Customer Reviews

Bootleg Series 6: Concert at Philharmonic Hall

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THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 6, a bootleg that has been around for decades, is a Halloween show from the Philharmonic Hall in New York City. One of the most important shows in Dylan's early career, this show gave quite an overview at the time from Dylan's ever-growing song book, including new, bizaare songs that would show up within a few months on Dylan's fifth LP, BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME. While much has been made of the later electric performance of the 1960s, it is here that you can see how good Dylan really was with just a guitar, a harmonica, and the signing girlfriend. Covering such a broad overview, Dylan shows all the budding facets of his art up to this time, from the protest songs (including ones that never made the studio records), the more introspective material, and the radical new direction Dylan was pursuing with the three songs from the unreleased (and unrecorded, for that mater) fifth album, BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME. He proves him a very masterful solo performer. If you like Joan Baez, you greatly enjoy the four songs she performs. If you don't like Baez, this won't win you over.

This 1964 concert, the first all acoustic performance (barring MTV UNPLUGGED, which also has a band) to enter Bob Dylan's discography, captures Dylan at a peak period as he was making a transitional move into rock and roll. Historically significant, funny, and overall Dylan, this installment of the Bootleg Series show a new side of early Dylan, and as VoodooLord7 points out, quite a contrast from the 1966 Manchester concert. What is so startling about this concert is how Dylan comes across as giddy, young, and, overall, a Minnesota boy just honoured to be playing at such a distinguished venue. When introducing the then unreleased "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding," he prefaces the song with the comment that it is very funny. On "I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Met)," he forgets the first verse, asking the audience if they knew it. The rest of the album shows Dylan in this 'aw, shucks' mode, but he gives the audience a wide variety of songs to chew on, showing them that even though he's giddy and young, he's a songwriter the likes of which they've never seen.

Compare this document to the cynical, aloof Dylan just a few months later. This was before the 1965 Newport show where Dylan brought out the electric band totally broke with the folk scene in general. (Who'd like to see a Bootleg installment of the Newport show???) The general atmosphere totally changed after the Newport show; afterwards Dylan was cynical, confrontational, cutting edge, and 'hip.' He's not angry. He doesn't have anything to prove. Dylan just wants to give a good show, and he wants to have a good time. After this, he played rock and roll, the likes of which had never been heard before, and forever changed popular music as we know it. The music went in directions, especially lyrically, that totally broke with all songwriting and pop traditions. VOL 6 captures Dylan just before this, and that's what makes it so endearing and so historically important. Nowhere on VOL 6 is there an equivalent to that legendary accusation "Judas!" on VOL 4. Dylan's not at war with the folk community who wanted to make him their own personal musical saviour. Instead, he was following his muse and this audience went with it.

What makes BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 6 so special is it gives us the opportunity to listen to Dylan before he made the permanent transition to rock. We can listen to Dylan play with the audience while giving a first rate performance. Those who were in-tune with Dylan this night, though, would surely know Dylan was moving far and away from the folk movement. Dylan showed an unparalleled depth of writing on ANOTHER SIDE, deep, introspective, and far and away from the protest songwriting that had dominated his second and third album. What really must have blown their minds were the new songs ("Mr. Tambourine Man," "It's Alright Ma," and "Gates of Eden) that Dylan had only previously played a very few times. Filled with wildly surrealistic, symbolist imagery, the words floated into your head and showed Dylan was opening up all sorts of new avenues for music, with a much bigger agenda that just being a protest singer, a la Phil Ochs. Dylan proved himself going deeper and deeper into a surrealistic, unprecedented, and never equaled period of songwriting that would become some of the most important songs in all of rock and roll. For those fortunate enough to be there, this would be one show you couldn't afford to miss. This was history in the making.

In the end, an essential addition to Dylan's canon, and for those interested in following the progression of the twentieth century's most important song writer, a must-have purchase. For those who love his all acoustic sound of the early 1960s, this will rival the studio albums themselves. With stunning production, a crisp, clean sound, and such an important snapshot of Dylan's early career, BOOTLEG SERIES VOL 6 will stay in your CD player for the foreseeable future. Highly recommended for the Dylan afficionado.

