Bob Dylan – The Bootleg Series 4 - Live 1966
‘Like Dylan In The Movies’ indeed. I wondered what I should write about this record. I realised I had already written it eight years ago. Here’s some edited highlights. It’s probably all you need.
The triumvirate of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde is a glory that cannot be denied. I could play these albums back to back for the rest of my life and never tire. From the squalling speedfreak eruption of 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' to the lilting surreal romance of 'Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands', the thirty four songs that stretch across the three albums are uniformly magnificent, taking in innumerable points that reach so high you need to be on another planet to see them. Naturally these three albums take you on journeys to those planets and beyond.
There are so many astonishing moments on these albums; so many reasons to fall ecstatically in love with the noise of raw, hell let's say it and be damned: the noise of raw rock and roll. Not to mention the sound of hearts breaking and tumbling over the pages of a thousand poetic notebook collages of real life as lived by, well, maybe a poetic seer, or maybe too 'just' some natural antecedent of Rimbaud, the French Symbolists and The Beats, which is nothing to dismiss too freely. It's certainly the sound of an Artist insisting on their right to be strange and to explore their own mind and heart instead of the surrogate minds and hearts of some vague 'generation' he was called the spokesman for.
It all reaches the most outrageously wired and strung out conclusion on the 'electric' side of the 1966 Live set, recorded when I was exactly one month old, in Manchester's Free Trade Hall. This recording was a revelation when I first heard it, and it continues to be so. It is the sound of walking the tightrope between sanity and madness, the fine line between celestial coherence and hellish dissolution. It's the sound of an artist battling both the demons of personal artistic vision that is desperate to reach the stars and the tethering demands of an audience apparently insistent on entropy, dragging him back to the muddy ground at every opportunity. The struggle is breathtakingly addictive.
The sound that Dylan and The Hawks (later The Band) make on this record is massive. It's a vivid, raucous, self-destructive purge of a sound that competes with the best moments of the Velvet Underground's immense 1969 opus, or the MC5's Back In The USA, and although it's probably true to say that this noise may have given birth to the shadiest rawk excesses of the late '60s and '70s, I'm not sure it's entirely fair to lay any blame here. Especially not when this all sounds so pure, so passionate, so filled with both a defiant hope and a raging despair.
It all reaches a climax, of course, before the set closing 'Like A Rolling Stone' with some wag's clearly carefully rehearsed outburst of 'Judas!' From that moment onwards, this recording always leaves me gasping. From Dylan's retorts, to his just heard call to arms aimed at the Hawks to 'play fucking loud!', to Dylan and Robbie Robertson's guitar strumming as the parrying goes on, punctuated by a few notes from Rick Danko's bass, I am all of a tremble, no matter how many times I hear it. And when Mickey Jones hits that drum and Garth Hudson's organ crashes in with everyone else in an oceanic swell of sound, I swear to god my heart stops.
Dylan wails like a man possessed throughout the entire seven plus minutes of the performance. He is spitting at the audience, battling himself, tearing himself inside out, a pyrotechnic swirl of colour, like Kerouac's fabulous roman candles exploding across the skies. The Hawks sounding like the most enormous band in the world helps, of course, giving a ravishing foundation, whilst atop it Dylan's harmonica stabs are the equivalent of John Cale's viola scrapes or the feedback wails of 'Sister Ray' guitars; they are Ornette Coleman's horn eruptions. And when it ends, his single 'Thank You' as he leaves the stage sounds so empty it could break your heart.
For that recording and that 'thank you' alone I have enough reasons to love Bob Dylan for the rest of my life.
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