Johnny Cash at San Quentin would be one example. The Legacy edition includes the full concert, including performances by Carl Perkins, the Statler Brothers and The Carter Family.
It is legit, the bonus discs offered to buyers of the Deluxe Box Set at Dylan.com. To this point in time, the San Diego set is not available anywhere else other than Dylan's website, and only to purchasers of that Deluxe box at full bust-out retail of $175....whether that will change in time and the San Diego discs get a subsequent separate release is anyone's guess.
This is the key point getting lost in all the back and forth about the pruning. Unbelievably great live Dylan, period, essential. SO glad I went for the big set with the bonus release option. I just put the first disc on intending to listen to a track or two, as a taster for more extensive listening later tonight, and now I'm five tracks in and can't make myself turn it off even though I need to get going on some errands. Riveting. About the discussion about the advisability (or not) of pruning off the sermons and audience reactions - though it'll probably never happen, wouldn't it be kinda neat if they made available an even bigger, limited run set of this period that did have everything, every last fire and brimstone word and audience negative reaction? Like they did with the Cutting Edge Collector's Edition having all the breakdowns and additional takes not in the 6 disc version? I for one would be all over it, and I'm just about the least religious person you could hope to find. I just think it would be fascinating to hear and shed further light on the man's legacy, since I more or less completely slept on this period of Dylan until now.
There's a narrative around his Bobness that he has always done what he wanted regardless of conventional wisdom, cultural and social "norms", etc. In my assessment, he is happy with that perception and perpetuates it. The 1965-66/"Judas"/electric stuff fits squarely into this mythos, as does the Basement stuff (woodshedding playing roots music while the rest of the world was going psychedelic). The gospel stuff does as well, but the current cultural climate regards those other examples as precient and heroic, while it regards the overt Christian-ness of this period as off-putting. Which is why "sanitizing" it because it doesn't resonate with today's cultural tastes is lame and hypocritical, in my opinion. Not to mention the OPs point, that you lose something from a strictly artistic perspective by eradicating the context surrounding the music.
I can see that some here see a special intensity to some of the backlash against Bob's themes (I agree!) and I can see that some here want to blame this on a broad cultural antipathy to Christianity in general. This, I think, goes too far. What I'm hearing from plenty of thoughtful posters is that it's a specific variety of Christianity, or a specific attitude that Bob adopts within his Christian themes, that listeners find off-putting in some or all of Bob's music of this period -- a Christianity of doom, apocalypse, and judgment (God's judgment, but also Bob's rather unsympathetic judgment about his listeners). It is easy to imagine (and more plausible to suppose, really) that secular listeners who find Bob himself off-putting in this period also recognize a huge range of appealing music from elsewhere in the explicitly religious music tradition. Anyway, I think it's a distinction worth making -- and maybe also a distinction that nudges us back closer to the norms of this excellent forum: not Christianity in general as a factor in the reception of Bob's music, but Bob's specific relation to the Christian themes in his music and how that might be a factor in how Bob's music is received. Let's not suppose that people in the big bad world are out to get one religion or another.
If someone could do it, it wouldn't be a bad idea to upload the talking that was omitted from the set (including whatever there is from San Diego) so people could add it themselves.
My preference would be to have the sermons but even without them, this set is amazing. One of the nice things about not having every bootleg ever.
It is possible that Bob Dylan requested the preaching be pared down for the Bootleg Series releases and bonus live set. It may have been a compromise; the music could be released, but the preaching had to be restricted (perhaps because Bob Dylan no longer has those same religious philosophical views).
I find it very hard to believe that Dylan himself would cut the speeches from this release. Knowing PC sensibilities in the corporate world and how Sony operates as a company, it was almost certainly their call to "sanitize" the concerts for 2017 listeners. Dylan's Gospel years were controversial in the 1970s. In today's media environment, it would be a bloodbath on social media as the entertainment world has only gotten more hostile over the years to organized religion and specifically Christianity. I'm not saying it was the wrong call in business terms, but it smacks of being a business decision protecting Dylan's image with younger listeners than anything else.
And Dylan would like to continue to do private corporate shows for big bux. Who needs preaching when you have these kinds of bookings to fill!
i'm guessing that's because his belief has evolved over the years... and he perhaps now views those sermons as rather naivete. i don't mean to imply that he lost his faith...instead rather developed or improved without the trappings of organized religion.