Much has been made through the years about Bob Dylan's early electric concerts -- more than simply legendary, they can almost be called mythical. Consequently, his earlier acoustic concerts are very often downplayed and under celebrated. On this, the first all-acoustic live album to enter Dylan's massive official canon, it is overwhelmingly clear just how vibrant and simply great these performances were; their immense historical importance is also on awe-inspiring display. This '64 show at New York's Philharmonic Hall was Dylan's big show of the year -- a Halloween show in which Columbia Records was putting its new star on display. It turned out to be one of the most important shows in Dylan's career -- and maybe even one of the best.

Another thing that stands out is how different these performances were from all subsequent Dylan performances. Dylan seems positively jovial throughout the show -- giggling, making jokes, introducing songs, playing with and teasing his audience. This is a stark contrast to the cynical, aloof Dylan that was on display in Don't Look Back, only a handful of months after this concert was recorded. It will also be a genuine shock to anyone familiar only with Dylan's current concerts, in which he talks to the audience only in order to introduce his band -- if, indeed, he does so at all. There are several reasons for this. Unbeknownst to the audience, Dylan's most recent acoustic album -- the then-three-months-old Another Side of Bob Dylan -- was to be his last. Dylan was only a few months away at this point from recording his first mostly-electric album, Bringing It All Back Home; soon after, he would both bring the electricity to his live shows and abandon the protest movement to focus on personal narratives and surreal esoterica. He thereby received almost constant vicious criticism from the folk crowd, producing in him a cynicism that would lead to his writing of Positively Fourth Street and spill over both into his live performances and his public persona. What we have on display here is a mostly untainted Dylan -- cheerful, exuberant, and even seemingly happy. Throughout the album, he clearly holds the adoring audience in the palm of his hand: they hang on to every word -- words which, by the way, they clearly know better than even he does -- and he plays them to the hilt. The album also offers a fascinating glimpse into a bygone era: a time of unparalleled and long-lost intimacy between performer and audience. The atmosphere gives off a mental picture of Dylan on a small stage singing songs requested by his friends -- despite the fact that this was a showcase concert at a major venue.

What can be said about the performance, heavily-bootlegged for decades, that hasn't already been said? Dylan's voice is in impeccable form: on display is a long-past epoch in which every word he sang was clear. His diction and phrasing here are perfect, revealing even words that were obscured or unclear on his studio albums. He also displays his perpetually-underrated agility on the acoustic guitar, an instrument with which he is quite adept and for playing which he never gets any credit. But, of course there are the words, unparalled words. The song selection is great, covering a spattering of songs from Dylan's first five albums -- one of which had not yet even been recorded, much less released! -- and several songs that never saw the light of day on a studio album. Dylan once said that he likes to see a person on stage "with just a guitar and a point of view; that is exactly what he himself has here, plus, of course, his trusty harmonica -- and that voice, that unmistakable voice. Indeed, he covers an incredible amount of ground for a solo performer. He plays many of the songs that constituted his signature work at the time, a good number of protest songs, and tracks from his most recent album. None of these, however, could possibly have prepared his audience for his most recent compositions -- Gates of Eden, It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding), Mr. Tambourine Man -- which had only been performed a handful of times at that point and which few, if any, in the audience could have heard before. These songs, with their surreal, phantasmagoric collages of strikingly visual and highly poetic images, seemed new and cutting-edge precisely because they were; their like had never been seen in popular music before -- and, indeed, have never been seen since.

And then Dylan called Joan Baez onstage. Although this pairing clearly charmed the 1964 crowd, all that can be said about it now is this: if you like Joan Baez, then this will be your favorite part of the album; if you don't (and many Dylan fans do not), then her lack of subtlety will ruin for you Dylan's immaculate and finely-crafted songs. Their choice of songs -- and Dylan's choice of encore -- can be seen as either playful or ironic on Dylan's part. The one exception to this is With God On Our Side, one of the most powerful songs of that or any other time; Baez's loud and powerful vocal adds an extra layer to this song that will either make one smile or make one cringe.

The sound quality on this album is immaculate: even possessors of a bootleg edition must crack down and purchase it. The packaging is also deluxe, although its one weakness is the essay by the usually incisive Sean Wilentz -- a grab-bag of cliches and questionable and/or silly statements, e.g., "even cooler, was Dylan smoking pot?" and references to "Dylan's nasal harshness" and Baez's "silken coloratura" -- which is not up to the standard set by previous Dylan liner notes. The bottom line is that this is an essential purchase for any Bob Dylan fan; for those who value his early period especially, this just might be the Holy Grail.

It's not that I didn't like the last Bootleg from 1975, it's just that this show from '64 showcases Dylan at the peak of his acoustic genius. This is before he went electric and started messing with the music and lyrics of his songs when he played them live. His voice is top form throughout the 19 song set, which features 4 amazing duets with Joan Baez. Aside from those 4 songs, the rest of the set is just Bob with his guitar and harmonica. The newly remastered sound is a wonder to behold. It truly feels like Dylan is standing right in front of you while the disc plays. The setlist features a bunch of my personal favorites, but to me the highlight is "It's allright ma". When the line where he sings "Even the president of the united states sometimes must have to stand naked" comes, it gave me chills, only because this show was recorded less than a year after Kennedy was killed, and the U.S. was on the verge of a full scale was in Vietnam. Bob is also unusually chatty with the crowd, who after every song in the set gave out thunderous cheers, especially after Dylan and Baez end her appearance with a great "It aint me babe". My advice to any fans is simply go out and buy this double disc right now.

An absolute dream album. Like discovering a long-lost friend, or a prehistoric hunter frozen in the alps. If you know all the lyrics (and most of the chords) to Dylan's early stuff, really his first 4 albums, you must buy this album, even if you haven't listened to "Another Side of Bob Dylan" in 30 years.

What strikes me most, on an entirely personal, sentimental level, is the response of the crowd to certain lines and jokes. The way the crowd responds with guffaws to the mention of "Martha and the Vandellas."

If I'm not mistaken, the crowd is actually trying to sing-along with "Who Killed Davey Moore?" I know from memory that in 1964 people would bring their banjo to a Dylan concert (I actually saw someone with their banjo at a Dylan concert as late as November 1965).

I love his completely flippant, irreverent introductions to "Gates of Eden" and "Davey Moore" - which must have completely gone over everyone's head at the time, when people still took his lyrics seriously.

Bob Dylan may be alone on stage at Philharmonic Hall during most of this 1964 concert, but he's friendlier, even gregarious at times, as he jokes with the audience and even requests their assistance when he forgets the opening verse of "I Don't Believe You." He's an entertainer here, a role he seems to have reclaimed in recent years as he barnstorms the world on the Never Ending Tour.

Otherwise, this concert finds him transitioning from the relatively idealistic troubadour of "The Times They Are-A Changin'" to the more cynical, introspective poet of "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)." The latter performance is the highlight of this collection. Dylan would perform this song many times in the decades to come, but only rarely as effectively as he did in 1964 when it was new and still five months away from its appearance on "Bringing It All Back Home." Dylan clearly enunciates each word, no doubt impressed with his achievement, but also intent on having the audience experience it fully.

Joan Baez turns up for four songs, the best of which is the duet on "Mama, You Been On My Mind." But the most memorable moments are when Dylan is on his own, offering excellent readings of "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall."

I prefer later, post-64 Dylan and, therefore, rank this set below the previous entries in "The Bootleg Series." But it's a terrific concert and makes for a particularly intriguing listening experience when one contrasts it with the 1966 and 1975 concerts.

Brian W. Fairbanks

For me Dylan was always there but I didn't get it. I mean Johnny Cash told me that Bob Dyaln was a great song writer, But I just never got what all the Dylan fuss was about.
Then I check out this cd.
Now I get it. Man do I get it.

Perhaps the most populair concert Dylan ever played.The young Dylan at that time held his audiance with his humor and songs in a strong grip.As we know now Dylan put the world on his head a few years later.The changes he made everytime in his career shook his fans, but Dylan was always the same man whether they like it or not.This Bootleg Series was the beginning of his populairity,just listen it and you will hear pure music.

I've been waiting around for nearly 30 years for Dylan to release a studio album that recaptures the brilliance of his youth and it's been a long wait. I'm beginning to feel like the elderly man with Alzheimer's disease that lives on my street. Every morning he goes down to the corner to wait for a bus that never comes, because the bus route was discontinued in 1985. Like that elderly man, I seem to forget that Dylan hasn't made a truly great album in nearly 30 years and maybe I'm standing around waiting for a bus that may never arrive. The album doesn't have to be as good as "Blood On The Tracks", heck, I'd settle for another "New Morning" or "Self Portrait".

What keeps Dylan artistically vital is his low profile Eternal Tour which continues play a punishing 250 days a year, even as Dylan has reached the eligibilty age for Social Security. Dylan's incessant touring creates a demand for his extensive back-catalog and only the Beatles enjoy more lucrative sales of their original albums. The final element of Dylan's continued relevance is the bootleg series of releases that began with the "Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3" in 1997. These studio outtakes and live performances provide a panoramic sweep of Dylan's early career and fill in the many of the missing links. The notorious RIAA should thank their lucky stars that those evil pirates were around to "steal" Bob Dylan's performances because it's provided a windfall of unanticipated income to Bob and the RIAA over the years. We hear so much about the dark side of file trading, pirating and bootlegging, it's only fair to point out that a lot of unacknowledged income has been generated for the RIAA, from the very music "theives" they so bitterly decry. Thanks to the bootleggers, we able to listen to this historic 1964 Philharmonic Hall concert by Dylan.

The clarity of the recording leads me to the conclusion that it was a sound-board tape, usually made by plugging the recorder straight into the sound mixer for the show. This 1964 show which features Joan Baez is my all time favorite Dylan bootleg concert, with the possible exception of the much coveted tape of his 1962 debut at Carnagie Hall. (Note To Bob Dylan: Bob, I've got a great master tape of the 1962 concert and you can have it for the asking...you don't need to sue me for it). I especially like the early accoustic Dylan shows because there is a rare intimacy between Bob and his audience, unlike his folk rock shows where he developed his icy cool, unscrutable stage personna. Bob Dylan, the folkie is an engaging performer who jokes and banters with his audience, something he's rarely done since 1964, unless he's playing a killer show and he's in the right mood. The set is a fairly representative sample of his body of work to that date, including three yet unreleased ballads, "Mr. Tamborine Man", "Gates of Eden" and "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Dreaming). They marked a radical change in Dylan's songwritting approach as he moved from the traditional folk ballad, into the surrealist approach that these three songs represent. The poetry of the new songs is dense, abstract, with both dreamy and nightmarish imagery. The following year Dylan released these songs on "Bringing It All Back Home" amid a firestorm of controversy from folk purists who decried Dylan's embrace of rock and roll and use of subjective psychedelic imagery which stood in stark contrast to his earlier use of topical protest themes. Dylan was labelled a sell-out and a blasphemer by the very peers and audiences that he had enchanted a year earlier in concerts like this one at Philharmonic Hall.

This concert is also a rare glimpes into one of the most mutually ambivalent personal relationships in history, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. At the time of Philharmonic Hall, Joan Baez enjoyed more "star power" than Dylan, whose public career was only two years old. When Dylan made his trek from Hibbing Minnesota to New York in 1962, Joan Baez had already been on the cover of Time Magazine and was generally regarded as synonomous with folk music and the protest movement for civil rights and disarmament. Joan became an admirer of Dylan's music and probably was more of a Svengali figure than the oft mentioned mentors like David Van Ronk, Ramblin' Jack Elliot and even Woody Guthrie. At times, over the next forty years Dylan and Baez seem to regard the other alternately with tenderness, frustration, befuddlement or apathy depending upon their mood. Each spoke a consistently respectful tone of the other, but it's pretty clear they both carried a lot of baggage around for many years after the parted ways as lovers. Joan joined the chorus that opposed Dylan's move into folk rock, Baez's reprimands were gentle scoldings while Pete Seeger's were uncharacteristic harsh judgements of Dylan's ethics. It seemed like a lot of Dylan's post Baez female lovers and even a wife, beared an uncanny resembalance to Joan Baez. At the time of this concert, their fortunes were linked, but they drifted apart within a few short months, having never made the studio album they once had tentatively agreed to collborate on. The material they share at the Philharmonic demonstrates how Dylan's rough edged, meandering and often nasal voice was perfectly counterpointed by Joan's lilting, angelic soprano. Their version of "Silver Dagger" may well be their finest moment as performers together.

This late in Bob Dylan's career, it seems that Colombia is content to release (and profit from) a perennial bootleg album. For diehard fans there are reasons to buy and cherish all of these, not all of them healthy. For your casual fan however, some releases are better than others.

Unlike the other releases, Vol. 6 lacks a distinctive sound that made the other volumes so engaging. First, there was Vol. 1-3 (one release). This three-disc set blazed the trail by making available live and unreleased cuts that spanned Bob's entire career; these discs reveal just how deep Dylan's musical veins run. Vol. 4, The Royal Albert Hall Concert, is essential because it captures Dylan at the height of his creativity in 1966. These two discs pack in an otherworldly, heroine-fueled, Rimbauld-esque vision that is still shattering rock and roll music today. One can feel in these performances the psychological tension (created in part from the times, but more from an artist in the process of shedding skins faster than he can grow into new ones). Vol. 5, The Rolling Thunder Revue, also captures another pivotal era in Dylan's career, this time that of a thirty-something icon's last stab at youth. Again, there is an intensity to the performances, to his voice, to the rolicking play of talented musicians.

Lastly we arrive at this collection, the Halloween Concert. What does it lack? For one, passion. The performances feel forced. Dylan is shaking off the albatross of being a "protest singer," and about to embrace (lyrically) the subjective and personal. When we do get these newer songs, like "It's all Right Ma" and "Gates of Eden" the listener feels this intensity. But the older songs, wich make up most of the set, are not performed with much passion or conviction. Dylan's voice whines and sounds distracted. The short set performed with Joan Baez is particularly disappointing, as all sets with her were. Joan, for all her talents as a singer, stands in too much contrast to Dylan's ideosyncratic voice. Song birds are beautiful and bull frog croaks are beautiful -- but not on top of one another. You can understand, listening to their shaky duets here, why in a matter of weeks Dylan would not allow her with him on the stage anymore.

Perhaps the most interesting aspects of this album are Dylan's monologues and dialogues with audience members between songs. He giggles and bandies absurd sentences, sounding very childish in the process, cannabis induced of course. He plays games, at one point playing the same chords over and over, pretending as though he has forgotten the first words to the song.

For an all acoustic concert Columbia would have been wiser to release something from 1963, a time when Dylan still felt connected to the songs we was performing. Here he spends too much time on material he'd rather leave behind. One exception it his rendition of "A Hard Rains a Gonna Fall," certainly the most intense cut on the record.

All in all, my intention is not to disparage this recording. After all, it is a complete Bob Dylan concert recorded during his hey-day. But considering the wealth of other material available, the previous bootlegs should be purchased before this one. That being stated, for fanatics like me, it is still a must, and beats the pants off "Knocked Out and Loaded" and "Down in the Groove," two albums only a mother could love.

As a 22 year old, the injustices of the world seem to come most clearly when I realize that I missed the great years of Bob Dylan. Channeling into the bootleg upon bootleg upon CD upon CD, I hope that someday I may find the flux capacitor and head back to 64 (18 years prior to my birth) and witness the glory of my homestate Hero. Having seen him just a couple of months ago in Minneapolis, this CD makes me want to cry. You can picture him all the while on this disc, just bouncing around on his guitar and harmonica happily, laying out the heaviest words he'd written to date. His jovial attitude and wordplay with the crowd is something I've never personally seen at a Dylan show and can only now imagine. His embracing simplicity and textual complexity underly the mastery of this man's mind. The sing-along atmosphere and "feeling of revolution" that is in the air while he sings of communist conspirators and the winds of change is inspirational, especially in our political climate of today. I didn't see him then, but I still want to be him then, and I think that's only because he got up there with his messy hair and little jammy shuffle, and showed us that he was cool, classy, smart and politically minded...these songs are going to move you.