Positively official: Bob Dylan 1966

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.

Copyright © 1998, Salvatore Caputo

Jeff Buckley: Son traced father's footsteps to life's edge

A certain yearning, ghostly quality in Chris Isaak's voice reminded me of Tim Buckley, so I asked Isaak if he was a fan. He said, "No." (So much for some of those theories "critics" espouse.) However, Isaak offered that he'd heard Buckley's son Jeff and that he was a mean guitar player. I filed that info away mentally. Even though I was a big fan, I hadn't realized that Tim Buckley had any kids. After Jeff Buckley made a little bit of a stir in subterranean New York, he signed a record contract in 1993. He soon put out an ep, LIVE AT SIN-E, and followed up with his full-length album, GRACE, in 1994. I was struck by how much he looked and sounded like his dad. Jeff Buckley's voice had that yearning, ghostly quality in spades. When I interviewed him in advance of his visit to Tempe's Mill Avenue Theater in November 1994, it became clear that he was not a fan of his dad's. Why should he be? Tim abandoned Jeff's mother, Mary, before the boy was born. His own man Jeff wasn't exactly resentful. He said he liked his father's music, but that he liked other music much more. He covered Leonard Cohen on his album. After interviewing Jeff Buckley, all I had were questions. Was his musical talent hard-wired into his genes, a present from his long-dead dad? Even though Jeff was not a fan of his dad's music, there was a similar exotic bent to their vocals and choice of chords. Is destiny a product more of nature than nurture? Jeff Buckley admitted that he wasn't happy in school, that there was no job track for him, that he lived and breathed being a musician. Just like his dad! Now that he was performing and recording he said, "I'm the luckiest boy in the world." The news of Jeff Buckley's death at age 30 on May 29 left me breathless, like a blow to the stomach. "Not again! He was so young!" Not again? Jeff Buckley only died once, drowning in the Mississippi on the edge of Memphis. Yet it did seem like a deja vu. His dad died of a toxic combination of heroin and alcohol at age 28 in June of 1975. Jeff had met Tim only once, just a few weeks before the overdose. Outrunning demons When I talked to him, the son seemed determined to be stable; to outrun the demons that plagued his dad. Now, there are unresolved questions about why he drowned in the Mississippi. Some say he was a smack user. I can't imagine his mother's sadness. To lose a child at all is tough, but to lose him in a way that dredges up the long-dead past must be painful beyond belief. Jeff Buckley's career got off the ground in Greenwich Village, a place that loomed large in Tim Buckley's career development as well. Jeff's first major appearance was at a tribute to his father. He sang Tim's Once I Was, a song that asks, "Sometimes I wonder, just for a while, will you ever remember me?" Some of us will remember them for a long time and wonder if sons are always doomed to walk in their fathers' footsteps. Copyright © 1997, Salvatore Caputo