingertips.

 

It surely is. Many of us used to dream about an official release of "Royal Albert Hall" and when that actually happened it was amazing. But to hear the entire surviving tour tapes is beyond amazing. I think the bootleggers actually did some good; their box-sets irritated the Dylan camp into topping them with even better versions. Well, maybe I could have phrased that better but you know what I mean.

 

I was thinking of that myself....thought I might try doing a little writeup of that song through the tour. But then this thread kind of died and it didn't seem worthwhile anymore. But maybe sometime, someone will tackle it!

 

By all means head over to Expecting Rain and get stuck into the thread "Listening to the 1966 Recordings In Real Time" or whatever it's called. I'm trying to talk about the music, show by show, as every concert hits its 51st anniversary. I'm only up to Sydney; and there'll be a couple of things I have to say about this song throughout. Expecting Rain • View topic - Listening to The 1966 Live Recordings in real time

 

Best Ballad Of A Thin Man of the tour, in my opinion. I love the whole show.

 

I'm enjoying your posts over on that ER thread, SN. Frankly, you would probably receive more response and interaction if you posted them over here as well, and I'd urge you to publish your reviews thus far on this thread. (It's quite a bit easier to post photos here, too, I think you'll find.)

I believe I'm right in saying that no one here has completed areview of every show...

 

Somebody Naked, I second Percy Song's recommendation. If you don't want people to avert their eyes, post your reviews here as well. Your thoughts will certainly be welcome.

 

You're both very kind. I'll have a rummage and just put them in this monster thread of yours.

 

8.30pm, Saturday February 5th, 1966. Westchester County Centre, White Plains, New York.




Chronologically the first concert in this treasured, mammoth box set. The day before, Dylan and The Hawks played in Louisville, Kentucky. A good three months before the bulk of it - before the exciting stuff, before the oft-told tales; before the European confrontational theatre of May 1966. In many ways it's the first step of the journey. In some ways it's miles away.


It's not a great recording, but we're lucky to have it. At this early stage, we have the rare pleasure of the inclusion of To Ramona and Love Minus Zero/No Limit. Both receive enormous cheers. Maybe that's why he dumped them. Visions of Johanna - still called Freeze Out and barely two months old - gets a lot of laughs. I guess the Mona Lisa/geez/knees stuff is funny. I can't remember my reaction at hearing this song for the first time, and it certainly wouldn't have been the same if I lived in New York in 1966. But there's a knowing enjoyment to this song. And then there's the strange reaction to Desolation Row - are they laughing at the protracted harmonica solo? If so, just you wait for Mr. Tambourine Man.


There are only two songs captured from the electric set (although newspaper review from the 7th confirms both Ballad Of A Thin Man and Like A Rolling Stone, and the NDH DVD shows silent footage of Positively 4th Street; and Tell Me, Momma at the soundcheck). They sound like a dress rehearsal for chaos, if you can have such a thing. The audience, as I imagine them, sound stunned. There's an oft-repeated cliché in showbiz circles about unresponsive audiences: someone will always defend them and say "they're listening". Which may be true. But they could be shocked to their core and you wouldn't know the difference. Dylan sounds confident. He know he's doing the right thing; and, in this poor recording, you can just about make out Sandy Konikoff, Rick Danko and Robbie Robertson's conviction that they agree with him. There's a bravado there: you don't play like that if you're just testing something out.


It's a series of fragments, and only hints at what was to come. The first of 23.


Footage of audience and soundcheck as an extra on the No Direction Home DVD and Blu-Ray.

 

8pm, Sunday February 6th, 1966. Syria Mosque (demolished), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.



The following night, and a not insubstantial 400 mile trip. 770 miles the day before, and then going half the distance back the way they came. If they travelled by plane, I’m immediately thinking of Buddy Holly (who played this same venue four times) and the Winter Dance Party tour that ended in tragedy in February 1959: almost exactly 7 years earlier - the options being a freezing cold bus or a potentially hazardous flight. A rigorous schedule; and, as Robbie Robertson was to put it after another decade-plus of touring: “a goddamn impossible way of life”.


