Bob Dylan Live 1965 (USA tour)

I think this show is included on the recent fab gear PD release over here. CD 5 if I'm not mistaken:-

 

Not the worst idea!

Also, when are you gonna publish a book?

 

Is the local art department gonna make some covers for these concerts?

 

I emailed Greil Marcus, via his website, regarding the Berkeley show(s):-

I believe you attended one or both of Bob Dylan’s shows at the Berkeley Community Center in early December 1965. (I’ve been unable to track down my written source for this belief among my bookshelves, but I know it’s there somewhere.) It has recently been determined that the circulating electric set normally attributed to an Allen Ginsberg recording at Berkeley on 04 December is in fact the electric set performed at San Jose on 12 December which is currently archived in the digitised Ginsberg collection held at the Stanford Libraries, along with the acoustic set from that night and the complete concert from San Francisco on the previous evening. I wonder if you would be kind enough to share your recollections of the show(s) on that/those nights at Berkeley, one of which apparently included the live premiere of “Visions of Johanna” in the acoustic half, and which marked the live Hawks debut of Bobby Gregg on drums. Do you recall seeing Allen Ginsberg in the audience, and was he taping the show?

Ginsberg swept into the hall with a retinue of Hell’s Angels and sat with them in the front row. Whether he was taping I can’t say. During “It Ain’t Me Babe” I saw the roof lift off the building and open it to the stars in the sky. It’s the only time in my life I’ve hallucinated. I couldn’t remember anything else about the performance of the song, and didn’t understand why what happened happened until I heard the bootleg of the show and realized it was all Robbie Robertson.


Ask Greil (current)


I'm very pleased he replied, of course, but was slightly disappointed that my question apparently wasn't fully comprehended. However, some conclusions can be drawn.

1. Ginsberg did attend one or both of the Berkeley shows with his pals and so at least did have the opportunity to record a show, perhaps with his old tape recorder. (The backstage conversation at San Francisco still, I believe, indicates strongly that he didn't record Berkeley.)

2. The Berkeley show(s) on 03 and 04 December, or the electric set(s) specifically, were not significantly different to the one at San Jose on 12 December or Greil might have smelled a rat when he listened to the "Berkeley" bootleg, which is surely the one he is referencing in his answer.

3. From conclusion 2 above, we might further extrapolate that the same drummer, Bobby Gregg, played at Berkeley and San Jose.


Perhaps someone else would like to follow up with a more specifically targeted question for Greil, like "Did you know that when you were listening to the Berkeley bootleg it was actually San Jose?"

#

 

On the at 1:45 of the “Backstage conversation” track, Dylan talks to somebody (he calls him “Dick”, but the guy answers back in Rick Danko’s distinctive voice) about problems with the new drummer and “trying to explain the music to him”. Bobby Gregg was the drummer on the album versions of 5 of the songs they played in that set, so I don’t think he needed explaining to. I think the new drummer must be Sandy Konikoff… or a third unknown drummer… on the grassy knoll...

 

Maggie May, of course.

 

Crazy to hear the intro of If Not For You during this SF show, five years until it was a finished song

Anyone know where to find lossless? Doesn't seem against the rules to ask as this is now a non copyright protected recording, yes?

 

See Post #101.

 

Hmm are you pointing to how he plays the intro to "Love Minus Zero / No Limit"? You're right, it's both the intro for "If Not for You" and also just an expansion of the main riff from the "Love Minus Zero" verse. I'm sure I've heard him use that particular intro for "Love Minus Zero" elsewhere, but I can't find an example off hand. Good ears!

 

Found it! Concert for Bangladesh in 1971. Obviously "If Not for You" existed by then too, and that song had the Harrison connection. I wonder if it's possible that those songs are somehow connected in Bob's head.

 

The first time I heard Love Minus Zero was from the Concert For Bangla Desh CD, where Harrison plays the If Not For You line. I've wondered if that was George's contribution to the song. After all, he was there for the first studio recording of it. And of all the 1970 versions, that original is where the lick is most prominent. I feel like the New Morning version is almost a throwaway. It's like he let George take the glory for the song. Of course, if Bob had gone with the piano version, that'd be different.

