Live Dylan: Zurich 1999
date: 1999-04-23
location: Zurich, Switzerland
boblink: http://www.bobsboots.com/cds/cd-m12.html
opener: Cocaine Blues
personal favorites played: “Not Fade Away” is the Buddy Holly song, but done in the Grateful Dead’s wide-open arrangement that I love. Tacked on as an extra track to pad out the second disc, a rare appearance (and fabulous performance) of “Visions Of Johanna.”
Bob factor: The voice is in good form here. The vocal on “Not Dark Yet,” for instance, might be better than the record version.
performance: This is the tail end of the Bucky Baxter era. Here Larry Campbell is credited with guitar, and Bucky is credited with pedal steel and banjo. I don’t have any information to go off of beyond the often-wrong label on the bootleg, but it sounds about right. Many people (me included) thought Bucky wasn’t a good fit as the primary guitarist. He seemed to be on a different page than Bob as far as what he wanted most of the time. But adding color with steel and banjo is a good job for a guy who has too much tendency to hot dog, and it comes out sounding good in the end.
recording: This is what they call a “liberated bootleg,” which is to say that it was originally an illicit recording sold for profit. But since the bootleg CD industry is essentially dead and things like this are now fileshared all over the place, the diligent bootleggers really just did the world a favor. We have here a wonderful soundboard recording. It might even be mixed for the recording. Most soundboard tapes use the “house mix”–which is often slightly distorted due to the oddities of the performance space–but this one is very coherent, with even crowd noise in good balance.
highlights: “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall” is kind of a tricky one to do right, but he has the kind of band at this point that he feels comfortable trying it with. “Can’t Wait,” a tune buried at the end of Time Out Of Mind that I didn’t even recognize, is wound into a tight little spiral that sounds like it could have come off of Infidels (this is praise when I say it, though that’s not the case for everyone).
lowlights: “Tangled Up In Blue” doesn’t suit this band all that well. The arrangement is there, but it will take a little more fine tuning (and a different drummer) before it becomes the stomper it is by 2002. Many of the wordier 60s songs like “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” are taken a bit too slow, making them a difficult listen.
decision: This one is a slam dunk. A great show all the way around, and one I’d completely forgotten about. Treasures like this are why I’m doing my listening project.
May 15th, 2008 - Posted in Live Dylan | |
