861. Bob Dylan - Live 1966 (1998)

Track Listing

CD 1

1. She Belongs To Me
2. Fourth Time Around
3. Visions Of Johanna
4. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
5. Desolation Row
6. Just Like A Woman
7. Mr. Tambourine Man

CD 2

1. Tell Me, Momma
2. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
3. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
4. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
5. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
6. One Too Many Mornings
7. Ballad Of A Thin Man
8. Like A Rolling Stone

Review

In 1966 Bob Dylan performed a concert in Manchester that went down in history. In it a Mancunian famously screamed out Judas after Ballad of a Thin Man accusing Dylan of having sold out by going electric.

This recording captures that moment, the birth pangs of folk-rock in all their glory. The event has become part of Manchester's mythology, and even if it may now seem ridiculous to us, Dylan's move seeming perfectly natural, it sends us back to a time where people were invested in their music, in this case folk, with a strength that is rare these days. They were wrong, of course.

This recording is also particularly great because of Dylan's defiant attitude throughout. He knew what to expect and he knew that his shift midway through the concert to electric would elicit the results that it did, the slow clapping and abuse. But he didn't give a shit and gave the concert of his life. The most important bootleg in history? Definitely.

Track Highlights

1. Like A Roling Stone
2. Tell Me Momma
3. 4th Time Around
4. Ballad of a Thin Man

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The early bootleg LPs attributed the recording to one of Dylan's tour-closing concerts at London's Royal Albert Hall. However, Dylan's now-legendary confrontation with a heckler calling out "Judas" from the audience, clearly heard on the recording, was well-documented as having occurred at Manchester's Free Trade Hall on May 17, 1966. After "Judas!", there is clapping, followed by more heckles. One of those shouts, barely audible on the record, is a man shouting, "I'm never listening to you again, ever!" Dylan then says "I don't believe you", then after a long pause, "You're a liar." Then, Dylan can be faintly heard telling the band, "play it fuckin' loud", as they start to play "Like a Rolling Stone". At the end, the audience erupts into applause and Dylan says, "Thank you." After years of conflicting reports and speculation among Dylan discographers, the Manchester source was verified after the preliminary mix of a proposed Columbia edition was bootlegged in 1995 as Guitars Kissing & The Contemporary Fix. Dylan rejected that edition; three years later, he authorized a markedly different version for his second "Bootleg Series" release.

Like a Rolling Stone: