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A Massive Review of Dylan 1966 Live Recordings

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*thwack*

That is the sound of a gauntlet being thrown to the floor. I would ask any fellow nutcases to join me in reviewing individual nights from the 36 CD box set. Don’t cheat and do Manchester. I’ll kick us off with Paris 24th May 1966 (CDs 26&27)

There are a few reasons why I picked to listen to this show first. Not only because it’s one that hasn’t escaped in any form before now but cos it was played on his 25th birthday after a week of being battered by British audiences. With a whirlwind of boos and catcalls following him across the channel, performing this show in front of a 50ft Stars and Stripes flag may have been asking for trouble.

Listening to the show is fascinating as it appears that the acoustic set is where all the drama happens for a change. Dylan appears to have walked onstage with a guitar which is out of tune and spends a good section of the set retuning it. First he deals with this with sardonic humour – “my electric guitar never goes out of tune” but then as the audience start getting restless and heckling he loses his cool.

“Hey man, I’m doing this for you” he snaps “I don’t actually care, I can play it like this if you want it. Just enjoy watching this or go to the bowling alley”. Myth has led us to believe that the guitar tuning was Bob playing games with his audience to rile them into reaction or test their faith. Yet on this evidence he is genuinely annoyed even asking if anyone has a guitar he can borrow at one point. “II want to get out of here just as much as you” is perhaps how he feels about the tour by now.

However the electric set is probably better received than anywhere else on the tour it seems. Due to tape changing we often lose the in between song drama but the enthusiastic applause and foot stamping at the end of the set suggests a splendid time was had. This is one of the mono soundboard feeds that make up the box and although technical flaws are apparent – like the mic popping during the acoustic set on certain phrases – its riveting stuff.

7

Comments

  3. An interesting/amusing aside.
    At the North Sea Radio Orchestra gig at the Union Chapel, Saturday lunchtime, the guitarist/composer announced that for the next song they needed a drum machine, which he was going to supply via an app on his phone. Apparently, at a previous gig in Camden, somebody had shouted “Judas!” at this point.

  7. I am still on the fence about buying this. My pre-order (from amazon france) has not shipped yet. However, should I decide not to cancel then I will review the Cardiff one which my parents neglectfully didn’t take me to …

  10. I love this clip from the previous UK tour in 1965.

    Dylan meets some fans outside the Sheffield City Hall. The juxtaposition of Bob’s impossibly hip American drawl with the gormless Sheffield accents of the fans is simultaneously fascinating and toe-curlingly embarrassing.

  11. For those thinking of selecting concerts ; here they all are:

    Disc 1 – Sydney, April 13, 1966 (Soundboard recorded by TCN 9 TV Australia)
    Disc 2 – Sydney, April 13, 1966 (Soundboard recorded by TCN 9 TV Australia)
    Disc 3 – Melbourne, April 20, 1966 (Soundboard / unknown broadcast)
    Disc 4 – Copenhagen, May 1, 1966 (Soundboard)
    Disc 5 – Dublin, May 5, 1966 (Soundboard)
    Disc 6 – Dublin, May 5, 1966 (Soundboard)
    Disc 7 – Belfast, May 6, 1966 (Soundboard)
    Disc 8 – Belfast, May 6, 1966 (Soundboard)
    Disc 9 – Bristol, May 10, 1966 (Soundboard / audience)
    Disc 10 – Bristol, May 10, 1966 (Soundboard)
    Disc 11 – Cardiff, May 11, 1966 (Soundboard)
    Disc 12 – Birmingham, May 12, 1966 (Soundboard)
    Disc 13 – Birmingham, May 12, 1966 (Soundboard)
    Disc 14 – Liverpool, May 14, 1966 (Soundboard)
    Disc 15 – Leicester, May 15, 1966 (Soundboard)
    Disc 16 – Leicester, May 15, 1966 (Soundboard)
    Disc 17 – Sheffield, May 16, 1966 (CBS Records recording)
    Disc 18 – Sheffield, May 16, 1966 (Soundboard)
    Disc 19 – Manchester, May 17, 1966 (CBS Records recording)
    Disc 20 – Manchester, May 17, 1966 (CBS Records recording except Soundcheck / Soundboard)
    Disc 21 – Glasgow, May 19, 1966 (Soundboard)
    Disc 22 – Edinburgh, May 20, 1966 (Soundboard)
    Disc 23 – Edinburgh, May 20, 1966 (Soundboard)
    Disc 24 – Newcastle, May 21, 1966 (Soundboard)
    Disc 25 – Newcastle, May 21, 1966 (Soundboard)
    Disc 26 – Paris, May 24, 1966 (Soundboard)
    Disc 27 – Paris, May 24, 1966 (Soundboard)
    Disc 28 – London, May 26, 1966 (CBS Records recording)
    Disc 29 – London, May 26, 1966 (CBS Records recording)
    Disc 30 – London, May 27, 1966 (CBS Records recording)
    Disc 31 – London, May 27, 1966 (CBS Records recordings)
    Disc 32 – White Plains, NY, February 5, 1966 (Audience tape)
    Disc 33 – Pittsburgh, PA, February 6, 1966 (Audience tape)
    Disc 34 – Hempstead, NY, February 26, 1966 (Audience tape)
    Disc 35 – Melbourne, April 19, 1966 (Audience tape)
    Disc 36 – Stockholm, April 29, 1966 (Audience tape)

  12. I`m waiting for mine to arrive from AmFrance but it`s a Xmas prezzie from the Baroness so I have to wait awhile to listen to Zimmie losin` his cool which he exuded by the bucket-load at the time.

