Fifty-four years ago, on January 24, 1961, Bob Dylan arrived in New York, where within a few months he would not only get a rave review in the New York Times and meet the legendary record man and producer, John Hammond, but would be signed by Hammond to Columbia Records and by the end of the year he’d record his first album, Bob Dylan.
Dylan recorded his first six albums in New York, and the city was his base of operations from ’61 into ’66.
I thought I’d pull together some of Bob’s recordings that are either about or take place in New York in some way, or were recorded in New York.
“Talkin New York” live at Town Hall, April 12, 1963:
“Song To Woody”:
“Hard Times In New York” recorded by Cynthia Gooding, March 11, 1962:
“Spanish Harlem Incident,” alternate take:
“Ballad In Plain D,” alternate take 2 (partial):
“She Belongs To Me,” Free Trade Hall, Manchester, May 7, 1965:
“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” Free Trade Hall, Manchester, May 7, 1965:
“Freeze Out 1,” (“Visions Of Johanna” outtake):
ttp://youtu.be/WYifDaD96rM
“Love Minus Zero/ No Limit” and “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window” and “From A Buick 6” (alternate takes):
Bob Dylan and his band at the Madison Square Garden Theater, January 20 1998.
Set List:
Absolutely Sweet Marie
Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You
Cold Irons Bound
Born In Time
Silvio
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
Girl From The North Country
Tangled Up In Blue
Million Miles
Positively 4th Street
‘Til I Fell In Love With You
Highway 61 Revisited
Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
Love Sick
Rainy Day Women #12 & 35
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 –-
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.]
[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.]
The major musical event of 2014 was the release of Bob Dylan and The Band’s ‘Basement Tapes’ recordings – 140 of them (if you include the two songs included in the hidden track at the end of disc six). But beyond the six-plus hours of mostly better quality versions of these songs than we’ve heard before (along with a batch of songs that haven’t made the bootlegs – at least the ones I got my hands on), a lot of other noteworthy albums were released during the year.
The list that follows is based on what I heard and what I liked. No one can listen to everything, and I don’t pretend to try. But these albums are good ones, and if you haven’t heard some of them, I hope you’ll check them out.
1 Bob Dylan, The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11 (Columbia): As I wrote when the set was released: Dylan’s best songs are not the straightforward protest songs from the early ‘60s – “Masters Of War” or “The Times They Are A-Changing.” Rather, it’s songs like “Visions Of Johanna,” songs that are opaque. Songs that defy literal understanding. Those are the great ones. I’ve listened to “Visions Of Johanna” 100s of times and still its mysteries remain intact. And a song such as “I’m Not There” – do you know what it’s about? … The lyrics to many of Dylan’s Basement songs are opaque too; as if they’re written in an invisible ink, or in a language that defies translation. And it’s that mystery that keeps bringing me back. One line stands out, gives up something one day, then pulls it back on another.
“Ain’t No More Cane (Take 2)”:
2 Jolie Holland, Wine Dark Sea (Anti): Jolie Holland moved into a whole other zone with the avant-garde guitar sounds that help define “Wine Dark Sea.” She takes her idiosyncratic version of Americana, integrates some wild noise (think Sonic Youth) rock guitar and the result is thrilling. Holland is an incredible singer and songwriter. Perhaps my favorite here is “The Love You Save,” which finds Holland trumping the late Janis Joplin with her take on the Stax/Volt soul of the mid-‘60s.
Jolie Holland – Full Performance (Live on KEXP):
Songs:
First Sign Of Spring
On and On
Out On The Wine Dark Sea
Who Are you
3 Angel Olson, Burn Your Fire For No Witness (Jagjaguwar): At times on Angel Olson’s moving second album, as on “White Fire,” she sounds like a female Leonard Cohen. At other times it’s the Velvets I hear a faint echo of, but on the final track, “Windows,” what I hear is Angel Olson, what I hear is an exquisitely beautiful sound, even as she sings about a man who is oblivious to those around him. Her voice has a fragile quality, but there’s strength too.
“Windows”:
4 Wadada Leo Smith, The Great Lake Suites (Tum): A musician friend of mine compares this album favorably to Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, and I agree. Over two discs composer/band leader Wadada Leo Smith (trumpet), Henry Threadgill (alto saxophone, flute and bass flute), Jack DeJohnette (drums) and John Lindberg (double bass) deliver music as intense and spiritual as Coltrane and his combo. And an hour and a half after you start listening, when the music’s over, you’ll want to start it up all over again. This is one for the ages.
5 Karen O, Crush Songs (Kobalt): This low-fi bedroom recording of Yeah Yeah Yeah front woman O’s “crush” songs is intimate and addictive. There’s a hint of the Velvets’ third album here, and that’s a good thing. Proof that anyone with the songs and the voice can make their own “Basement Tapes.”
“Body”:
6 Spoon, They Want My Soul (Loma Vista/Republic): The album title nails what’s going on these days, when corporate America won’t settle for anything less than turning us into unthinking all-consuming zombies. I’ve been a Spoon fan since the mid-‘90s and this album of smart poppy rock is up there with their best. “Rainy Taxi” is intoxicating, and “knock Knock Knock” as well, but the whole album is a keeper. These Austin rockers are fighting the good fight, and winning.
