Just one week in November. Three double albums by three of the legends of rock. Paul McCartney's Back in the US may not be getting a UK release until March next year but by the wonder of the Internet it hardly matters to fans when an album sits on a shelf. If it is out, it is out! All three albums have similarities and marked contrasts. Ex-Beatle and Dylan both released a live document, but McCartney's is from the recently highly acclaimed US tour where the roadies just arrived home whereas the roadies for Dylan's release are probably long dead, the tapes of that particular tour being some twenty seven years old. Mitchell, like the other two, sings nothing we haven't heard or bought before. Her take, though, is a complete reinvention; her classics done in the studio with a fully blown orchestra.
All three are reinventions. Mitchell in that sense exceeds all the demands. The raison d'etre was reinvention. Dylan has always been reinventing, making an already huge catalogue even more immense by so restructuring words and melodies that songs can sound nothing like the original, if within the Dylan art form there can ever be such a thing as an original. His live shows are so much more intriguing, if occasionally shambolic, as a result. With McCartney you feel for the poor band who has to play Beatle parts, too sacred to be too finger loose and fancy free, resigned in faithful reproduction to never to be a substitute for John, George and Ringo.
Bob Dylan's career is full of more nooks and crannies to be revisited and reassessed than any other rock icon. Not so long ago, I picked up an 80's bootleg of studio outtakes and was soon burying my head in that section of Clinton Heylin's biography and then Scott M. Marshall and Marcia Ford's Restless Pilgrim: The Spiritual Journey of Bob Dylan had me ensconced in the "Christian" period and awakened me to many of the more spiritual of his rhyming couplets.
And so another reason to look back (did Dylan really suggest once not to?). The Bootleg Series Volume 5 is a long awaited official release of what many suggest to be his most startling and satisfying concert tour -- the legendary Rolling Thunder Revue in late 1975. It is without doubt the final proof. This is a breathtaking double CD of a magical moment in rock music generally and Dylan's career specifically. Contextually it was an interesting time. After a barren period of Dylan releases after 1967, Dylan hinted at something better with Planet Waves in 1973. A year before this tour he returned to greatness with maybe his best work, Blood On the Tracks, and was in the process of writing and recording Desire when he put this caravan of troubadours together and took off round the northeast of America and Canada.
This document of live concerts is also slap bang in the middle of two previously released live albums; indeed if we count Budokan in 1978, there are four live albums now available of a four year time span and this is where Bob beats Paul hands down. Where on Back In the US we ask ourselves do we really need a third, same live version, "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" is infused with a menacing apocalyptic groove and there is a reggae type casualness about "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll."
The entire circus smacks of a busking band who have been given a bigger stage and cannot believe their luck, but they are going to enjoy it while they are there. Not that there is anything less prophetic or two edged about Dylan's delivery, it still twists and snarls as only his voice can, but never has it sounded so natural and unaffected. You wish that you could return to days when songs like "Hurricane," "Romance In Durango" and "Sara" were fresh to those who were privileged to be there on nights like these. Breathtaking!
There is an interesting moment in the middle of "Oh Sister," again most sensitively delivered where Dylan says that he and this "sister" "died and were reborn and then mysteriously SAVED!" As he holds the note on SAVED! he pauses and the silence is peppered with screams of affirmation from many who no doubt spat out derision when the man released an album called Saved just five years later. It is an almost prophetic moment on a mystical tour that saw Steven Soles, David Mansfield and T-Bone Burnett from his band experience a conversion experience.
Where Volume 5 beats Volume 4 is that the 1966 tour of Volume 4 is slightly compromised by controversy. The cries of Judas that make it a vital historical piece also caused it to be born in a clash of volcano and sea whereas this first part of the Rolling Thunder Revue was played out in a time of relative calm, albeit the beginning of Dylan losing his wife for good which perhaps explains the different vibe to the later dates released on "Hard Rain." In the end this is an essential snapshot of a moment in time when Dylan was at the peak of current form as well as the owner of the finest back catalogue. If you own one Dylan live album then this has to be it. Nothing else comes close.
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