  13. Quick question on Dylan.

    Got an album today by Flatt & Scruggs from ’68 (including a DONOVAN song and a song made famous by DONOVAN…Top Table, goes with having international hits, it happens) called “Nashville Airplane.”

    The title surely has to be a nod towards Jefferson Airplane, yes?, and Dylan’s “Nashville Skyline,” in turn, is surely a reference to Flatt & Scruggs’ “Nashville Airplane?”

    • With four Dylan songs and two songs associated with Donovan I assumed the title was a reference to Flatt & Scruggs’ departure from their traditional bluegrass material. They split up after this album.

      Although Nashville Airplane pre-dated Nashville Skyline by a year, so I can’t explain the title. I can’t see any JA connection though.

      • Too coincidental for “Airplane,” in 1968, not to be some sort of inference, approving or not, to Grace & co. It makes no sense otherwise.
        And Dylan must have been aware of this (Columbia) LP – I think a few musicians played on it and “Nashville Skyline.”

        Have I hit upon something that Dylanologists have missed?

        • The Flatt & Scuggs album is discussed at length in the liner notes to the Bear Family box set “Flatt & Scruggs 1964-1969 Plus”. Nothing to do with Jefferson Airplane. And the LP wasn’t a “departure” from their bluegrass roots – they had been recording songs by Dylan and Cash (and The Monkees) and also current hits like “Ode To Billy Joe” for years.
          Fine album nevertheless.

  14. I’ll do Leicester, reason being I thought the Leicester show was the best sounding of the 1965 set that came out previously. I listened to the acoustic disc as soon as I opened the box this afternoon, but only half listened to the electric disc, as I was getting ready to go out, so I’ll have a proper listen tomorrow afternoon. On first listen though, the sound quality is excellent and there was an awful lot of booing and shouting from the audience and audience-baiting by His Bobness.

    • Leicester – 15 May 1966

      This was the 9th date of the European tour, the 35th date of the whole tour and pretty close to the end. The end of Dylan touring for almost 10 years that is. You can certainly hear the weariness in his ‘banter’ with the audience, using lines he used at other shows in response to their shouts. You can’t really work out what the shouts from the audience are, or at least I can’t, after switching my hearing aids for my headphones, but it’s safe to say that the shouts are not ones of appreciation.

      The selfish generation, Jeremy Paxman calls the baby boomers, and it’s difficult to argue with most of His reasoning. Well here’s another example. They were privileged enough to get tickets for the greatest tour ever and yet they moaned, heckled and walked out. Yes, Dylan turned a couple of his early songs into rock songs, but he also played a couple of his electric songs acoustically. Sounds a fair swap to me.

      The Leicester show is a soundboard recording and the voice and instruments come across loud and clear (or quiet and clear for the first half). Any Dylan fans from Leicester must be pleased, because the show from Leicester was probably the best sounding one from the 1965 concert recordings too.

      The acoustic set is very well received by the audience. By this time on the tour the setlist has become pretty standard, although with great versions of Visions of Johanna and Desolation Row as highlights, it’s a disc that will be returned to (once I’ve got through the other 35 discs of course). But it’s the electric set where the mischief begins. From onstage as well as off.

      With the aforementioned weariness comes confrontation. The band tear into a blistering Tell Me Momma to get things rolling and it’s met with applause. A slight edit before he repeats the ‘it used to be like that, but now it goes like this’ line to introduce I Don’t Believe You. He then pauses, as if he was trying to provoke some heckles, which he gets, and responds with a Bill Grundy-like ‘can’t you yell any louder than that?’ The song itself is great and again is met with applause.

      But after Baby Let Me Follow You Down it starts to sound like the crowd at Barnsley last season as we were notching up an 8 match losing streak. The boos starting drowning out the applause. Yet Bob seems to be enjoying it. After a great Just Like Tom Thumb’s blues a slow hand clap breaks out. Sounds like the entire audience is joining in. Bob appeases them by telling them he’s about to do a folk song next. Of course, after the audience applauds with relief the band (or should that be The Band) tear in a fantastic sounding Leopard Skin Pill-Box Hat! An edit cuts short the audience reaction, but I imagine there were a few grumpy faces.

      But just when you think he’s going to be chased out of town (and who hasn’t been chased out of Leicester?) he starts winning. Just like Barnsley turned it round last season, the audience actually applaud an electric version of one of the folkier songs they have been asking him to return to. Well, he either won them over, or all the hecklers walked out during One Too Many Mornings. I’ll turn it up next time to see if I can hear any doors a-slamming mid-song.

      The final couple of songs are Ballad of a Thin Man (as good a version as I’ve heard) and Like a Rolling Stone. It’s listening to something like this where you wish someone had really invented a time machine. By the end, the slow clap has been replaced by an enthusiastic one and the only shouts from (what’s left of) the crowd are for more. They didn’t get any more, but I have. 34 discs more. And if the Leicester show is anything to go by I’m rather looking forward to it.

              • I don’t think my shoes have dried out yet! Actually, I haven’t worn them since, but for a different reason.

