Bob Dylan – The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Live 1975

The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Live 1975 - The Rolling Thunder Revue

Bob DylanThe Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Live 1975 – The Rolling Thunder Revue Legacy C2K 87047 (2002)


When Bob Dylan embarked on his “Rolling Thunder Revue” in 1975, it was part of his creative renaissance.  It was his second wind after a hum-drum few years at the dawn of the 1970s.  The revue traveled by train and included a laundry list of friends and collaborators, new and old.  Before The Bootleg Series Vol. 5, Hard Rain had already been released documenting the tour.  But Hard Rain was tired and disappointing.  Here, Dylan sounds desperate, in the sense of being urged to go on.

This one opens with a blazing “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” (a song debuted on Nashville Skyline).  It then drifts into a few rather dated reworkings of old songs.  Dylan’s backing band may feature a lot of big names, but they play a kind of music that often suffers from the worst excesses of the era: ornate guitar wankery, hollow, tinny and effect-laden engineering, and a full and claustrophobic sound that lacks space.  They are basically just self-indulgent hippie jams.  But the end of disc one turns to folk.  This highlights much of what was missing on Hard Rain and much of what came next in Dylan’s career.  He started as a folkie, and he was a good one!  He then went electric, which was what launched him to superstardom.  His contentious concerts of that era would feature some acoustic folk and also electric rock.  His albums of that era mostly did this too.  Later though, particularly from the late 1970s onward, everything was more or less electric.  He was far less successful in a purely rock setting.  For whatever reason, there was only so much rock music that Dylan could put out at one time.  It could be — let’s not forget — that when Dylan went electric it was before the modern rock era.  It was only about a decade out from Elvis and other early rock that was not strictly urban.  As that kind of stuff was left behind, Dylan didn’t adapt particularly well.  Maybe folk seemed equally of the past at times (he did return to it though).  But a set like The Bootleg Series Vol. 5 includes the right amount of folk.  It’s some of the most consistent material here.  For instance, there’s a great “Tangled Up in Blue” here (maybe better than the studio version).  The set wraps with more electric material at the end of disc two.  The last few electric songs work better on average than much of disc one, settling into a sound comparable to contemporary Grateful Dead.  The second disc also features a lot of songs from the not-yet-released Desire, and the whole band seems engaged with the new material.

There is something hard in this music.  It looks back more than forward.  It is like a reaction to the 1960s.  Not everything had gone as planned.  Dylan couldn’t have anticipated his celebrity status.  He probably wouldn’t have expected his career to start slipping in the 70s.  What makes this interesting in how it tries to avoid defeat.  But in doing that you can sense that much more than before the possibility of defeat looms larger in Dylan’s consciousness.  This was it though.  Desire, released a few months later, would be the last truly relevant Dylan album.

[One note about the packaging here.  I checked this out from my library, so something might have been missing from the box, but there appears to be no listing of recording dates or personnel for each song.  Presumably, this is culled from multiple concerts.  It’s quite impossible to tell though.]

Bob Dylan – At Budokan

At Bodukan

Bob DylanAt Budokan Columbia PC2 36067 (1979)


Count At Budokan among the group of most divisive albums in the Dylan catalog.  Recorded in Japan on a 1978 tour, amidst sessions for Street-Legal, it finds Dylan making an attempt to develop a Vegas-style show with a horn section and backing singers.  The template for this type of show is an Elvis Presley album like Elvis in Person at the International Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada and Aloha From Hawaii Via Satellite.  Like the former Elvis album, Dylan is doing new arrangements of his old hits.  The problem here is mostly that flautist/saxophonist/etc. Steve Douglas is TERRIBLE!  That flute is too loud and the sax is clichéd.  And the band as whole is a little stiff.  In hindsight, others have pointed out that shows from the tour in England were stronger and would have made for a better album.  As it stands, one of this album’s biggest liabilities is that it’s far too long.  At two discs, there’s a full disc worth of unnecessary reggae and easy listening mediocrity.  That’s too bad, because some of this — “Maggie’s Farm,” “All I Really Want to Do,” and “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” — really sounds good in its new setting.  And, hey, Dylan is actually trying to sing, and doing a decent job of it by his usual standards.

