Part of releasing new music, no matter the artist, is luck. Time Out of Mind may have put Bob Dylan back on the map, but he did not remain in the public eye for all that long. Not at the same level, anyway. He is now a legacy artist. Passive people mistake his ongoing tours as opportunities to hear the hits. But this has rarely been the case. His blur of contemporary materials and well-known songs affected his performances from every spot of his career. But Summer Nights: Love and Theft Live shines a light on the overlooked 2001 album. Dylan followed up Time Out of Mind with an album just as strong. Love and Theft is not paid its dues, not enough, anyway. Summer Nights is a chance to reconnect with the album through unofficially recorded live performances. An excellent compilation effort from the stage.
Returning to Love and Theft through the context of live performance is a necessary shot of life for songs like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. A song which plays with the characters from the children’s novel but features a guitar line which sounds more like noodling than necessary playing. Still, it is hard to knock it as an opening song. It sets the scene rather well and gives listeners a breather before the heavier tones, the memorable features of Mississippi and High Water (For Charley Patton). Performances making up Summer Nights come from five years’ worth of touring, about right for a contemporary Dylan album, if the gap between Rough and Rowdy Ways and the modern day is anything to go by. It gives these songs time to settle, a chance to breathe before a live audience. Summer Days features a nice adaptation of those twelve-bar blues, the fundamentals of the Deep South sound still guiding Dylan.
Cool guitar work can be found on every song, though it is highlighted best of all on Bye and Bye. A fine blur of the instrumental scope afforded to Dylan at this period, an unwavering commitment to adapting the hearty blues-rock tone of the past. Modernised, manipulated, and occasionally overhauled with those piano bars or harmonica additions, Summer Nights does an exceptional job of blurring the past and present. Dylan does that time and again with his album work, so perhaps Love and Theft should be no surprise at all. But then a song like Po’ Boy is performed with such a steely nerve, a focus on those vocal changes Dylan has gone through. He is all the better for them in these instances, a new cadence which is welcomed by the crowd, and affected by the arrangements backing these songs.
Pay your respects to Love and Theft with a listen to this live compilation. The album is given an extra layer of depth in these performances, nicely selected and put together in the same tracklist as Dylan’s 2001 classic. A spontaneity dominates the live performances, the swinging structure and the hammered piano blending well with the slick guitar riffs. It all comes together well, a sonic bed which informs the lyrical adaptations Dylan is making. A series of homage pieces to the blues rock, which inspired and informed him frequently. Love and Theft remains a benchmark moment for Dylan, and the performances on stage feel like a last hurrah before he lost himself to covers, classics, and constantly changing the feeling of his live shows.