                My missus bought me some new trainers for my birthday (end of September). I wore them the next day at the footy and we lost. It was the first game of the 8 straight defeats. I last wore them at Altrincham because they got absolutely soaked. As did everything really. I found out that day that my big parka isn’t waterproof. My programme was in my inside pocket and turned into a blob of paper mache.

                Anyway, back to the shoes, I put them in the cupboard with the boiler to dry out and wore different shoes to the next match. We won. We then went on a 7 match winning streak and went from bottom of the table at the beginning of December to promotion, winning two trophies at Wembley. My birthday shoes stayed in the cupboard. They are cursed. Like a reversed Billy’s Boots.

                They’re nice trainers though, but I just daren’t wear them, as we’ll start losing again. I don’t know whether to wear them at a game we are likely to lose, so I can’t blame it on the shoes, or at a game when we are likely to win, to break the curse.

                We have two local non-league sides who are tearing up their divisions, so maybe if I wore them at one of their games they could break the curse for me? What a pickle!

  17. I – after some soul searching – splashed out on this. £99 from HMV was fairly reasonable when calculated per disc, I thought. Or convinced myself that I thought. Anyhoo. I’m up for this. What discs are left unclaimed? Happy to be randomly allocated one @dogfacedboy

  18. Cardiff May 11th 1966

    Thanks to @dogfacedboy for my review copy.

    Only 1 disc here, the electric set. First thoughts after a couple of listens are that it is sensational. Set builds and builds from a fairly workmanlike Tell Me Momma to an incendiary Like A Rolling Stone with Dylan singing/shouting like a man possessed (but see below). I had some issues with the files and the versions I have of Ballad of a Thin Man and One Too Many Mornings are incomplete (my fault). Sound quality is outstanding, stand out performer in The Band (Hawks whatever) is Garth Hudson, his tasteful fills are everywhere. Audience appear to be completely into it and applause gets louder after each subsequent track. Hard to pick out a standout track, it’s all great, but Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues seems heartfelt and devastating.

    The strange thing is slow hand-claps are heard before the 9 minute Like A Rolling Stone starts, which is out of character with the way the rest of the performance was received. Some trainspotters on the Steve Hoffman forum believe that this LARS is actually from Newcastle and they have been accidentally switched!

    If I took this album in isolation I could easily say it is one of the best live albums I’ve ever heard, but maybe it’s only actually in the top 30 or so 😉

    And my full set shipped today …

  19. I’m about ready to post the Sheffield review, but need to link to an outside website. Can someone remind me how to make it so clicking on the word “here” (for example) will open the link instead of posting a long and cumbersome URL. Thank you

  20. May 1966. Blonde on Blonde had just been released but I had only managed to listen to snatches of it in various record stores across Aberdeen: it would another couple of months before I could afford to actually buy it.
    I was nearly 17. Next year sixth-form beckoned and with it the frightening thought of leaving school the following summer – who would ever want to leave school? We played rugby or hockey every Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, the teachers had stopped belting us with leather straps for every single misdemeanour and we even had “study periods” in the library!
    Tommy Mearns wanted to leave school, that’s who. He collected his six or seven O-levels then somehow managed to persuade his parents that Higher Education was not for him. Off he went to Edinburgh to work in a record shop in Princess Street from where one day he contacted me. “We’ve got tickets for Bob Dylan next week, fancy coming down?”. I considered myself a real Dylan fan, not many of us about but we all knew each other, but I had no clue whatsoever that Bob was touring the UK – this was 1966 in the North of Scotland: I bought the NME when I could afford it ie not often and whilst Manfred Mann was currently No1 in the charts this would soon be replaced by Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night and the rest of the year’s charts would be dominated by, shiver, Jim Reeve’s Distant Drums.
    With no idea whatsoever of the furore the tour was causing I hitched my way to Edinburgh one Friday afternoon (I would need to forge a sick note for school later). I met Tommy at his workplace around seven. He played me a few of his current faves (do I remember JJ Cale?) and at the appointed hour we walked the relatively short distance to the ABC Regal. There were crowds milling around outside, mostly studenty-types with corduroy jackets and an air of serious seriousness.
    Tommy had secured seats halfway back but bang in the middle. The wait was interminable but somewhere around 8.30 the lights dimmed and on walked Mr Dylan himself. The lighting was poor but he appeared to be wearing a leather jacket and a pair of ridiculously tight and ridiculously short red-and-white striped trousers. How cool!!
    Like most folk-artists he fiddled around for what seemed forever tuning and retuning his guitar. Then suddenly with not a word of introduction he started She Belongs To Me. Wow, what a voice, drawing out every word, every phrase, in nasal majestic magnificence. Much slower than the record but all the better for that. I’m spellbound.
    And that , dear reader, fifty years later is all I can clearly recall from the acoustic set apart from the heart-stoppingly beautiful Mr Tambourine Man which ended the first half. Applause bordering on polite, certainly not adoring or tumultuous – again more like sitting in a reverent albeit large folk club.
    So I turn to The 1966 Live Recordings: compared to the various bootlegs I have heard over the years the sound quality is near perfect. How come those bastards have sat on this for fifty years?? Fourth Time Around is even better than on the album (how is that possible?). Visions of Johanna played slowed down to almost walking pace yet with perfect timing, rhymes tumbling in and out of each other like curtains moving in a soft Bayou wind, is just breathtaking.
    It’s All Over Baby Now follows and given what has preceded it is merely excellent. I find it hard to believe I have no recollection of a sadly incomplete Desolation Row , a track I played to my dad trying, and of course failing, to prove that “Bob Dylan is a poet”. On first and second hearings it sounds here a little rushed, a little too wordy and clever but once again – that voice!!
    Just Like A Woman continues a at by now familiar almost-funereal walk. I can only assume that the crowd reaction is muted because they like me had never heard this song before.
    And then to Mr Tambourine Man. I would have sworn on a bible the opening words were met with a whoop of delight but maybe that was just me and Tommy and the Soundboard somehow failed to pick our shouts of “Fuck, yes” and “Get stuck in, big man”? Looking at the Box Set track listing it seems I will get to listen to Tambourine Man” another 17 times: over there that’s my cup overflowing.

