The show Roger McGuinn called one of the best Bob Dylan gigs: “Was sure unusual”
Accounts of seeing Bob Dylan live vary depending on who you’re speaking to, but one thing connects them all – his commitment to music.
It sounds as though his gigs aren’t for the faint of heart. You need to have an appreciation for the mystery of Dylan in order to enjoy them, as what you see often won’t resemble the actual Bob Dylan songs you enjoy, rather, some strange interpretation of them. Leonard Cohen spoke in depth about the unique experience that was seeing Bob Dylan live, as he was taken aback by the strange circumstances surrounding it all.
“In this particular case, he had his back to one half of the audience and was playing the organ, beautifully I might say, and just running through the songs,” said Cohen. “Some were hard to recognize. But nobody cared. That’s not what they were there for and not what I was there for.”
He continued, “Something else was going on, which was a celebration of some kind of genius that is so apparent and so clear and has touched people so deeply that all they need is some kind of symbolic unfolding of the event. It doesn’t have to be the songs. All it has to be is: remember that song and what it did to you. It’s a very strange event.”
Dylan was never content with delivering the same old live sound. When he first went to New York, his approach to music was pretty simple. He would go on stage with his acoustic guitar and iconic sounding voice and play covers of the folk songs that he liked the most. A lot of people liked this side of Dylan, but it was a ticking time bomb, as once he heard The Byrds play his cover of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, he wanted to embrace using the electric guitar and leaning into folk rock. From that point on, his live shows didn’t stay the same for very long.
One of his most notorious tours was the Rolling Thunder Revue, which saw Bob Dylan go on tour with a number of different collaborators, playing in smaller cities and putting on strange and energetic shows. Out of all the unique shows Bob Dylan has played throughout his life, Roger McGuinn said that these gigs during the Rolling Thunder Revue were his best.
“Bob was great,” said Dylan, “He was probably as good as I’ve ever seen him perform. He was really, really committed and there was a lot of passion in his vocals.”
As well as the passionate performances that Dylan was putting on, McGuinn also enjoyed being on the road with such a talented band of people. Plenty of different big names in music hit the road with Dylan to create an unusual and exciting tour, the likes of which hasn’t been done since.
“Rolling Thunder sure was unusual,” said McGuinn, “We had a ball. It was about a hundred people on the road and a lot of parties and all kinds of people hanging out after the show at the hotels […] I remember hanging out with Allen Ginsberg and Joan Baez and T-Bone Burnett and Kinky Friedman, and that it was just a big, long party, and also that the stage shows were four and a half hours long.”
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