It’s only 24 hours later, so you’d be a fool to expect a wildly different concert from the previous night in White Plains. But this is Bob Dylan; and it kind of is. A better recording, which helps. After a fairly perfunctory She Belongs To Me (clearly, people talking at concerts didn’t just start in my lifetime) and an early outing for the “This never happens to my electric guitar” gag, this is a stunning reading of To Ramona. Something about his voice sounds as if it lacks the range that this song has previously demanded, so he doesn’t reach for the notes that he attempts a song later. He plays a little fast and loose with the melody - not drastically - but it works beautifully. Something else about Dylan’s voice at this show: it appears to be at some kind of crossroads. It sounds to me, and on this song particularly, as if he’s trying what we now know as his 1966 voice out a little bit (as he already had, let’s face it: a good example is in the version of It Ain’t Me Babe that he played in Berkeley two months earlier. This being Dylan, these things are never cut and dried): it’s got one foot in his 1965 voice and one in 1966. It’s clearly different from his performance of the song featured in Dont Look Back (only 9 months earlier), but we’re not quite at the stoned, out there moaning of May 1966. Not yet.


Visions of Johanna is still called Freeze Out, and still a knockout. I can’t imagine what this must have sounded like to the ears of a Dylan fan who was still 3-6 months away from hearing Blonde On Blonde. It gets less laughs than in NY, but it’s still in Nightingale’s Code.


No It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue and less than a third of Desolation Row survive. An incomplete Love Minus Zero/No Limit and then a complete Mr. Tambourine Man.


And then a jump straight to the end: and, as far as I can tell, the only aural evidence we have of Dylan performing both Positively 4th Street *and* Like A Rolling Stone that year. A couple of months later, in Sydney, he finishes the set with Positively 4th Street. Three weeks after that, he’s dumped it and Like A Rolling Stone is the closer for the rest of the tour.


We pick up the story in just under three weeks; during which time Dylan heads to Nashville and records Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands, among other things. He also plays shows in Tennessee, Virginia, Canada and Pennsylvania. Again. And New York. Again. Which is where this picks up in 20 days.

 

8.30pm, Saturday 26th February, 1966. Island Garden (demolished), Hempstead, New York.



The next surviving audience tape we have is nearly three weeks later, recorded in Dylan’s then home state (the previous two nights he played in Philadelphia). This site is about the same distance from JFK Airport as Manhattan, but in the other direction. Dylan had been living in Woodstock from 1965: he could easily have travelled to this show from his home, if he'd wanted to. Which is possible, and makes sense - in this show he sounds rested. His voice is strong. There’s none of the audible exhaustion that you hear in later shows.


It’s another audience recording, so limited time and tape mean that this particular bootlegger is pretty vigilant about only recording the music. Hence it’s difficult to get any sense of what happens in between the songs (although you can just about make out some of the intro to Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues). But Dylan’s in fine voice and the crowd loves him. There’s a marked difference between the reception the US East coast crowd gives him and the betrayed, bullish British fans of May ’66.


And there’s a new song. 4th Time Around - replacing To Ramona - is introduced by name. In the interim since Pittsburgh, this song had been recorded for his new album in Nashville: it’s now a permanent fixture; and given that Blonde On Blonde is months away from being released, I’m intrigued to know whether crowds can hear the Norwegian Wood reference. Visions Of Johanna sounds very confident and energised (no more nightingale's code, but it's still the peddler who steps to the road). Love Minus Zero/No Limit contains, as it always did, one of Dylan's most irritating couplets, in that half of it is perfect: "She knows there's no success like failure" (so poignant and so true)/"And that failure's no success at all" (so redundant). But it's a beautiful performance. The audience are rapt throughout the set. Many songs get an enthusiastic welcome; Mr. Tambourine Man (“Yeah, baby! Give it away (?) Get in the way (?)” shouts a fan) features what appears to be some of his strongest singing of the tour. It's also notable that the harmonica solo gets a round of applause. Within three months, this kind of playing would be dismissed in the UK as "too much improvising on his wretched harmonica".


