With occasional reflection on the perpetual absurdity/intrigue of life and society in general.

Saturday, November 19, 2022

The Optical Files #162: Bob Dylan - Live 1966 (1998)


This album, the official title of which (The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert) is a mouthful, first came to my attention when my high school band director described a legendary Dylan bootleg where he responds to being heckled for "going electric" by telling his band to "play fucking loud" before tearing into "Like a Rolling Stone." It's one of the most famous & widely circulated bootlegs, certainly in Dylan-dom, maybe in all of popular music, & in the spirit of bootlegging, I obtained a few tracks through file sharing. Many years later, toward the end of my Bob Dylan CD-buying days but when I was still feeling like a completist, I purchased the official release of the concert. Setting aside this set's legendary status, as a listening experience it's just okay. By bootleg standards, the quality is fair to good, but by live album standards it's pretty poor. Lots of plosives pop in the mic, the acoustic guitar is thin, the band mix is heavy on the treble, & the lower end sounds muffled. Moreover, Dylan sounds uncomfortable delivering some of the songs, putting emphasis on odd syllables (like "you" in the chorus of "Mr. Tambourine Man") & just generally sounding strained a lot of the time--not to mention how he fills the overlong performances on Disc 1 with meandering harmonica solos that go nowhere.

By all accounts this is a pretty standard Dylan show for this period: an acoustic set followed by an electric set, with 4 songs from the soon-to-be-released Blonde on Blonde album in the mix. As usual, we get some different arrangements from the recorded versions, but aside from a splendid full-band rendering of "I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)," nothing is too inspired. An acoustic version of "Visions of Johanna" strips the song down to a vulnerable vocal, but I think that tune needs the rest of the band to give it its teeth. After you hear the uptempo "Ballad of a Thin Man" on Before the Flood, any version played slower--like this one & even the original studio version--just sounds like the thin man is trying to ford a river of molasses. "One Too Many Mornings," one of his most subtly heartrending songs, is given a full-band treatment here that does no justice to the hushed pre-dawn spareness of the original. The 1 song you can't get anywhere else, disc 2 opener "Tell Me, Momma," is lackluster. Apparently Dylan played it in every show on this tour, then never played it live again & never recorded a studio version. I think I have a pretty good idea as to why.

The mythic status of this bootleg plays up the narrative that Dylan got booed everywhere he went for plugging in his guitar, but the recording itself doesn't really bear that out. To my ears, both sets sound very warmly appreciated by the audience. You can hear a little grumbling here & there leading up to the famous "Judas" moment, but the roar of applause is much louder. Not to mention, "Maggie's Farm" was a year & 2 albums ago--I know information moved slower back then, but you would think these Brits would have had enough time to be shocked by the evolution of Dylan's style. 

Aside from "I Don't Believe You," I can think of a better live version of every song here. There is a certain raw exuberance that comes through, but nothing, again, that you can't find elsewhere. But if nothing else, Live 1966 is proof that vital historical documents don't always translate into pleasant listens.

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