=================== =================== =================== === INFO.txt =================== =================== =================== Bob Dylan Tramps New York City, New York 26 July 1999 Schubert Remaster Disc 1 1. Oh Baby It Ain't No Lie (Elizabeth Cotton) 2. The Times They Are A-Changin' 3. Boots Of Spanish Leather 4. John Brown 5. Visions Of Johanna 6. Seeing The Real You At Last 7. Ballad Of A Thin Man 8. Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine) 9. Every Grain Of Sand 10. Tombstone Blues Disc 2 11. Not Dark Yet 12. Highway 61 Revisited 13. Love Sick 14. Like A Rolling Stone 15. It Ain't Me, Babe 16. Not Fade Away (Norman Petty/Charles Hardin) 17. Blowin' In The Wind 18. Alabama Getaway (Robert Hunter/Jerry Garcia) 19. I Shall Be Released Concert # 1129 of The Never-Ending Tour. Concert # 34 of the 1999 US Summer Tour with Paul Simon. 1999 concert # 83. Concert # 34 with the 12th Never-Ending Tour Band: Bob Dylan (vocal & guitar), Charlie Sexton (guitar), Larry Campbell (guitar, mandolin, pedal steel guitar & electric slide guitar), Tony Garnier (bass), David Kemper (drums & percussion). 15, 15 acoustic with the band. 2, 15 Bob Dylan harmonica. 1, 16-18 Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell backup vocal. 4 Larry Campbell bouzouki. 7, 9 Larry Campbell pedal steel guitar. 19 Elvis Costello (vocal & guitar). Note. This was a breakout gig without Paul Simon. 15 new songs (78%) compared to previous concert. 7 new songs for this tour. Stereo audience recording, 130 minutes. Session info updated 23 January 2000. Thank you Olof! http://www.bjorner.com/bob.htm And here's something that Paul Williams wrote: Bob Dylan-Mind Out of Time, The Accidental Art of a Performing Artist 1986-2001 by Paul Williams Introduction/Chapter Zero: "Visions of Madonna" On the 26th of July, 1999, in a club in Manhattan, Bob Dylan delivered one of his greatest performances ever of his well-loved 1966 epic "Visions of Johanna." As if to acknowledge and signal his awareness of the power and freshness of this latest reinterpretation, the singer-bandleader effectively changed the title of the song halfway through, by starting to sing the chorus as: "And these visions of Madonna are now all that remain/....have kept me up past the dawn." Where does genius come from? This book proposes to examine where the improbable 58-year-old artist singing in front of 900 people in Tramps that night came from, in the sense of what roads he had walked down, artistically and personally, in the preceding thirteen years of his life and work. In 1997 a Newsweek writer reported that Bob Dylan recently told him that ten years earlier (summer '87): "'I'd kind of reached the end of the line. Whatever I'd started out to do, it wasn't that. I was going to pack it in.' Onstage, he couldn't do his old songs. 'You know, like how do I sing this? It just SOUNDS funny.' He goes into an all-too-convincing imitation of panic: 'I-I can't remember what it means, does it mean-is it just a bunch of WORDS? Maybe it's like what all these people say, just a bunch of surrealistic nonsense.'" Dylan told the magazine that he got help (during his 1987 nervous breakdown as a performer) from Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead: "He'd say, 'Come on, man, you know, this is the way it goes, let's play it, it goes like this.' And I'd say, 'Man, he's right, you know? How's he getting there and I can't get there?' I had to go through a lot of red tape in my mind to get back there." This book is called "mind out of time," and argues that this is how Bob Dylan sees himself (what he aspires to be) as a songwriter and performer. So, although the general structure of this narrative will be chronological, I feel it's appropriate to step outside of chronological sequence for the purpose of this introduction, and start the story by looking closely at one fine example of this artist's ability to stop time and thereby encompass it and conquer it, in the timeless world of ephemeral art. Onstage in a particular club on a summer night in New York City. This ephemeral performance art becomes accidental when it loses its ephemeral status because someone, not the artist, captures the musical performance on recording equipment so it can be heard outside of that room and that night, by people other than the fortunate few who were in the theater at that show. A book like this, by its nature, is not about the intentional art of the performer, which takes place at a particular time and place. This non-accidental art is only experienced by the people who are in the audience that day; and even being one of those people doesn't empower me or anyone to write about the experience, unless we have total emotional recall, because the simple act of taking notes creates a distraction for the observer and a distance between the listener and this remarkably alive art form. So this book cannot meaningfully be an in-depth look at concerts I attended; it must be the report of a listener who has listened attentively to live recordings whose existence and availability is largely accidental, in terms of the artist's control or intent. Of course, I feel better qualified to write about these recordings thanks to the large number of Dylan concerts I've experienced as an audience member over the course of 38 years (see Appendix I). And certainly it is no accident that Bob Dylan sings and plays his heart out in front of a live audience almost every third night of his life (from 1989 to 1999 he played close to one hundred shows every year). He is a brilliant, conscious artist. But most of the body of work that this book and its companion volumes examine is accidental in its recorded form, which is the only form we can discuss together. The story of the live audience experience of these works of art is the story of hundreds of thousands of individuals in a vast array of mind-states at specific moments in their personal histories, some sitting or standing where they can see and hear well, others far in the back of a large auditorium. But accidentally, you and I can approach these works of art as though they were enduring communal objects, so that when I describe the mastery of the performing artist singing this particular piece on this particular night in 1999, you have the opportunity (if you search patiently) to listen to the