    At the interval me and Mr Mearns went outside onto the streets where we hugged each other in the rain. In 1966 Scotland guys didn’t hug each other (except when Denis Law scored against England) but we hugged. I didn’t tell Tommy I loved him but that night in Edinburgh I did.

    So around a half an hour later we watched in bewildered bemusement as four of the toughest, scariest and collest guys I had ever seen in my life started to set up. Every so often a distorted wail of feedback echoed around the cinema-hall – what the hell was going on? (A small aside: I kept the ticket for years before it went missing sometime in the 90’s. I am certain, well fairly sure, that it said “Bob Dylan and The Hawks”. Am I right or am I, as usual, Wrong?)
    A spotlight revealed Bob and after a distracted few arm waves off we went. I could not have told you what the first number actually was, Tell Me Mamma was not a Dylan song of that I was sure. The lead guitarist couldn’t half play though, I’d never heard anything like that before. The applause was spontaneous although most around me seemed as surprised as I was. Almost unbelievably I have no memory of hearing “It used to be like that and now it goes like this” (that would be years later on Great White Wonder) but this song I did recognise and, yes, I loved it!! The Edinburgh version of I Don’t Believe You may not be definitive but good heavens above it’s still bloody good!
    In comparison Baby Let Me Follow You Down sounds a tad pedestrian but next up is Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues. It was around here I really started to listen to, and really appreciate, what Bob and his Band were doing. My life was about to change.
    “This is dedicated to the Taj Mahal”, four cuban heels stamp the floor, somebody turns the dial up to eleven and it’s the rollercoaster ride that is Leopard-skin Pill-Box Hat. For the first time tonight the hall rings with applause. If some people were booing or leaving I certainly didn’t see that: there were shouts and hollers but as far as I could tell, and I can today recollect, it was all good-natured.
    Next a ragged, tumbling, chaotic yet utterly wonderful One Too Many Mornings; has anyone anywhere ever sounded this good?
    Ballad of a Thin Man shows how tight Robbie & Co were on that tour, not a wasted or frivolous note, and on this track Garth Hudson in particular is, and here I am running out of superlatives, fucking ace. Bob has never sung better (although some of Rolling Thunder almost gets there) and Tommy and me keep glancing at each other in stunned amazement.
    Of course we finish with Like A Rolling Stone, of course we do. Bob does that thing with his voice where his words fall down the stairs, stretch round corners and collapse into each other in near-perfect perfection; The Band’s music careers along, sometimes discordant yet always wholly in harmony with their small but totally-in-control ringmaster, and the concert finally crashes through the walls and rings off in triumph to the waiting darkness.

    So ,there we have it. I’m certain there will be better versions of each song on the Edinburgh CDs scattered across the other 34 discs but for obvious reasons this will be the concert I will listen to most. Will anyone but the most obsessive of Bob Nuts listen to all 36 CDs – I doubt it. Is, despite the “it’s only x pounds a disc” pleas/excuses from elsewhere on this thread, the price, for what some might say (Hi there, Mrs Wrongness) is the same concert times eighteen, far too high ie bordering on insulting – yes it is.
    But but and but – this document of an artist at the peak of his incendiary powers boldly going where no other artist has gone before or since is essential. Beg, steal or borrow but get it; stop reading this and go get it!!

  22. One thing bugs me.

    Soundboard recordings – as I understand it soundboards didn’t exist in those days, or even monitors – everyone just plugged in and turned it up (fookin loud) and hoped for the best.

    Or a meringue!

    • There must have been some kind of – albeit rudimentary – mixing going on, because pics of the tour show two mics in place for the drum kit: a general overhead one and one in front of the kick drum. That suggests an 8-track desk, with other mics for the vocals, bass amp, organ and guitars, possibly then all bounced down to a stereo output to the house PA system. Would such a thing have been deployable at places like the De Montfort Hall in 1966, Bob and/or audio buffs?

  24. Disc 17 – Sheffield Gaumont Theatre, May 16, 1966 (CBS Records recording)
    Disc 18 – Sheffield Gaumont Theatre, May 16, 1966 (Soundboard)

    “This never happens with my electric guitar” grumbles Bob as he struggles to tune up before Mr. Tambourine Man. We’re seven songs into the acoustic half of the show and it’s the first time Dylan has spoken. It’s also the first song of the set to receive anything resembling the self-congratulatory audience recognition we’re so familiar with today, with a smattering of applause greeting the opening line. Delivered, for the most part, as per the record, …Tambourine Man goes off-piste toward the end when Bob abandons the script and begins to suck and blow the harmonica like a man possessed. It’s as if he’s suddenly realised he has 20 notes at his disposal and is determined to use them all as often as possible.