But, back to your point, the Bangla Desh version of Love Minus Zero is very much infused with If Not For You.

EDIT: wrote that before you posted!!! Of course, Bob and George rehearsed If Not For You for Bangla Desh as a duet, so clearly it was on their mind at the time.

 

Yes, I hear it, coming hot on the heels of Bob telling AG for the first time, "Hey, we got a new drummer tonight", and I can make out most of it. Do either of them specifically say "drummer" in any of this exchange about trying to explain the music to this "cat"? It's at times like these I envy people with good hearing.

So, are we back to Bobby Gregg at Berkeley and Sandy/A.N. Other at San Francisco and San Jose?

 

That's where I'm at. So unfortunately we have no recordings of Bobby Gregg playing in concert with Dylan. I've been listening to a comparison of the San Jose and Pittsburgh versions of "Positively" and "Rolling Stone", it's hard to tell because of the sound quality, but to my ears it could be the same drummer, Konikoff. The only thing to compare for Bobby Gregg are the studio versions, and they sound quite different. though he could have changed it up in concert.

 

Well that sure is something!

 

Can't see the image...just "

 

IMG_4635 — Postimage.org

 

unusual place to put a microphone

 

Iggy Pop disagrees

 

I agree that "Dick" (who I first thought might have been Richard Farina) must be Rick Danko, judging by his voice, as you say. But was he ever known as "Dick Danko"?? During the Freeze-Out recording session two weeks earlier in NYC, Dylan seemed to still be trying to get the Hawks' names straight ("OK, go ahead, do it...Richard, er, Rick why don't you start it...") but I can't understand why he would call him Dick instead of Rick.

Overall, it does seem like Dylan is trying to get Danko to take their "new" drummer aside and work with him on song arrangements. They had played with Bobby Gregg before in the studio (during the aforementioned Freeze-Out session on Nov. 30th, and Dylan had been using him since BIABH in Jan. '65) so that makes me wonder if it could have been an "unknown drummer on the grassy knoll" (geez, what a great line ), otherwise they probably would have just called him "Bobby."

Still, to my ears, it does sound like Bobby G. on most of the songs (especially LARS), not Sandy Konikoff. So I'm sticking with that opinion for now, but I'm open to other possibilities.

Thanks for that, but my system is still blocking that site. My internet provider, Bumcast, keeps adding more layers of so-called security, and a lot of the images on the SHF are coming up blank for me now. I tried Firefox, IE, and Chrome -- no dice. Frustrating, these dreadful first-world problems of ours, but *we shall overcome someday* .

 

He had to rearrange their faces and give them all another name.

 

Unheard Bob Dylan Show Recordings Made by Allen Ginsberg Just Surfaced Online

"In a career as thoroughly observed, documented, and analyzed as Bob Dylan’s, the emergence of any previously unseen or unheard material is big news. If that material comes from one of Dylan’s prime creative eras–the 1965-66 tour, say, during which the legendary songwriter hired a fire-breathing backing band to help him “go electric” for the first time–the news is even bigger. And if the material happened to be captured by another artist whose legend is on par with Dylan’s–one of the most celebrated American poets of the last century, for instance–you’re looking at a bona-fide historical artifact, whose resonance should extend far beyond the cult of fanatics who make up the general audience for Dylan ephemera.

That’s exactly what we got last week, when, with little fanfare, two recordings with nearly identical titles appeared on YouTube. With some interruptions, they document two Dylan shows from 1965, near the beginning of that fateful tour: one in San Francisco on September 11, 1965, and the other in San Jose from the following evening. As you might expect, the performances are enough to knock you out, but the sound quality is up and down. If you’re one of the aforementioned fanatics, you’ll find a lot to love; if your fandom more casual, you’re probably better of listening to one of the much clearer tapes from the same era that have been released commercially.