Miles Davis – Bags Groove

Bags Groove

Miles DavisBags Groove Prestige PRLP 7109 (1957)


My early reaction to this album was “it’s good not great.”  Well, coming back to it years later my opinion has changed a bit.  While I still look at this and say Miles’ playing is nothing special, due to his general complacency and the fact that he hasn’t yet realized the full potential of his stemless Harmon mute, I have to give credit to the rest of the band for truly achieving something special.  The rhythm section steals the show.  Percy Heath gives amazing performances throughout, and, despite the fact that he never solos, he’s the still the album’s star in my mind.  People have long talked about Monk‘s solo on the title track (take 1), and that’s all well justified.  It smokes.  Unfortunately, he’s only heard on the title track.  But Horace Silver plays well when he’s substituting for Monk, and Sonny Rollins‘ style is well-suited to the music.  Milt Jackson also plays really well in his one appearance.  Kenny Clarke is solid as always, and, significantly, he doesn’t distract from the other performers–something not to be underestimated with a talented group like this.  Bag’s Groove is an excellent album to play in mixed company, even among people who have no specific knowledge of or appreciation for jazz.  It’s about as good as “straight” jazz ever got.

Elvis – Recorded Live on Stage in Memphis

Recorded Live on Stage in Memphis

ElvisRecorded Live on Stage in Memphis RCA Victor CPL1-0606 (1974)


Anyone following Elvis’ career in the early 1970s will note the large number of live albums.  Oh, there were studio albums too, even really good ones.  But most of the studio albums came from just a few recording sessions, and some were bolstered with selected live material. This was the time of Elvis’ Vegas act.  It’s worth putting that in more perspective though.  The King hit it big in the 1950s, as the first rock and roll superstar.  But as his star rose, and he started to get into the movies, he was drafted into the Army and spent a few years stationed in Germany before returning to a musical career.  He recorded as soon as he got out of the Army, but attention soon shifted to the movies.  He didn’t perform concerts.  His albums were movie soundtracks, sometimes improbably including a good tune (“Viva Las Vegas”), but for the most part — Elvis openly admitted as much in his later years — they were terrible.  But with his Hollywood career going strong, he was resting his voice.  It did not suffer from years of hard touring.  He also made no attempt to be relevant in the era of Beatlemania and the British Invasion.  He suddenly came back with a late-60s TV special and his first new non-soundtrack album in what seemed like forever.  And then he started a Vegas act.  These career paths were unprecedented.  There simply weren’t any rock superstars before Elvis, so no one knew what they would do as they got older.  No rocker had ever made a “comeback” before.  But he could do it in part because he semi-consciously took time off from a focus on music, and the lack of touring meant his voice was ready and waiting for the task.  There also weren’t any rock and roll themed Vegas acts, which was given over largely to Rat Pack style crooners, Liberace-like spectacles, and non-musical acts, of course.  The signature feature of Elvis’ show was that it became huge, in terms of having an enormous cast of musicians supporting him.  He performed enormously complex arrangements of old hits and new songs.  And he and manager Col. Tom Parker always seemed to find great songs to incorporate into the act that fit Elvis like a glove.  The success of this style of show rested in large part on the tremendous amount of hard work that Elvis put into it.  But keeping the show going, often with two shows a night, took a toll.  Elvis notoriously had a growing drug dependency, one exacerbated by the pressures of the entertainment industry.  Despite hugely successful stands at the International Hotel in Vegas, big shows at Madison Square Garden in New York City, and the first ever globally televised concert Aloha From Hawaii Via Satellite, by 1973 he was collapsing and being hospitalized as a result of his failing health.

So then we arrive in 1974, when Recorded Live on Stage in Memphis was recorded March 20th at the Midsouth Coliseum.  In 2004 a reissue of this album presented the entire concert, but the original album featured only an abridged selection of material from the show.  The entire show followed more or less the same familiar formula as nearly all of Elvis’ concerts and live albums of the previous few years: commencing with “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (known as the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey), then right into “See See Rider”, with a medley of 50s hits in the middle and familiar tunes like “Polk Salad Annie,” “An American Trilogy,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” and “Suspicious Minds” littered throughout.  But what is most intriguing about this album is how it differs from the usual format of the previous few years.  There is a big band, but not with an emphasis on a huge string orchestra.  There are more intimate moments with Elvis singing just with a piano.  He also does some gospel songs.  Unlike most of Elvis’ live albums, the crowd is readily audible (though allegedly some audience noise is overdubbed).  It does sound at times like the band, and Elvis, have tired some of playing the same songs yet again, the same way as always.  But those concerns fade when listening to “Why Me Lord,” “How Great Thou Art” and “Help Me.”  What is unfortunate is that there does not seem to be the same level of effort in expanding and evolving the act as there was a few years earlier.  These are just minor adjustments meant to perpetuate the same successful formula.

This isn’t the best of Elvis’ live albums of his musical comeback.  It’s still a good one, with elements of widespread appeal.  It is best admired by fans who have heard his other material of the era and want something more that sets off in a similar direction with a few tweaks and slightly different material.  It’s too bad Elvis couldn’t just retreat back to the movies and then emerge in the late 70s/early 80s backed by a punk-like trio…oh, you know it might have worked!  Even Bob Dylan almost went with it in the early 80s.