Bob Dylan – Telluride 2001 Review

After how strong a show Asheville 2001 turned out to be, an appetite for further shows from the lead-up to Love and Theft is simply unquenchable. Bob Dylan hit on an all-time great sound between Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft. More time on stage, yet fewer songs than the Asheville 2001 gold standard. Go figure. When the likes of This Wheel’s on Fire and My Back Pages are featured, the conversation must shift from quantity and instead to quality. Dylan, around this time, was reconfiguring his on-stage sound with acoustic, easy-listening experiences. Dylan and the band are in phenomenal form on the 2001 tour. A series of fantastic performances which really dig up the roots of some career-best works. But there is time for the deep cuts and covers which listeners have come to expect, and Telluride 2001 is a great all-rounder to introduce people to the almost endless series of bootlegs available.  

Just a month out from the release of Love and Theft and little had changed in regard to the performance style. The setlist had, naturally, been shaken up from show to show, as was Dylan’s penchant around this time, but the foundation is unshaken. A cover opens the show, Like a Rolling Stone features in the encore. Things Have Changed is absent but much stays the same for Dylan. Humming Bird marks a nice opener, a cover which brings the band a chance to feel the upbeat, improvised spirit of the show. It’s testing the waters with a song that isn’t expected, and it works brilliantly. Follow it up with a double bill of My Back Pages and It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) and there is much to love. Instrumentally similar from song to song but such a change to each of them that the overarching style is a welcome listen. Telluride 2001 is an upbeat treat where even the tearjerkers, like Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right and Love Sick are light and loose.  

But there is a part of those songs lost in that instrumental style. It makes no difference given how many versions are available elsewhere, but it is worth making note of given the instrumental similarities found across this release. Dylan’s voice is better suited to his early 1960s work like A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall here. Quite nasally, a little croaky, but wonderful all the same. It works for Girl from the North Country and If Not for You. But that vocal range extends further, of course it does, the hurried tempo and playing around with each line pays off brilliantly for Dylan and the band. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall has such a moving, swaying sentiment to it. That carries through the rest of the performance, too.  

A rollout of the hits for the encore is a given for the 2001 tour, now an impossibility. But it’s nice to hear Love Sick, Like a Rolling Stone, All Along the Watchtower, and Blowin’ in the Wind delivered with that same stylishness as is afforded to other songs in the set. Telluride 2001 has a delicacy to it that translated well to the stage pre-Love and Theft, and it would linger longer, though a little less in prominence, in the years to follow. There is ample material and bootlegged recordings of such a style, but when the keyboard was brought in to replace the guitar, hearing the acoustic beauties became that little bit harder. But this is a brilliant time capsule of a period when Dylan was keen, even with contemporary material at hand, to play through his hits. It’s somewhat expected by the audience given the success of MTV Unplugged, but Dylan has subverted expectations time and again, and he could’ve done just that here. He doesn’t, and Telluride 2001 is memorable because of that.