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
Pushed It Over The End (AKA Citizen Kane Jr. Blues)
Long May You Run
Greensleeves
Ambulance Blues
Helpless
Revolution Blues
On The Beach
Roll Another Number
Motion Pictures
Pardon My Heart
Dance Dance Dance
Some months back the extraordinary experimental guitarist Henry Kaiser dropped an advance of his upcoming collaboration with free jazz guitarist Ray Russell, The Celestial Squid.
The album is a free jazz mindblower.
Today a 12 minute promo video for the album was released:
I’ve been digging Kaiser’s music since the late ’70s when I wrote a short article about him for New West magazine. We subsequently became friends. Recently, in December, we collaborated when Henry improvised as i read from my novel, True Love Scars, at Down Home Music in El Cerrito, CA.
Here’s info on the album direct from Cuneiform Records, which will release it on February 3, 2015.
Guitar summits don’t ascend higher than when legendary British free-jazz pioneer and longtime session ace Ray Russell meets the brilliant California avant-improv overachiever and Antarctic diver Henry Kaiser in the realm of The Celestial Squid. With more than countless session and soundtrack performances to his credit, including the early James Bond film scores, Russell is returning to his bone-rattling, noise-rocking roots for the first time since the very early 70s. You’ll be shaken and stirred as Kaiser, Russell and eight super friends deliver a no-holds-barred, free-range sonic cage match.
Russell created some of the early ’70s’ most outrageously outside music, releasing hallmark works of guitar shock-and-awe. Russell’s “stabbing, singing notes and psychotic runs up the fretboard have nothing to do with scalular architecture,” wrote All Music’s Thom Jurek, “but rather with viscera and tonal exploration.” Russell anticipated the wildest and most intrepid vibrations of Terje Rypdal, Dave Fuzinski, Sonic Youth, Keiji Haino, Tisziji Muñoz and their boundary-dissolving ilk. Russell is hardly a niche performer, though. Untold millions of music and film fans have actually, if unknowingly, already enjoyed Russell’s riffs – at least if they saw any of the James Bond films that John Barry scored, beginning with Dr. No in 1962.
For over 40 years, Russell would not make such exploratory music until West Coast guitar experimentalist Henry Kaiser called him out of the blue and asked if he would be interested in co-leading an ensemble in the style of his ’71 masterpiece, Live at the ICA: June 11th 1971. Russell was surprised and delighted by the offer, and readily accepted. Why had he waited so long to once again explore the free-jazz spaceways you might well wonder? Simple – no one had asked him to do so!
So on April 12, 2014, Henry Kaiser and Ray Russell – along with drummers Weasel Walter and William Winant, bassists Michael Manring (electric) and Damon Smith (acoustic), and saxophonists Steve Adams, Joshua Allen, Phillip Greenlief, and Aram Shelton – entered Berkeley, California’s Fantasy Studios for a day-long session that resulted in The Celestial Squid, a nearly eighty-minute embryonic journey through the deepest waters and most cosmic heights of improvised music. Except for melodic heads and compositional structures, everything on The Celestial Squid is improvised, down to some astonishing extemporaneous horn arrangements. While The Celestial Squid echoes the raw energy and youthful bravado of Russell’s earliest achievements, this music synergizes the combined power and imagination of all ten of these musical masters into a force to be reckoned with.
guitars: Henry Kaiser, Ray Russell
saxophones: Steve Adams, Joshua Allen, Phillip Greenlief, Aram Shelton
electric bass: Michael Manring
acoustic bass: Damon Smith
drums: Weasel Walter, William Winant
recorded live by Adam Munoz at Fantasy Studios, Berkeley, CA on April 12, 2014
mixed by Henry Kaiser, Adam Munoz, Weasel Walter at Fantasy Studios, Berkeley, CA
mastered by Paul Stubblebine
artwork and art direction by Brandy Gale
production by Henry Kaiser
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 –-
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.
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.]