And, for the first time, we have a decent chunk of the electric set. Largely stripped of its confrontational nature, this music sounds triumphant, jubilant, courageous. The crowd member who identifies I Don’t Believe You doesn’t sound angry at its new incarnation (it’s likely Dylan has already introduced it). Baby, Let Me Follow You Down sounds thunderous. In your face, for sure; but he’s not waging war on the audience yet: there’s no need. Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat is deliberately introduced in later shows with an air of "You're gonna hate this, and I don't care" but here the crowd has no audible problem with it at all. The closing lines even get laughs and applause. A verse and a bit into One Too Many Mornings and the tape runs out. Pity: this sounds like a great night.


Between this and the next surviving recorded show - about six weeks later - Dylan plays in Florida, Missouri, Nebraska, California, Oregon, Washington and Canada. In Hawaii, in April, drummer Mickey Jones replaces Sandy Konikoff for the rest of the tour. Dylan and the new incarnation of The Hawks then head for Australia; from that point it becomes the 1966 World Tour. And a different beast entirely.

 

8:15pm, Wednesday 13th April, 1966. Sydney Stadium (demolished), Sydney, Australia.



Here, in many ways (particularly if you're following Columbia/Sony's CD numbering), it all begins. Suddenly Dylan's playing in a venue about two or three times the size of those previous three shows (further information on the venues, and lots more, can be found here: Bob Dylan: The 1966 Live Recordings - Sony 36-CD box-set - November 11 ). It’s the first soundboard recording, immediately raising it from the furtive, amateurish audience tapes (his voice and harmonica are a bit high in the mix of the electric set, but you can't have everything); the first time we have virtually a complete show; the first time the tour has left the USA. Blonde On Blonde was in the can, to be released in the summer of 1966 (no one can agree on the date. Some insist that it's May 16th 1966 - the same day as Pet Sounds, and the day Dylan played Sheffield - but a persuasive case has been made that no one outside Dylan's circle heard it until early July: over a month after this tour finished. See When was Blonde on Blonde released? Nobody knows. ).


This Sydney concert - the first show during a ten day, five city Australian stint - bears many of the hallmarks of what we come to associate with this tour. Dylan's '66 voice is fully established, although nowhere near as unhinged as it would get over the next six weeks (45 days, in fact. That's all there is between this show and the burnt-out, bilious stoned ramblings of the final Albert Hall show. The schedule, and how Dylan and The Hawks got through it and played such consistently incandescent music, is nothing short of mind-boggling. But more of that later).


My first thought at this show is that they're all probably mildly jetlagged (for example, compare the weary fluidity of It's All Over Now, Baby Blue to other performances on the tour): it's only been four days since the show in Honolulu (where Mickey Jones joined them for the first time) and one day since they landed in Australia (Mickey Jones speaks of a 14 hour flight from Hawaii to Sydney, and of Garth Hudson sleeping for the entire journey). Had any of them experienced this before? Travelling huge distances and then performing? We take it for granted in the established world of jet-setting rock tours and enormodomes. But this is only 1966. These are men largely in their early twenties: Garth Hudson was probably an old man to the rest of them, at 28. They are neither hardened rock stars, nor living in a world where such a thing even exists.


Sydney Stadium (Mickey Jones: “a huge boxing arena”) had a revolving stage: a nice idea, in principle, for a show in the round; meaning that all the audience get a better chance of a decent view at some point. But, in terms of maintaining the momentum of a rock concert, it's a very strange concept indeed. It explains his comments after the first song ("...Uh...I'm gonna move everybody over there a little bit, so...I guess you (say) wait...do you have to wait 'till it gets there...?"). Perhaps there is no better metaphor for this whole experience than placing Dylan on a surreal sort of merry-go-round, manually cranked round at regular intervals like a Victorian freak show.


