Bob Dylan Live 1965 (USA tour)

That makes sense and would account for the lack of mic jostling, although I'm not sure if this has a stage-mic sound. It does sound like he's near a PA....and I don't think Allen would leave a $500 machine unattended!

There are accounts of Ginsberg in regard to these shows in various books, etc. This is making me want to review it all. I read somewhere about AG sort of annoying Joan Baez with hints that Bob may have a new song about her, during this time when "Johanna" was a mysterious unrecorded "new" song.

Seems like Berkeley should have been recorded. From SF it was certainly easier to get to Berkeley than San Jose. Not that those Beat guys minded a little driving, ha ha.

 

Also, this SF "Rolling Stone" is unique one. Not sure I've heard such a rapid-fire rap-delivery.
..and indeed the total track time is shorter than most LARS.

Of course, there's probably other fast 1965/66 versions, but this one is playing NOW so it's KING

 

Ginsberg thought enough of the San Jose "LARS" that he indexed it on the tape box!

 

I was surprised by that, as well. And only a few minor coughs and distracting crowd noises.

I mentioned to someone earlier that I did a little a digging online, and I think the "Meltzer" that Allen mentions in the backstage tapes, the one who he says is now playing a banjo in a bluegrass band, is probably David Meltzer, who was completely unfamiliar to me.
SEE: Serpent Power | Biography & History | AllMusic

Also, Allen mentions he spent "$30" on a "Fender" -- I think he's telling Dylan that he bought a Fender amp for his electric guitar, which Dylan asks him about, wanting to know if he had the "peg" (tuning peg) on it fixed yet. I never realized that Ginsberg played guitar. Elsewhere, Dylan says that he spoke with Phil Spector, and that Spector was interested in producing an album by Allen...now that would have been something.

All of the songs from the two shows haven't quite sunk in yet, but these precious recordings -- which seemed to suddenly rise from obscurity and near-oblivion -- are certainly missing links in the documentation of Dylan '65-'66 live shows. I do hope that they get officially released, whether under full copyright-protection or not.

 

As I take this all in, I have to ask: are there any images of the tapes online? Or just this:


Plenty of other Dylan stuff in the archives, most of it not playable online (and then, much of it released anyway). There is a tape of outtakes, which from a cursory listen doesn't contain anything uncirculating (in fact this tape could be the source of the bootlegs?) but it seems the Oh Baby For You track is properly known as Sacred Cow.

 

Good catch on Meltzer, there were some cool things to unpack in those conversations. Nice to hear Bob so candid. I think his comment about the tape recorder would make a great title for this collection: "I don't know why the **** I don't get one of those."

I was surprised that Ginsberg hadn't heard of Phil Spector, made me wonder if he had quickly name-dropped Spector in any published work. Not sure about that, but I see he recorded a conversation with Lenny Bruce and Spector less than two months later, down in that awful place Bob found to be such a drag, Los Angeles. (Nothing's really happening there")

Conversation Lenny Bruce, Allen Ginsberg, Phil Spector at Bruce's home January 25, 1966 (not a download, just an abstract of the tape contents)

 

A few pages back, there was some discussion about the way that Ginsberg seemingly played back some music for Dylan on the same tape deck he was using to record their "interview." I'm a little rusty in this realm, but I'll give it a shot.

I have a stereo reel-to-reel deck, and years ago someone gave me a box of old tapes they'd gotten from a deceased relative. All the tapes -- mono only -- were from the 1950s, and many of them featured audio captured from TV programs (I was told that people used alligator clips attached to the speaker wires, since TVs had no in/out jacks back then.) There were also several blank tapes and empty reels. The image below is a tape box containing a vintage 5-inch reel. It's older, but the same size and general type that Ginsberg may have used, if the Uher brand recorder was the machine he recorded Dylan with. Note the single track/dual track references, and those crazy-long recording times. A theory: Ginsberg already had two separate channels of music recorded, each in "half track" mono, on the tape, and he was recording over some of it for his Dylan interview (Dylan monologue, to some extent) on one channel only. The brief snippet of music we hear on the tape is the only remnant left after Ginsberg switched tracks again, went from "play" to "record," and resumed his talk with Dylan. Any takers on that?



[FOOTNOTE: One of the TV audio reels was from a 1957 Ed Sullivan Show, the broadcast that featured Buddy Holly singing Peggy Sue, IIRC, but our intrepid taper chopped off many of the segments of that show, and didn't capture Buddy's performance. Grrrr. One of the reels does have "Sam Cook"(sic) singing I Love You For Sentimental Reasons on the Sullivan show, but I think the beginning and end were both missing.]

 

So here's my main question: disregarding the mislabeling, how did San Jose 2nd half get circulated and not 1st half?

 

Is that Bob himself playing the tapes for you?

 

Really enjoyed reading this!! Great stuff

 

Yes, short of playing a different tape, on a different machine, and recording THAT for all of 10 seconds, Ginsberg has to be playing a small bit of what he is choosing to record over. Luckily for him there was music in that very spot (music he didn't care to preserve any longer, clearly). Which raises the scary question - what if Ginsberg did tape Berkeley as Pickering attests (on his old machine) and thought so little of the quality that he simply taped over it?

 

"So tell me more about this new drummer."

 

That is a great question, along with how does it get mis-labeled. Did the bootleggers just pull a date out of their rears?

 

Good call, HR! Yes, it sounds logical and it also coincides with the sudden and abrupt appearance of Garth giving it big welly on the organ at the soundcheck/rehearsal in the background.

Has anyone identified the band, yet? Sounds West-Coast to me.

 

"The only thing I know for sure is that his name is not Henry Porter."

 

Standard practice to slap a more saleable title on a bootleg: "Berkeley" has more cachet than "San Jose", just as "Royal Albert Hall" sounds better than "Manchester".

 

This is the clincher that it's San Francisco. Good to know that someone has good hearing, good headphones, or both!

Of course, it had been recorded and he stated as such, I think, in the KQED-TV Press Conference. Maybe by 11 December he already knew that the New York recordings were not exactly what he wanted for the new album.

 

December 3, 1965 Dylan S. F. press conference:
What happens if they have to cut a song in half like "Subterranean Homesick Blues"?
They didn't have to cut that in half.
They didn't have to but they did.
No they didn't.
Yeah?
No. You're talking about "Like A Rolling Stone."
Oh, yeah.
They cut it in half for the disc jockeys. Well, you see, it didn't matter for the disc jockeys if they had it cut in half because the other side was just a continuation on the other side and if anybody was interested they could just turn it over and listen to what really happens, you know. We just made a song the other day which came out ten minutes long, and I thought of releasing it as a single but they would have easily released it and just cut it up but it wouldn't have worked that way so we're not going to turn it out as a single. It's called "Freeze Out." you'll hear it on the next album.

 

Not so sure about that in this case. I purchased it new back in the day, it had gaps between each song like it was burned without using Disc at Once option, but that show had Long Distance Operator live, something most of us didn't know happened, and it sounded pretty good for a 1965 audience recording, so it could have been entitled "Live In Waco Texas" and it would have sold.

 

Oh, how I wish they'd kept playing Tombstone Blues through the '66 run. Fire!

 

It's legitimately amazing. It shines so much more on this newly emerged tape. Don't think I realized it's full impact before (which might just be a failure of imagination on my part). Also, the one-two punch of P4S and LARS is staggering. I regret that disappeared as the tour continued.

 

I bought "Long Distance Operator" on Wanted Man which was the first CD to come out. It was a rare case of a bootleg record coming out before the tape had circulated with traders, so that was the opportunity for the bootlegger to call it anything they wanted. Berkeley in 1965 has so much more historic mystique than Waco or San Jose.

 

For me, it was UK city names that had a "mystique." For a US show, can't say I cared if it was Accident, MD or Cut And Shoot, TX. Mostly it was their proximity to Minneapolis that mattered.

 

... which reminds me: many years ago a woman on Ebay was offering an amateur film of Dylan playing Minneapolis November 5, 1965. It was silent and only a few minutes long, but very closeup, she claimed. She couldn't provide any sample or stills. Her reserve was $500 and she got no bids. Anybody remember that or know of what might have become of the film?

 

You're killing me (alive) here.