    It’s an eerie feeling listening to these CDs now, knowing that half a century ago my 15 year-old schoolboy self and a few pals were seated somewhere in the gloom of the Sheffield Gaumont actually watching this drama unfold. To say it was a life-changing experience doesn’t even come close. Expectation weighed heavy in the air that Monday night in May 1966 and I was more excited than I can ever remember before, or since. It’s been claimed that the Sheffield show was one of the best of the tour, both in terms of Bob’s performance and the recording quality, so I was indeed lucky to have witnessed it first-hand.

    Opening with a near-perfect She Belongs To Me, the first surprise is Bob’s powerful vocals and exaggerated enunciation, which at times makes him sound almost like a Dylan impersonator, albeit a very good one. Our parents tried to tell us he couldn’t sing, but that was never even close to the truth. He didn’t sound like anyone else perhaps, but in 1966 his voice was as good as anyone in rock and better than most. As we noted on The Bootleg Series Vol. 4 version, during the ’66 tour Bob changed the line “She wears an Egyptian ring” to “Egyptian RED ring”. A tiny modification, perhaps, but a typically inscrutable one.

    Officially Blonde On Blonde was released on the same day as the Sheffield concert, May 16, 1966, but I don’t recall seeing the album go on sale until a few weeks later. Consequently, the four Blonde On Blonde tracks Dylan performed on the tour were unfamiliar to the audiences, who were hearing them for the first time. Add the otherwise unreleased Tell Me Momma to the list and that’s five brand new songs Bob brought to the party.

    The first unfamiliar song of the night is Fourth Time Around, evidently a parody of the Beatles’ Norwegian Wood delivered in waltz time. Sitting here in 2016 with a lifetime of rock gigs under our collective belt, it’s strange to think that in 1966 many people had never been to more than a handful of shows and had yet to develop the concert-goer’s protocol we take for granted today. Consequently, now-familiar lines like “Your words aren’t clear, you’d better spit out your gum” are greeted with loud guffaws from the embryonic Bobcats hearing them for the first time. It’s the kind of thing you might hear at a Randy Newman concert today but it seems out of place at a Dylan show. Another new song, the sublime Visions Of Johanna, follows and once again there’s nervous audience sniggering at lines like “Hear the one with the mustache say, Jeez I can’t find my knees”.

    Things get back on a familiar path with It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue and the word-a-thon that is Desolation Row before the third new tune of the night makes an appearance. Just Like A Woman is not your typical Bob song. It has a middle eight for a start, a rare thing indeed in the Dylan canon. Less organic than much of his catalogue, it seems more a product of the songwriter’s craft than simply a vehicle on which to hang the stream of consciousness wordplay he was writing at the time.

    The aforementioned Mr. Tambourine Man ends the first half in fine style and Bob leaves the stage to the first generous ovation of the evening. We didn’t know it, but we had just witnessed the calm before the storm.

    As the heavy velvet curtains creak open for the second half the stage lights remain dimmed. In the gloom we see the red stand-by lights of the guitar amplifiers as several shadowy figures shuffle on and plug in. The Hawks! A spotlight finds Dylan and I had just a second to register that his acoustic guitar has been replaced by a black Fender Telecaster before all hell breaks loose and a glorious cacophony fills the theatre.

    Tell Me Momma, the fourth unfamiliar number in the set (and the only new one not from Blonde On Blonde) arrives like whirlwind. This strange song perhaps deserves some explanation. Dylan has never released a studio version of Tell Me Momma and it has only ever been performed in concert 15 times, all of them on the 1966 tour. It was first played on February 5 at White Plains, New York and made its exit on May 27 at the Royal Albert Hall, London, never to return.

    I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met) started life two years earlier as a mid-tempo acoustic song on the album Another Side Of Bob Dylan but here it’s transformed into a disjointed heavy rock stomper. Bob’s spoken intro “It used to be like that, but now it goes like this” disclaimer was repeated most nights throughout the ’66 tour.

    On the face of it Baby, Let Me Follow You Down seems like an unusual choice to perform live, but again it has a story to tell. Firstly, it’s the only song in the entire set not written by Dylan. This Eric von Schmidt tune first appeared acoustically on Bob’s 1962 self-titled debut album and two years later The Animals covered it (as Baby Let Me Take You Home) for their first single. The Newcastle band followed this with their monster hit The House Of The Rising Sun another non-original song lifted from Dylan’s first LP. It’s thought that Bob was so enamoured with the Animals’ rocked-up versions of those songs that it inspired his change to electric music, which in turn gave rise to the entire folk-rock movement. So we have a lot to thank Eric Burdon and his boys for, it seems.

    The lead into Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues features a long stream of consciousness preamble from Bob about a painter who “lives down in Mexico”. Bob’s not making much sense here and if I didn’t know better I might suspect he’d been at the jazz Woodbines during the interval. Again, he gave a variation of this rambling narrative several times during the tour. This was for many years the first and only song from the tour to receive an official release with a version recorded in Liverpool on May 14 (two days before Sheffield) appearing as the B-side of the June 1966 single I Want You. The Sheffield version seems tighter and less ragged than the Liverpool recording, but it could simply be down to the recording quality. Incidentally other than the original single the live Liverpool version of JLTTB has only ever been released officially on the 1978 Australian compilation Masterpieces (now deleted).

