CD of the week: Adam Sweeting
Thirty-two years after it was recorded, Live 1966: The Royal Albert Hall (Columbia), the official release of this remarkable live performance arrives in a transformed world, albeit one that has long acknowledged it as some of Bob Dylan’s most awesome music. (The gig took place at the Manchester Trade Hall, not, as per legend, the Royal Albert Hall, but that is still how it is known.)
Robbie Robertson, lead guitarist of Dylan’s backing band The Hawks (later The Band), has recalled the bizarre atmosphere of chaos and confrontation that surrounded their 1966 concerts. “You can hear the violence, and the dynamics in the music. We’d go from town to town, from country to country and it was like a job. We set up, we played, they booed and threw things at us.
“The only reason tapes of those shows exist today is because we wanted to know, `Are we crazy?’ We’d go back to the hotel room, listen to a tape of the show and think, `Shit, that’s not bad. Why is everybody so upset?’ “
If it made no sense then, now it sounds like music from a galaxy far, far away. Everything surrounding it serves to reinforce the enigma of Dylan at his creative peak, when even The Beatles gathered round to pay homage.
The recording catches Dylan soaring weightlessly in a space that no pop musician had previously inhabited. With The Hawks, Dylan had evolved his own intoxicating brew of rockabilly- powered, acid-surrealist rock music. It ought to have sounded vaguely familiar to anybody au fait with The Beatles or Stones, yet even now the scale and scope is staggering.
Dig, if you will, the way Dylan’s incredulous wail swirls above the pumping funkiness of Tell Me Mama (“something is tearing up your miiiiiiind”). Thrill to the singer’s deadpan cheek as he introduces I Don’t Believe You with a folky squawk on his harmonica. “It used to be like that,” he intones, “and now it goes like this” – cue thunderous bass and drum intro. During Ballad of a Thin Man, the musicians drive you into a corner with their terrifying musical reconstruction of a nervous breakdown. When Dylan sings “I don’t have the strength to get up and take another sh-o-o-o-o-o-o-t” in Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues, the sentiment is echoed in the strung-out dementia of Robertson’s guitar and Garth Hudson’s itchy, neurotic organ- playing.
But the electric performances are only half the story, since the first disc of two contains the complete solo acoustic set with which Dylan opened the show. Here, he gives himself room to re-frame some of his richest and most evocative songs. In Visions of Johanna, he floats the huge tapestry of the lyric over a slow but elastic tempo, often cutting in sharply at the start of a verse, then easing back and allowing more air in as the saga progresses. In contrast, It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue is taken at a crisp pace.
Desolation Row never fulfils its epic pretensions, and Tambourine Man is marred by some vocal eccentricities, but Just Like a Woman is suffused with a forlorn introspection the Blonde on Blonde version lacked.
Throughout, it’s striking how much care Dylan takes with his diction and pronunciation. But these were the days when rock music wasn’t afraid to jostle for space alongside poetry or literature, and if you paid attention you could learn something. And you still might.