A decade and a half ago Bob Dylan was still filling his sets songs from his past.
On November 19, 2001 he brought his band to the Madison Square Garden Arena in New York and performed a set that included songs from many of the albums he recorded in the ’60s and early ’70s.
Someone was nice enough to share this very cool video of the show:
Set List:
Wait For The Light To Shine
It Ain’t Me, Babe
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
Searching For A Soldier’s Grave
Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum
Just Like A Woman
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
Lonesome Day Blues
High Water (For Charley Patton)
Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
Tangled Up In Blue
John Brown
Summer Days
Sugar Baby
Drifter’s Escape
Rainy Day Women #12 & 35
Things Have Changed
Like A Rolling Stone
Forever Young
Honest With Me
Blowin’ In The Wind
All Along The Watchtower
Forty-one years ago, on January 10, 1974, Bob Dylan and The Band played the second of a two-night run at the Maple Leaf Gardens in
Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
The 1974 tour had begun just seven days earlier at Chicago Stadium in Chicago, Illinois. The second Toronto show was Dylan’s sixth performance of the tour.
It was, of course, Dylan’s first tour with The Band since they had stormed through Europe together, dismaying many fans of Dylan’s ‘folk’ phase with some of the most exciting rock ‘n’ roll ever played on this planet.
It was a huge tour — the shows were held at arenas across the country. In Oakland in February 1974, for example, two shows at the Oakland Coliseum Arena sold out.
Here’s a recording of “As I Went Out One Morning,” from the second night at the Maple Leaf Gardens.
It’s from a bootleg of the show, As I Went Out One Evening.
According to www.bjorner.com this is the only time Bob Dylan has ever performed “As I Went Out One Morning” live.
“As I Went Out One Morning” appeared on John Wesley Harding.
Plus the John Wesley Harding version:
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
Bob Dylan talking via phone to A.J. Weberman on Jan 6th & 9th, 1971.
You can listen or download over at the ubuweb site.
I found this comment on ubuweb about the recordings of interest:
The material shows amazing insight into Dylan as a human being, a family man and an artist.
Here’s the full info about these recordings as posted on ubuweb:
These are the telephone tapes made by A.J. Weberman of two phone calls (Jan 6th & 9th, 1971) to Bob Dylan regarding an article published by Weberman concerning Bob Dylan. Weberman became infamous for going through Dylan’s trash and selling the garbage he found. I obtained this copy of these recordings from a generation-counting private collector in Ireland 15 years ago and, at the time, I was told they were sourced from a reel to reel copy made from Weberman’s cassettes, rather than from the Folkways LP edition. The material shows amazing insight into Dylan as a human being, a family man and an artist. I decided not to try to clean up the material using DSP since the previous trader left it as he got it.”
Angel Olsen is one of my favorite contemporary artists. Thanks to Doom & Gloom at the Tomb and NYC Taper we get to hear her recent set at the Bowery Ballroom in New York.
You can steam the set below or head to NYCTaper and download as MP3s or Flacs.
Interview with Albert Harry “Al” Schmitt, the engineer on Bob Dylan’s upcoming album, Shadows In The Night, which was recorded at Capitol Records studio B in Los Angeles.
Schmitt, who is also a producer, has worked with Frank Sinatra, Henry Mancini, Cal Tjader, Al Hirt, Rosemary Clooney, Liverpool Five, The Astronauts, Sam Cooke, Steely Dan, Neil Young and many more.
Santa Clarita journalist Stephen K. Peeples interviews Schmitt.
“It’s like nothing you’ve ever heard Dylan do,” Schmitt says of Shadows In The Night.
Pretty technical interview but interesting all the same.
Schmitt says 23 songs were recorded, although only ten are on the album.
This is apparently the first of eight segments, but it’s not clear how much more of the interview is about the Dylan album.
“Don’t Look Back,” the documentary of Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England, is wonderful in its entirety, but here we have a great scene in the Savoy Hotel that took place on May 3rd or 4th 1965, in which first we see Dylan typing — presumably working typing up song lyrics from handwritten notes — while Joan Baez sings Dylan’s “Percy’s Song” and then his great “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word.”
Next Dylan takes the guitar to sing some of two Hank William’s classics: “Lost Highway,” with the opening line, “I’m a rolling Stone….” and “I’m So Lonesome I could Cry.”
Dylan recorded “Percy’s Song” during the sessions for The Times They Are A-Changin’ in 1963 but didn’t include it on the album.
Dylan wrote “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word” in 1965, so it was a new song when Baez started singing it.
“Lost Highway” was written by country singer-songwriter Leon Payne in 1948 and recorded by Hank Williams in 1949.
“I’m So Lonesome I could Cry” was written and recorded by Williams in 1949.
Here’s Dylan singing “Percy’s Song” live at the Carnegie Hall, 1963:
Here’s Hank Williams doing “Lost Highway” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”:
Joan Baez sings “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word”:
Forty-one years ago, Bob Dylan and The Band opened their historic 1974 tour with “Hero Blues,” an unreleased Dylan song that he recorded in 1962 during The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan sessions but left off the album.
The show took place at the Chicago Stadium in Chicago, Illinois.
Here are versions recorded during The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan sessions:
Take one:
Take two:
Tale four:
Lyrics:
Yes, the gal I got
I swear she’s the screaming end
She wants me to be a hero
So she can tell all her friends
Well, she begged, she cried
She pleaded with me all last night
Well, she begged, she cried
She pleaded with me all last night
She wants me to go out
And find somebody to fight
She reads too many books
She got new movies inside her head
She reads too many books
She got movies inside her head
She wants me to walk out running
She wants me to crawl back dead
You need a different kinda man, babe
One that can grab and hold your heart
Need a different kind of man, babe
One that can hold and grab your heart
You need a different kind of man, babe
You need Napoleon Boneeparte
Well, when I’m dead
No more good times will I crave
When I’m dead
No more good times will I crave
You can stand and shout hero
All over my lonesome grave
Forty years ago, on December 30, 1974, Bob Dylan finished recording Blood On The Tracks at Sound 80 Studios in Minneapolis; on that day he rerecorded three songs for the album.
He had recorded a version of the entire album in New York, but after he played the album for his brother David Zimmerman, decided to recut some of it in Minneapolis with his brother producing.
“I had the acetate,” Dylan said later, after the album was released. “I hadn’t listened to it for a couple of months. The record still hadn’t come out, and I put it on. I just didn’t… I thought the songs could have sounded differently, better. So I went in and re-recorded them.”
The musicians he used in Minneapolis: Greg Inhofer (keyboards), Bill Berg (drums) and Chris Weber (guitar, 12-string guitar), Bill Peterson (bass), Peter Ostroushko (mandolin) and Kevin Odegard (guitar).
That day Dylan tried one more time to nail “Tangled Up In Blue,” “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” and “If You See Her, Say Hello.”
Clearly he was pleased with the outcome, as those were the takes that ended up on the album.
(According to Clinton Heylin, Dylan may have recorded “Meet Me In The Morning” that day too, although Michael Krogsgaard, who was given access to the recording sheets of the sessions, didn’t find that song listed.)
According to Wikipedia, Dylan told Mary Travers in a radio interview in April 1975: “A lot of people tell me they enjoy that album. It’s hard for me to relate to that. I mean… people enjoying that type of pain, you know?”
Dylan once said that “Tangled Up In Blue” took ten years to live and two years to write.
Dyaln also said of “Tangled Up In Blue”: “What’s different about it is that there’s a code in the lyrics, and there’s also no sense of time. I was trying to make it like a painting where you can see the different parts but then you also see the whole of it… the characters change from the first person to the third person, and you’re never quite sure if the third person is talking or the first person is talking. But if you look at the whole thing it doesn’t really matter.”
“Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” official version:
“If You See Her, Say Hello,” official version:
Outtakes
“Tangled Up In Blue”:
“Tangled Up In Blue”:
“Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”:
“If You See Her Say Hello”:
Check out my post on “If You See Her, Say Hello” here.
“Meet Me In The Morning,” alternate take, recorded September 19, 1974 according to Harold Lepidus at the Bob Dylan Examiner site. (This version was officially released in 2012 as the B side of the “Duquesne Whistle” single):
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[I recently published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Forty-Seven years ago, on December 27, 1967, following just three one-day recording sessions, Bob Dylan released his minimalist masterpiece, John Wesley Harding.