The songs in the acoustic set are crystal clear. (The) 4th Time Around and Visions Of Johanna (no longer Freeze Out) are both introduced by their actual names - no mules, no porcupines, no Shakespearean joke titles. The musicianship, too, is solid. There's a rigid metre to Dylan's playing which would be almost completely abandoned by late May.


No introduction, but another new song: Just Like A Woman, recorded in Nashville the previous month. More applause for Mr. Tambourine Man. "See you in fifteen minutes", Dylan tells his audience at the interval.


Thanks to the recording quality, this is the first time we can hear Tell Me, Momma properly. It's still a sort of work in progress; rhymes that don't fit and a very different second verse from the version that we come to know.


"This is called 'I Don't Believe You'. It used to go/be like that: now it goes like this" is something that Dylan says at pretty much every concert we have a recording of from now on - perhaps even at the ones before this. Right now it's a stately, bold reinvention: it will become a bile-drenched **** you anthem of betrayal, spat out at an audience who have similarly rejected their idol. The angered bewilderment of "Something has changed/She just ain't the same" will come to chime perfectly with the disillusioned Sheffield fan in No Direction Home who bemoans "He's changed from what he was..."


There's whistling, shouting, laughing and polite applause from this audience. It's difficult to conclude anything that you'd want to generalise about. The band sound like they haven't quite agreed with Dylan on how to start Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat; but once it's up and running, there's no doubt involved. The Hawks could play a blues to a tough crowd in their sleep.


"'Hard Rain'" some guy insistently shouts out throughout the set. No chance. And just imagine if Dylan had taken an axe to any of his great protest anthems on this tour: if he'd given this treatment to anything from 'Freewheelin''. As much as they're not wild about the new songs, one senses that the earliest, strongest objections are to the delicate love songs that Dylan recasts in this brand new, electric onslaught.


This is the first time in this set that we hear Ballad Of A Thin Man. It's arguably the song that Dylan uses above all others as the great finger of confrontation to the audience. It becomes that later, obviously. But the very fact that he chose to add it to the set is evidence that he's ready for a fight. I love the way that he makes "well-read" sound like "well rid".


(There isn't much that dates this music. An exception is, in 2017, the incongruity of being told that "you should be made to be carrying, at all times, a telephone". No one could know how prescient a line that was.)


In fact, in this part of the set, it's put-down songs from here onwards. Something is happening, you wish you knew what it was; you got a lot of nerve; how does it feel to be on your own? From here on, Dylan's either ready for a fight or looking for one. Which sort of amount to the same thing.


The 'Hard Rain' guy tries his luck again. He won't take no for an answer.


"Hard rain/Feel no pain/I'll be coming back tomorrow again. Is that all right (with you)...?" Dylan replies.


Dylan was scheduled to play the same venue not the next day; three days later, on Saturday 16th. With a 1000 mile-plus round trip to Brisbane in between.


The next stop for us is six days later, in Melbourne.

 

Wow....great stuff. ^^^^^

Like....go get my box out & listen to these shows with fresh ears from the perspective of these reviews kind of stuff.

Thank you

*Noted - dang, lots of now "demolished" venues.

 

I really appreciate the reviews for the audience tapes. A few words have been said about them in this thread but not enough. Thanks, Somebody. And thanks for the visual aids. Do keep them coming. We want you to feel at home here.

 

Got the big box will que up the first 5 shows tonight. Cds # 32---36

 

Well done, your review leads me to give these audience recordings a second chance

 

This was already the best thread I've ever followed on the forum, I can't believe it just got better!

 

Perfect.

I've been thinking that this thread is the best music book I've ever read, and here we are on page 260 with things heating up again! Thanks so much for playing along here, @Somebody Naked. Spectacular stuff!