What people now want from Bob Dylan is what he gave them in the past. There is no need to live there. We can return as and when we want, through live recordings and bootlegs such as Free Trade Hall, Manchester. But unofficial bootlegs and hearing Desolation Row perched on some plastic chair in Nottingham are not the same. We will never have the latter again, the in-person variety, but we do have the recordings. Much the same for shows from the 1960s, when Dylan still had an interest in those protest songs, in the trades and deals of great innocence and wild writing, rhyming and structure. He may not remember where those songs came from but he sure remembers how to bring them to life in all the right places. An example of this comes from Free Trade Hall, Manchester, the unofficial bootleg which does well to shine a light on one of the underrated performances of the 1960s by Dylan.
Truly one of the best setlists on paper. Everything from polite applause as Dylan introduces The Times They Are A-Changin’ and the folk platitudes, the respect in equal measure of audience and artist, slowly slips away. Electric was a reaction. The rattle of jewellery which John Lennon had mocked a year prior to Dylan’s Manchester performance. Now as then, the moneyed apply themselves to battles of the working man and find their way, somehow, to make it about themselves. Fight against that any way you can. For Dylan, it was the introduction of a new sound. One which would scare the straight faces clear of his sound. It worked. There may not be any electric here but the notion of change is in the air. Stiff performances of Mr. Tambourine Man, where the beauty of Dylan’s voice sounds like studio replication, the silence of the audience rather telling.
People can no longer sit and identify beauty. They can no longer hear it as they did then. This is not some desire to be part of a generation passing by, but certainly a reaction to how poor the form of audiences in the modern-day are. Shows of the last two years have been mired by the horrors of obnoxious audience members, there were surely a few at every show on the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour. Listen in to Free Trade Hall, Manchester. There is a lack of entitlement for what Dylan will play and when. The social buzz around it is not yet amplified as it would be online, in discourse and forums where we demand and dissect every detail. Enjoy Free Trade Hall, Manchester, for what it is, a highlights show played in perfect form, but where the artist on stage is beginning to tire of his sound.
You can hear the complexities of She Belongs to Me and Desolation Row in just about any Dylan show of this period. It is when he gets weird with it that the sound gets outrageous, intense. Still the heaviest sound of the times, still the great benchmark no other musician manages to hit when working with the same chills and memories. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll and Love Minus Zero / No Limit really stand out here. They do far more for the heart than the likes of Talking World War III Blues or All I Really Want to Do, those songs are still filled with folk spirit but are weedy, and threadbare compared to the might and weight of something like It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue. Those are the songs every Dylan fan still returns to. Free Trade Hall, Manchester, is just another example as to why that is. Steady versions of classic pieces are found within.