I don't know the reasons, and I'm reluctant to speculate. I have nothing to contribute to the what-if and maybe back-and-forth. Evidently God and religion frighten the decision-makers, whoever they are, so they cut the pure gospel chorus, the gospel singer's solo in the middle, and Dylan's pleading to the audience between songs. This is an essential Dylan concert. All the concerts in the box-set are essential, but the 1979 stuff was the hottest. Even with the censoring, San Diego '79 is an awesome concert from a two-week period of awesome concerts within an inspired life-changing two-month tour. Dylan would pick up where he left off the following year but the red alert, speeding ambulance, watch-your-back, hellhound-catching-up-with-me urgency was in November and December '79. In my work I recognize when an actor is feeling his or "business" as we say. Acting is an emotional process, and so is singing. Dylan is totally in his emotional moment, feeling his message and driven by it. Danger is imminent, an abyss has opened under his feet that's spreading everywhere, and he's sounding the alarm, only the threat is spiritual instead of political. Everywhere he looks people are diseased and possessed, and he includes himself. There's a war against the spirit that's turning his loved ones into puppets and he and his band are fighting back. I mean, just listen to the language he's using in the these songs. It provokes reactions in people more than profanity could. That's quite deliberate. Dylan is sounding the alarm, only instead of politics, it's "war against the spirit." I enjoy the concert on this basis, on the basis of performance, not because it's religious although I'm okay with that.
Several years ago I bought 24 photos from this concert on ebay. Having trouble finding them now, but when I do I'll post them here.
As someone who has never heard any bootlegs from the '79 tour could I ask: 1. How much sermonizing featured in any one concert? 2. There has been some people suggesting that the sermons were cut because some of them wouldn't sit well in the current climate. So how many of the sermons would now be considered offensive?
There's no set rule, and every show was different in terms of how much sermonizing, where it would come and how long it would last. He was consistent in the sermon before Solid Rock. In a way the sermon was part of the song. He wanted everybody to understand what the song means, what the risks are and how to get through the ordeal. So he would speak to the audience. It is up to an individual to decide if they are offended or not. Personally, I wasn't offended by anything he said. The gospel singers who fronted the concert created a sense of theater for Dylan to step into, and man, did he put on a show. All I can say, reading this thread and the main thread from which I am permanently barred, nothing has changed. We're back in 1979, having the same arguments and debates and still not discussing the music, the instrumentation, the intent of this band. I appreciate this post 7453 from new member Mark Payne in particular: "I saw Dylan on his gospel tour in Akron Ohio on May 18th 1980 and it was one of the best shows I have ever seen, it was like a "Old Fashioned Revival Camp Meeting", the band was rocking, the back up singers added a Pentecostal flavor to the concert, it was like you could smell the sawdust from a tent meeting. The passion and conviction he sung with made you realize, he truly had a "born again" experience. As a believer myself, I was excited to hear the songs live after hearing the Slow Train Coming album the previous year. Nothing came close in gospel music to Bob Dylan as a songwriter, the songs were direct, while Contemporary Christian music of that time was trying to lean toward secular music, Dylan was getting away from the secular and was aiming toward the original black church, the blues, Americana, you can tell he was tapping into the roots of gospel music, which as you know, influenced everything else. I remember feeling the tension as he refused to perform the hits, you could cut it with a knife, some people were yelling for the songs from the audience and he responded with: "All right, well, others do these songs for you. I know a lot of country and western people they do that. They sing ah, sing ah, what is it? “You can put your shoes into my bed anytime”. And then they turn around and sing “Oh Lord, just a closer walk with thee”. Well, I can’t do that, That’s right, you cannot serve two masters. You gotta hate one and love the other. You can’t drink out of two cups". I could not believed what I had just witnessed, he had no problem with the tension, the cat calls or the struggle, his singing was impassioned and he was determined to get out his message. My take on the box set, it is very good, some of it is stunning in how good it is, but there were missed opportunities, I am not a big fan of the sermons in the DVD and I feel it hurts the pacing of the DVD, Dylan's performance was so much better in the recently upgraded Toronto video circulating on the internet, why wasn't that considered for this box? He looked uncomfortable in parts of the "Trouble No More" DVD, like the camera man was too close to his face and it bothered him, I know the footage wasn't as clear or as close in the Toronto performance, but it was fantastic!!!"