7 Sharon Van Etten, Are We There (Jagjaguwar): The trials of a woman trying to deal with a (sometimes not-so-good) relationship is the theme running through Are We There. Whether these songs are about Van Etten’s real life, when one listens to this album they might as well be – these songs feel so confessional. With haunting voice and music that perfectly suits her theme, Sharon Van Etten has turned pain into songs that are deep, self-reflective and at times confrontational. Check these lyrics from “Your Love Is Killing Me”:
“Break my legs so I won’t walk to you.
Cut my tongue so I can’t talk to you.
Burn my skin so I can’t feel you.
Stab my eyes so I can’t see
You like it when I let you walk over me.
You tell me that you like it.
Your love is killing me.”
Wow!
“Your Love Is Killing Me”:
8 Tweedy, Sukierae (ANTI):Tweedy and his son Spencer recorded this 20 song album with help from a few musician friends. It’s beautiful and moving and wonderful. Tweedy says it’s a two record set and suggests the vinyl version is the best way to listen. Very Beatlesque at times – check out “Summer Noon.”
“Summer Noon”:
9 Ex-Hex, Rips (Merge): Mary Timony’s new band delivers a garage-rock explosion of a debut album. There are echoes of The Ramones and Patti Smith and Timony’s friends, Sleater-Kinney in the 12 songs. Great guitar riffs from Timony. There’s a priceless energy in these tracks. This trio is on fire.
10 tUnE-yArDs, Nikki Nack (4AD): Merrill Garbus has voice, a big soulful voice and she can really sing. And when you can really sing, and you have the knock for writing catchy songs with loads of hooks, you can go wild with the music and make it work. Sometimes it sounds like Garbus has utilized every object in the junkyard to make her unorthodox tracks, and at other times only her voice.
Also great:
11 Lykke Li, I Never Learn (Atlantic):
12 Lucinda Williams, Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone (Highway 20)
13 The Hold Steady, Teeth Dreams (Razor & Tie)
14 The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground – 45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition (Ume):
15 The War On Drugs, Lost In The Dream (Secretly Canadian)
The Velvet Underground, “I’m Waiting For The Man”:
Books:
(In no particular order – these are all great!)
The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll In Ten Songs, Greil Marcus (Yale University Press): Greil Marcus’ latest book is all about what Marcus hears when he listens to ten songs, and what he hears is unexpected and sometimes revelatory. It’s not any kind of history of rock that you or I have ever read before, because Marcus sees no point in revisiting the same old story that we’ve read numerous versions of since the ‘60s. Not a history so much as a theory about rock ‘n’ roll, and then ten examples that, in different ways, back up that theory. Amazing.
I loved You More, Tom Spanbauer (Hawthorne): Tom’s Spanbauer’s book is 466 pages of heartbreak. Think about the love affair that went so wrong for you, the one that tore you down, left you devastated and in pieces. Yeah, that’s this book. Beautifully written. Every sentence is a gem.
A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, Holly George-Warren (Viking): A superbly written biography of Alex Chilton, who is best known as one of the leaders of Big Star. If you start to read it, you soon will find yourself deep into both the Big Star recordings and Chilton’s solo work before you know it.
Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay, Elena Ferrante, (Europa Editions): The third in what looks to be a four book series that follows two girls in Italy from childhood to old age. With this book, Ferrante adds politics to the volatile mix of love, sex, family, money and friendship that fuels the first two.
Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues, Joel Selvin (Counterpoint): More than just a biography of Bert Burns, who wrote such classics as “Here Comes the Night,” “Piece of My Heart,” and “Twist and Shout,” discovered Van Morrison, produced records including “Under The Boardwalk” for The Drifters and so much more, Selvin also manages to detail the history of the New York-based rhythm and blues business.
My Struggle (books 1, 2 & 3), Karl Ove Knausgaard (Macmillan): This year I read the first three books of this six volume epic semi-fictional autobiography. Knausgaard goes deep into his first person narrator’s psychology, as he lays out his life for us in minute detail. Somehow it’s fascinating, even when it seems like he’s telling us way more than we need to know. Mesmerizing.
On Highway 61, Dennis McNally (Counterpoint): Actually, I’m only a third of the way through this incredible book, but it’s so good I have to include it. McNally has written the history of how blacks and whites influenced each other musically, as they created what he calls cultural freedom. Along the way he tells the stories of Mark Twain, Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Lead Belly, John Hammond, Sr., Thelonious Monk and many, many others. More on this book in 2015.
I like this cover of Bob Dylan’s “Paths of Victory” from a Cat Power performance at Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA in 1999.
Dylan recorded the song in November 1962 at the Broadside offices in New York and it appeared on The Whitmark Demos: 1962 – 1964 Bootleg Series album.
He also recorded it on August 12, 1963 for The Times They Are A-Changin’, but of course didn’t include it on that album. That version made it onto the very first Bootleg Series set.
Here’s the version of “Paths Of Victory” Dylan cut for The Times They Are A-Changin’:
