The sound of history in the making, here’s a warts, gags and all document of young Bobby Dylan, folk hero, in the process of creating a rock revolution.
The year is 1964 and Dylan is already a hit-maker and troubadour of the civil rights movement, as he takes to his biggest New York stage to date, in front of an adoring audience.
Amazingly, the only one who sounds underwhelmed is Dylan himself. To judge by his boyish patter and engagingly goofy laughter, backstage he may even have sampled something stronger than the red wine to which he was partial at the time, probably the very stuff that was already sending him on a trip upon his magic swirling ship. Or maybe you thought that song really was about a busker?
Dylan may undercut the solemnity of the occasion every time he giggles into the mic, but there’s nothing cavalier about the actual performances of ‘Who Killed Davy Moore?’, ‘The Times They Are A Changing’, ‘Hard Rain’ and ‘Hattie Carroll’, all of them passionate readings of the songs on which he’d already carved out his young god reputation. Even when he forgets the words – as on ‘All I Really Want To Do’ – he turns the error into an audience-delighting gag. And with Joan Baez duetting on a couple of tunes, all seems joyous and golden in the folk garden.
But, in truth, Dylan’s head was already somewhere else again, as new, unfamiliar, edgy and downright epic songs like ‘Gates Of Eden’ and ‘It’s Alright Ma’ illustrate. He can be pointed, witty and direct on ‘If You Wanna Go…’ and ‘Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues’, but it’s when he leaves behind the here and now to fuse Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac and what was only then beginning to be called pot, that this album starts to sound like the fantastic shape of things to come.
Raw, passionate, funny, and revealing, this is Bob Dylan at the point where the child prodigy was about to give way to full-blown genius. After which, very little in rock culture would ever be the same again.