But anyone with an interest in the American culture of the ’60s will be fascinated with what comes before and after the music. The bootleg taper we have to thank for these recordings is Allen Ginsberg. He and Dylan had been friends for a couple of years already in ’65, and he was testing out a new piece of equipment at the shows, with Dylan’s personal permission. We know the part about Dylan’s permission is true because we can hear the musician giving it, as part of a 20-minute backstage conversation between the two icons that’s preserved at the beginning of the first tape.

The first tape opens with Ginsberg’s bookish Manhattan patter, describing the “absolute, beautiful precision” of his tape recorder, which, he says, he recently purchased for $500. “I don’t know why the f**k I don’t get one of those,” Dylan muses, and then he has an idea: “Hey, why don’t you tape some of the concert?” Dylan says he’s interesting in hearing how the band sounds that night, and Ginsberg offers to give him a copy of the tape when the show is over.

If it weren’t for the fact that their circle of acquaintances included several fellow giants of the era, the ensuing conversation might come off like mundane gossip. Dylan says he recently had a long and pleasant conversation with Marlon Brando, about whom he has apparently mixed feelings. “He thinks about the universe, like you,” he tells Ginsberg, then pivots: “He’s just a very plain, simple, common, ordinary, Nebraska cat. Really that is all he amounts to.” Later, Dylan mentions offhandedly that he talked to Phil Spector about making a record with Ginsberg. The titanic pop producer and the iconoclastic poet would have made exquisitely strange bedfellows. Unfortunately, we’ll never know what the collaboration would have yielded, because it never came to pass.

At the beginning of the second recording, Ginsberg speaks with a fan who apparently recognized him outside of the San Jose show. “Allen Ginsberg…is Joan Baez here tonight?” the young fan asks. (She isn’t.) Between Dylan’s two sets–one acoustic, one electric, as was his standard operating procedure in this era–he and Ginsberg resume the previous night’s conversation. For a moment, they engage in elliptical banter about the crowd at the previous night’s San Fransisco show, sounding a bit like caricatures of their own hipster-mystic public personas. “What you see now is a typical concert. Last night, you saw one that was, y’know, pretty wild. I dug it. San Francisco. I dug… I sort of felt who they were out there,” Dylan raps as he prepares for the raucous second set, which at times unfolded like trench warfare between the artist and an audience that refused to let go of their earnest folk singer. “Who do you feel they are?” Ginsberg asks. You can hear someone tuning a guitar in the background. “I have no idea, none whatsoever,” Dylan answers.

The Ginsberg tapes evidently came from the Stanford University library’s department of special collections, which administers a large archive of the poet’s papers. The library publicized the existence of the recordings in a blog post in 2015, accurately touting them as documents of “a transformational time in Dylan’s performances.” Though the library has digitized over 2,000 recordings from the Ginsberg papers, the Dylan shows still aren’t officially available online–until last week, you had to physically travel to the library to hear them. The new YouTube videos mark the first time the tapes have become available for the wide listening public.

Keith Gubitz, the California-based Dylan collector who uploaded the videos, says that he’s seen his hero play live about “a few hundred times” since first hearing “Blowin’ in the Wind” as an eight-year-old in 1962. He told SPIN that word about Ginsberg tapes began circulating online amongst a community of fellow Dylan enthusiasts in July, but he’s not sure exactly how they made it out from Stanford’s listening room.

“In ’89, I met a guy that was following the Bob tour. He basically was a Deadhead, and saw Bob and decided to switch tracks,” he said, describing his own entry into the world of Dylan tapers and traders. “I met him in line when I was trying to buy tickets, and we hooked up and started following Bob together. We would stay in hotels and dub the tapes right after the show.”

Gubitz isn’t a taper anymore, but he maintains a large collection of other people’s Dylan show recordings on YouTube. He says he’s occasionally run into problems with YouTube pulling his videos down, but it doesn’t happen frequently, and he’s not worried about anything happening to the Ginsberg tapes. You might consider listening to them sooner rather than later, however, just in case they disappear."

 

Obviously the reviewer has messed up with the dates here. On September 11 and 12 Bob was probably rehearsing with The Hawks in New York State.

 

September?

EDIT: I see @Percy Song beat me to it!

 

Those "mind-reading" Internet advertisement selection programs are working overtime on my computer this morning, apparently: