I was in my freshman year of college, which I hate to admit was in 1970-71, when I picked up the best rock concert album I've ever heard. Nobody since, not the Sex Pistols or the Stooges, Nine Inch Nails or Kiss, has outdone the teetering-on-the-abyss urgency of Dylan's Royal Albert Hall Concert.
Now, 27 years later, long after I wore out the cheap plastic of the bootlegged double album, called Zimmerman in this particular pressing, I get to hear it without Like a Rolling Stone running out in mid-song.
The album was tucked away in the back row of a run-down record store just off campus. I had no idea what the two-LP set contained, other than it was a Dylan bootleg. I thought it would be outtakes from studio sessions.
Instead, it was a live album of what we know today was a performance by Bob Dylan at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, rather than his Albert Hall concert from the same tour.
Savvy pirates
These bootleggers were smart. The concert was in two parts -- acoustic and electric. Dylan played the acoustic part first, but the bootleggers labeled the electric part as the first disc. Good move, because as emotionally charged and wondrously sung (well, compared to the way Bob sings these days) the acoustic part was, the electric part was even more so.
Dylan and the Hawks (you know, the guys who became the Band) played the most outrageous noise ever made, before anyone made up the rules for outrageous noise. To hear himself over the noise of the band, Dylan shouted the lyrics in a manner completely different from the acoustic set or from the way he sang before. (This was the beginning of the blenderized vocals he offers these days.)
The lyrics were always the point with Dylan, but his melodies usually were more than workable. He threw all that out when performing with the Hawks behind him. Instead they played the chord progressions and Dylan bent and twisted the melodies, making mincemeat of the intellectual meaning of his words.
The boy can rage
So what? The emotional intensity of the performance carried the weight of betrayal he wrote about in I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Met). The guy was definitely feeling it on stage.
This was a mean noise, but the beat, the volume, Robbie Robertson's stinging guitar leads and the undertone of Garth Hudson's organ, made it a liberating, joyful experience too.
The bootlegged copy of the concert I bought so long ago is hard to interpret. The tension between Dylan and the audience is indecipherable. Without being able to hear the audience, I though Dylan was putting the audience on when he screamed, "I don't believe you! You're a liar!" before he went into his closing song, Like a Rolling Stone. That's one reason the belated CD version that he finally released as The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966 -- The 'Royal Albert Hall' Concert is great. Listeners can hear the fuel for Dylan's furious performance.
The second side of my bootlegged LP was so crammed with music that the bootleggers couldn't fit all of Like a Rolling Stone onto it. Rather than fade the song out, they just let the groove run into the label, sending my needle skating across it and cutting off the music in mid-rage. The complete version of the CD is better, offering a chance to hear what would become Dylan's anthem, when it was fresh and without any inkling of the warhorse it would become.
Dylan has made way too many official concert albums of fairly mediocre shows. Only After the Flood, from his "comeback" tour with the Band in 1974 comes close to the fire of the 1966 tour. (Although the short set he did on Concert for Bangla Desh shows off the gentleman farmer Dylan of the early '70s to good effect.)
Regardless, Live 1966 is the only Dylan concert album you have to have.