    Until now the audience has listened in quiet reverence to the electric set, possibly because they’ve been pinned to the wall by the volume, but to paraphrase a line Bob himself would sing many years later: things are about to get interesting right about now. At the close of Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat the final new song of the set, the natives start to get decidedly restless. Heckling, booing, shouting and general unrest breaks out in earnest, while a few Dylan supporters yell at the dissenters to keep quiet. “That’s crap” wails someone, while another tells Bob “Just play”. Dylan deals with this in familiar fashion. He mumbles incoherently into the microphone until the rabble quietens down, mainly because they are trying to work out what he’s saying. He ends this otherwise unintelligible speech with “…when I was just a baby” then, as the band kicks into One Too Many Mornings he repeats “Remember, I was a baby once” only louder this time.

    We’d read about the booing, of course. Sheffield was the sixth date on the UK tour and news of unrest from the fans had already started to filter through. Let’s be honest though, it was basically just a copycat protest. After all, what were they expecting? Blonde On Blonde may have been a few weeks away, but Dylan had already released a couple of full-on electric albums in the shape of Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. As if that weren’t enough of an indication, a trio of loud and nasty singles Like A Rolling Stone, Positively 4th Street and Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window had been all over the radio and the pop charts for almost a year, so the blueprint of Bob’s new direction was right there for all to see.

    They’d no doubt read that a few folkies were protesting in America and felt they should follow suit. But who in Britain other than perhaps stuffy old Ewan MacColl and his traditionalist ilk really cared about such stuff? Did we boo? Of course we fucking didn’t. The short-haired squares could complain all they liked, this was Bob Dylan at his absolute creative peak and we had just seen the future of rock and roll.

    One Too Many Mornings was by then a two year-old song from The Times They Are A-Changin’ album, but Dylan was evolving at such a rate in the mid-60s that those two years might well have been a decade. That was then and this is now and the rollicking …Mornings is unrecognisable from the gentle acoustic ballad of 1964. More dissent follows as Dylan takes his seat at the piano for Ballad Of A Thin Man. Someone in the band says “Can you hear ‘em?” before Bob enquires “No boos?” with heavy sarcasm. Seemingly spurred on by events, Dylan delivers an incandescent performance as good as any of the other six (count ‘em) official live versions which have appeared over the years (not counting those on this box set, of course).

    Mickey Jones’ pistol shot snare kicks off Like A Rolling Stone and we’re into the home stretch. Only a year after the best rock single of all time (© all rock magazines, forever) put the cat among the folk purists’ pigeons, here’s Bob already experimenting with the phrasing, stretching a line here, shortening another here and generally messing with the structure of the song. Robbie Robertson is on top form here, his snaking guitar lines are inventive and ground-breaking throughout, but nowhere more so than on this closing song.

    Then suddenly it’s all over and, as the stunned crowd begins to shuffle out into Fargate wondering what the hell they have just witnessed, the spell is broken by a single wobbly verse of God Save The Queen, then obligatory in all British theatres and cinemas, played over the Tannoy.

    A day later in Manchester Dylan would be denounced as a “Judas” and soon the entire world would sit up and take notice. But that was yet to happen and for just a few hours more he still belonged to Sheffield.

    * Some small sections of this review have previously appeared in my blog: http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/features/music/bob-dylan-john-tams-and-the-commissionaire.html

      • Thanks muchly.

        The Blonde On Blonde release date has become something of an issue. Earlier this year I took part in a BBC radio show which was based on the premise that Blonde on Blonde and Pet Sounds were released on the same day, May 16, 1966. But as you say, it almost certainly didn’t go on sale in the UK until several weeks later.

        Today, there would be a huge media launch with press and TV and even pop-up shops as we saw in London for the Dylan album Tempest. Back then new albums simply trickled into the shops almost apologetically with little fanfare and maybe just an ad in NME and Melody Maker to promote them.

        By comparison, on Sky news this morning there was a 3 minute “news” item about the release of the new Metallica album.

    • Cracking read, thanks. I have always had the same thought about how the hell people were apparently taken by surprise by Bob plugging in after the recent albums, singles etc.

      • Their idea of Dylan was frozen in 1963. As the recent coverage of the Nobel business proves, that’s true of a lot of people to this day. It would be like someone turning up at Shea Stadium and saying, “Why aren’t they in leathers?”

      • Yes, the booing always struck me an affectation, or an embryonic attempt at virtue signalling: “Look at us, we’re still flying the protest/folk flag”. For others it was probably just a case of “monkey see, monkey do”.

        It’s hard to get into the mindset of someone who would pay money to go to a concert just to boo. It’s a very strange thing to do. Why not just stay home?

        All credit to Bob, he ploughed through it all and either ignored it, or sometimes even teased the naysayers. Here was a man on a mission. He knew where he was going and a few misguided audience members weren’t going to get in his way.

      • Top notch stuff, brilliant even. And as usual your encyclopaedic background knowledge only makes the reading that more enjoyable. And I am mightily impressed by the fact way back then you already seemed to know that the electric set was receiving shall we say mixed reviews (unlike me)

  26. I’m not up to some of the epic reviews above but hopefully this will give you some idea about why (or why not) you might have to make this your next pick from the box.

    Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen. A short (35 minutes or so) single disc in glorious mono. Bob perhaps in a more relaxed, less declamatory, mode than he would be later on.

    First, a word on the sound – generally ‘alive’ and immediate. A fair bit of distortion as the needle bumps up into the red, however not bad for 50 years old.

    The show itself has a massive cut, just part way into set 1, from a little of the way into 4th Time Around. However, what is there is very good indeed. She Belongs to Me has some primo moothie and Bob sounds in fine, relaxed voice. Some more good moothie and relaxed vocals at 4th Time Around before it is rudely cut.

    We come back in at Baby Let Me Follow You Down. I’ve always liked this – it has exciting momentum – and it is excellent here. Danko’s bass is high up in the mix and the song is all the better for it – nice organ and piano breaks too – and, oh, that savage guitar.

    There’s a surreal shaggy dog story about a painter introducing Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues. Possibly the chattiest I’ve heard Dylan outside the gospel concerts. Is there more of this on the other discs?

    Leopard-Skin Pillbox hat is an easy-going chug-along version – verging on the rollicking, in fact – faded out just as a guitar solo is beginning to take off, unfortunately.

    Ballad of a Thin Man is distinguished by some marvellous organ from Hudson.
    Like a Rolling Stone is relatively less intense than later versions – lack of intensity perhaps due to lack of Judas heckle; the Danes sound generally happy to be there. More hygge rain than hard rain.

    If you listen to anything here: She Belongs to Me and Baby Let Me Follow You Down,

    • It seems as though he used the painter in Mexico monologue to introduce Tom Thumb’s Blues at every concert!

      I wonder why he dumped Tell Me Mama after this tour and never recorded it in the studio?

      • If you look at the 65-66 period also with help of the last Bootleg Series, he probably could have released another album to go with the 4 (counting BOB as 2) that he did put out.

        e.g.

        Tell Me Mama
        I’ll Keep it With Mine
        Farewell Angelina
        Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence
        California
        Positively 4th Street
        Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window
        She’s Your Lover Now
        If You Gotta Go, Go Now

  27. View post on imgur.com

    Bob In Oz

    In early March 1966 Dylan was still in the studio in New York recording. By early April he and the Hawks, sans Levon Helm and plus Mickey Jones, were on a plane to Australia via Honolulu and a refuel in Nadi, Fiji. In his suitcase were acetates of the unreleased Blonde On Blonde album.

    I’m sure Albert Grossman let alone Bob and the boys had little idea of the distances involved in this start to the World Tour let alone the lack of sophistication of the destination.

    So why Oz? There is an excellent 3-part series on the Australian leg of the world tour in Isis the Dylan “fanzine”. Pete Seeger had played Australia to large audiences and promoted the work of Dylan. Ditto Peter, Paul and Mary who Grossman managed. So, I guess that is the reason. As fate, would have it the tour was promoted by Ken Brodziak. Why fate would have it? Well prior to the tour Dylan had complained of playing in stadiums due to poor sound. “I’d rather make less money and play in smaller theatres.” Well, nice idea but Brodziak owned stadiums in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney so that is where touring bands played. This is a shame as a PA had been built and shipped over specifically for the tour – all 100 watts of it. I suspect this may have been a first. So, the sound was a major concern for Dylan – it wasn’t just an electric racket as is suggested about the Newport gig.

    Unlike the rest of the tour the Australian shows weren’t recorded by CBS

    So, onto our first concert in Sydney at the Stadium. Now this is no ordinary stadium. It was built as an outdoor boxing Stadium in 1908 and famously hosted the fight when Jack Johnson won the World Heavyweight crown. It was subsequently roofed, although I understand there was a gap between the walls and the roof. It was largely corrugated iron so you can imagine what these dudes from New York thought. Heaps of artists had played there and you can read more here . The icing on the cake is that the venue was laid out as an octagonal with the stage rotating. This was done automatically but artists were unsettled so instead the stage was rotated manually, Fred Flintstone like, 45 degrees between each song. This would explain Dylan saying to the effect of “I’m just going to move you people over here now” between songs.

    The Sydney show surfaced in 2000 and its source is still unclear. However, there was quite a bit of recording of his shows by TV stations (most lost) during the tour so maybe that is the source. A friend of mine David Pepperell, who is quoted in the box set booklet, claims Dylan had the habit of giving tapes of his shows away and that this recording would be one of them – who knows. Certainly, there is very little audience noise so it’s a soundboard of some sort. A Melbourne recording had been around since 1974 (more on this later) but this was the first to include both acoustic and electric sets.

    The acoustic set sounds much like the others on the tour. Using a borrowed guitar (his broke en route –apparently because he was cramming the Gibson into a case too small for it and it finally gave up the ghost). Dylan’s voice is clear, diction perfect and right in tune. Remember also that this is the first show of the tour so his voice will have been well rested. If you like his “busy” harmonica you will like it on here coz you get it in spades. The new release sounds a bit sharper, more presence.

    Intermission and time to plug in the guitars. Battle stations! Tell Me Mama loud and very trebly. Dylan singing loud, close to yelling some times and occasionally out of key. But gee there is energy. This is what he came here for.

    Dylan’s voice is way up front, too upfront but if you want to forensically listen to his vocals on the electric stuff this is the disc. He is working it, the first gigs of his new band and the new material. The new release is a bit clearer, you can hear more instrumentation but not a lot.