“We can all relax now,” wrote the music critic Ralph J. Gleason in Rolling Stonefollowing the release of John Wesley Harding. “Bob Dylan isn’t dead. He is all right. He is well and he’s not a basket case hidden from our view forever, the lovely words and the haunting sounds gone as a result of some ghastly effect of his accident.
“And his head is in the right place, which, is after all, the best news of all.”
While the best-known song off the album is “All Along The Watchtower,” due to Jim Hendrix’s explosive rock version, every song is a gem.
Dylan recorded in Nashville with producer Bob Johnston, and for all but the final two songs, was accompanied by just two other musicians, drummer Kenny Buttrey and bassist Charlie McCoy. Pete Drake played steel guitar on the two country songs, “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” and “Down ALong The Cove.”
Some comments Dylan made, according to the Drifter’s Escape blog:
“I didn’t intentionally come out with some kind of mellow sound. I didn’t sit down and plan that sound.”
“There’s only two songs on the album which came at the same time as the music…’Down Along the Cove’ and ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’. The rest of the songs were written out on paper, and I found the tunes for them later. I didn’t do it before, and I haven’t done it since. That might account for the specialness of that album.”
“I asked Columbia to release it with no publicity and no hype, because this was the season of hype.”
“What I’m trying to do now is not use too many words. There’s no line that you can stick your finger through, there’s no hole in any of the stanzas. There’s no blank filler. Each line has something.”
In an interview published in Newsweek in February 1968 Dylan told writer Hubert Saal:
“I was always with the traditional song. I just used electricity to wrap it up in. Probably I wasn’t ready yet to make it simple. It’s more complicated playing an electric guitar because you’re five or ten feet away from the sound and you strain for things that you don’t have to when the sound is right next to your body. Anyway it’s the song itself that matters, not the sound of the song.”
“I could have sung each of them better. I’m not exactly dissatisfied but I’m just not about to brag about the performance. In writing songs I have one great trouble. I’m lazy. I wish I could but you’re not going to find me sitting down at the piano every morning. Either it comes or doesn’t. Of course some songs, like ‘Restless Farewell,’ I’ve written just to fill up an album. And there are songs in which I made up a whole verse just to get to another verse.”
“It [John Wesley Harding] holds together better. I’ve always tried to get simple. I haven’t always succeeded. But here I took more care in the writing. In Blonde on Blonde I wrote out all the songs in the studio. The musicians played cards, I wrote out a song, we’d do it they’d go back to their game and I’d write out another song.”
Dylan talked to John Cohen and Happy Traum in June and July, 1968, for Sing Out!
Dylan talks about ballads and then John Cohen asks if “Wicked Messenger” is a ballad.
Dylan: In a sense, but the ballad form isn’t there. Well, the scope is there atually, but in a more compressed sense. The scope opens up, just by a few little tricks. I know why it opens up, but in a bllad in the true sense, it woudl’t open ujp that way. It does not reach the proportions I had intended for it.
Cohen: Have you ever written a ballad?
Dylan: I believe on my second record album, “Boots of Spanish Leather.”
Cohen: Then most of the songs on John Wesley Harding, you don’t consider ballads?
Dylan: Well I do, but not in the traditional sense. I haven’t fulfilled the balladeer’s job. A balladeer can sit down and sing three ballads for an hour and a half. See, on the album, you have to think about it after you hear it, that’s what takes up the time, but with a ballad, you don’t necessarily have to think about it after you hear it, it can all unfold to you. These melodies on the John Wesley Harding album lack this traditional sense of time. As with the third verse of the ‘Wicked Messenger,’ which opens it up, and then the time schedule takes a jump and soon the song becomes wider. One realizes that when one hears it, but one might have to adapt to it. But we are not hearing anything that isn’t there; anything we can imagine is really there. The same thing is true of the song ‘All ALong the Watchtower,’ which opens up in a slightly different way, in a stranger way, for here we have the cycle of events working in a rather reverse order.
About songwritng Dylan says: It’s like this painter who lives around here — he paints the area in a radius of twenty miles, he paints bright strong pictures. He might take a barn from twenty miles away, and hook it up with a brook right next door, then with a car ten miles away, and with the sky on some certain day, and the light on the trees from another certain day. A person passing by will be painted alongside someone ten miles away. And in the end he’ll have this composite picture of something which you can’t say exists in his mind. It’s not that he started off willfully painting this picture from all his experience … That’s more or less what I do.
[This year I published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