    Pepperell claims there was an organised group of a couple of hundred all seated in one spot and they were jeering loudly prompting others to respond- in other words the script for the entire tour – but this is not heard, according to him, because of the recording is only through the vocal mic. So, consider this – between each song the band stands silently giggling while the stage is rotated as debate rages in the audience with some are walking out. Perhaps it’s just me but I feel the intensity increase. Dylan’s vocals get louder on I Don’t Believe You and Baby Let Me Follow You Down and Tom Thumb is simply raucous. I gather things settled down after the walk out and the music seems to as well. I love the version of One Too Many Mornings and Ballad Of A Thin Man, a song I am heartily sick off, is so clearly enunciated and so poignant. Incredible theatre. The set finishes, for the only time on tour, with Positively Fourth Street instead of Like A rolling Stone, no doubt another statement to the vocal objectors in the audience.

    You will get better sounding sets than this but it was the start of the tour, when the hostile reaction shocked them. You may not listen to this one a lot but don’t not listen to it.

    After Sydney, they went to Brisbane then back to Sydney and then to Melbourne and to another boxing stadium, the House Of Stoush Festival Hall. Appropriately the first event I saw there was a boxing match that my Dad took me too – Kahu Mahunga a Kiwi boxer. I can still recall the thud of boxing glove on hardened body. But I digress.

    The Melbourne acoustic set has been available since around 1974. I have a Trademark of Quality issue sub titled “the enigmatic story of a boy and his dog”. A subsequent CD called it Mother Revisited a reference to a comment he makes in his intro to Visions of Johanna. I taped this bootleg and took it with me to Zimbabwe. I know it so well that when Baby Blue plays I expect the vocal stumble that you hear on this recording.

    By now, Dylan has been burning the candle at both ends big time, late nights, probably half jet lagged the whole time, smoking dope, chain smoking unfiltered Camels and on stage beside him a glass of whisky.

    Bobby D arrived onstage unsteady on his feet, a lot of coughing, sometimes extended for comic effect and slurring, rambling between song patter. But what staggered everyone attending was that once he started singing, the focus, the clarity was remarkable. Virtually all the acoustic sets in this box set have this clarity but this is where it all began. I’ve listened to some of the later shows and sometimes I get the feeling he is a bit ground down- who wouldn’t be? The sound- again more clear, more presence than previous issues, but that also includes quite a few vocal pops and extraneous bangs and scrapes as he plays guitar.

    So, a great recording – I wish Dad took me to this instead of the boxing.

    The box set includes an audience recording of the Melbourne concert and includes some of the electric set. The sound is terrible which is a pity as I understand the electric set was well received and the playing excellent.

    After 2 shows in Melbourne there was Adelaide and then a venue resembling an airport hangar in Perth. A brief holiday in Greece was supposedly scheduled but the Australian Government commandeered planes to ferry troops to Vietnam. So instead they hung around bored in a hotel in Perth then off to Copenhagen.

    • Great stuff JW.

      Wasn’t it the Capitol Theatre in Perth (now demolished) – ie a proper theatre. The Mickey Jones DVD has vintage footage of all the Aussie towns including Perth where they stayed a week in poxy motel out near the airport. By the look of it Perth really was a one horse town in 1966

    • Great stuff, Junior. Talking of bootlegs, even more than first hearing Blonde on Blonde properly the thrill of listening to GWW was just immense: I literally was shaking with excitement. The record weighed around 10lbs and seemed impervious to whatever I threw over it. I knew every crackle, every scratch (and there were many scratches). Nothing in the Dylan canon, even the cleaned-up versions that gradually surfaced over the years, has ever sounded better than Hezekiah Jones….

  29. ‘Judas, the most hated name in human history! If you think you’ve been called a bad name, try to work your way out from under that. Yeah, and for what? For playing an electric guitar?’ – Bob Dylan

    Blurb from the new Clinton Heylin book “Judas!”

  33. I Taken only moments before Bobby Neuwirth snapped “Get outta the way kid and don’t come back until you can afford daytime shades and Cuban heel Beatle boots like me and my bezzy mate Bob here!”

  34. With thanks to DFB
    Newcastle Acoustic and Electric.

    I don’t know how it was in the hall, but when the electric set started compared to the acoustic set, bloody hell was it loud. I had to turn the volume down at first. I turned it back up again though

    The acoustic set was well received, though some of the audience’s responses are cut short, possibly the tape running out? Apart from introducing Just Like a Woman as Hamlet Revisited, there is no communication with the audience, again are we getting the whole picture it’s like being on an archaeological dig and finding an incomplete artefact and trying to imagine what the entire object looked like. Dylan plays to my ears at least some excellent harmonica throughout.

    As I said the noise of the electric set surprised me, so what must it have done to the audience? There’s some calling before Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat. A cry of ‘Go Home’ and another call out to which Dylan replies ‘You’re talking to the wrong person’ there is a cheer from a section of the audience and before the crashing start Dylan or one of the band says ‘Liar’, more cheers.

    I suppose we have the benefit of hindsight, but this must have been a radical departure for some of the audience to experience. Though they must have heard how the gigs had been received previously.

    Yes I’d have loved to have seen one of these gigs but being eleven at the time I’d never heard of Bob Dylan.

    BTW Great photo Lodes

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