same recording I'm referring to. Okay. "Visions of Johanna" (or, if you like, "Visions of Madonna"), was the fifth song Bob Dylan and his band performed on Monday July 26th, 1999, on 21st Street in Manhattan. Larry Campbell and Charlie Sexton on acoustic guitars, Tony Garnier on string bass, David Kemper on drums, and Bob Dylan on vocals and acoustic guitar. What makes this eight-minute performance so remarkable is its expressiveness, its artistry, its structure, its musicality, its freshness, its vision. You could start here (and many young appreciators of Dylan's music have started with recent concert recordings). This is not a repeat of a work of art created back in 1966. It is unmistakably a great work of art created at the time of its performance. Something new and original and thrilling. Bob Dylan once said, "He who is not busy being born is busy dying." His greatest accomplishment as an artist has been to stay true to this demanding dictum, in the face of the inevitable obstacles from within and without that all human beings and all artists must contend with. Our story in this volume begins at a particularly difficult moment in this process, August 1986 to July 1987. ("I'd kind of reached the end of the line.") "Visions of Madonna" and thousands of other performances that will be discussed herein are evidence that a committed artist can indeed use those painful years when he finds himself busy dying as opportunities and stimuli to learn new ways to "get there," back to being busy being born. This song, this performance, on this night in 1999, is certainly about being born. As an artist, a singer, a musician. And as a lover and a human being. Listen to the way he sings, "How can I explain? It's so hard to get on." And the way he and his band deliver every other verbal and musical phrase in this version of "Visions." It starts with the same old magical incantation, "Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet?" But not the same, because it doesn't arise from the harmonica wail followed by snare drums that opens the familiar original album version, nor from the guitar strums that open the live 1966 versions on Biograph and the Live 1966 album. Instead it arises (to the surprise and delight of the club audience, who recognize the seldom-played favorite when they hear these words) from a guitars-bass-and-drums riff newly created for this 1999 version that for the first time in a live "Visions" captures the martial (marching drums) rhythm that so inspired Bob Dylan as a vocalist when he sang these lyrics almost as a call-and-response duet with Ken Buttrey's drumming at the Blonde on Blonde recording sessions. "Ain't it just like the night..." on July 26, 1999 arises from the first few bars of a band riff so rich in personality that Bob Dylan sings to it as though confident that he as bandleader/performer is an embodiment of the trick-playing night himself (i.e., he and his band are). As on Blonde on Blonde, the song is sung as a duet with the rhythm instruments. It's not a replay or imitation of that 1966 recorded performance, but it inhabits the same triumphant and heartfelt and deeply humorous realm of freedom. Artistic and personal freedom made possible by the rightness of these sounds in the ears of the singer who is singing to and with them. "We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it." So the song, in 1966 and 1999, is a kind of confession (not denyin' it), and a declaration of independence. At Tramps in '99, Dylan sings, "and these visions, visions of Johanna that conquer my mind," as though he feels satisfaction, and maybe some joy, at having his mind conquered. I hear a similar celebration of liberation a few seconds earlier when he sings (clearly duetting with the "voice" of the drummer) "there's nothing really nothing to turn off!" It is, and has always been, a song about living proudly and joyously and communally in a private realm of silence in the midst of a noisy city. No surprise that the song's author should be inspired to a particularly heartfelt performance while singing in a club in Manhattan. This night he doesn't sing the "inside the museums" verse, but it doesn't matter, because the spirit of the verse is very much present in the long instrumental passages (lean into that riff, boys!) that follow the third and fourth choruses (the "Madonna" choruses). If you want to touch the heart of this 1999 "Visions," immerse yourself in the "little boy lost" verse...and listen to this man's voice as he sings, "he likes to live dangerously" and "speaks of a farewell kiss to me." "Dangerously" and "farewell kiss" are notably wry, and inseparable from the mosaic of drum and melodic guitar punctuations that dances around and with these words, this melodic and percussive and marvelously expressive singing. No accident that this is the verse that climaxes in a passionate, "It's so HARD to get on!" And climaxes further when Madonna suddenly replaces Johanna in Bob's visions. (Of course, Madonna was a character in the original song too, in the middle of the final verse: "And Madonna she still has not showed." In context, clearly a nickname or alias for Johanna herself.) It's all in the riff. That's the secret of Bob Dylan's music (and, therefore, his genius, including his genius as a lyricist). The riff calls forth the great vocal performances, as though Dylan were one of those old bluesmen he so admires. And when on this Tramps '99 performance the band is directed to vamp on the riff for long non-vocal passages, the riff itself starts speaking to the song's listeners as though these were whole new verses of evocative, mind-blowing, Bob-Dylan-in- his-prime lyrics. We're used to Dylan achieving this effect with his harmonica solos. But he's also been able, on good nights, to work the same magic through the instrument of his live band, flooding listeners with extensions of feelings and situations already evoked and described by his lyrics and singing, as though his harmonica, or his string-band-plus-drummer, were filling in the rest of the story, and filling us all with feelings by doing so. The master of language can also be a master of non-verbal language. And on this July '99 "Visions of Madonna," as on the Feb. '66 Blonde on Blonde "Visions of Johanna," the two work together to produce a transcendent work of art. In both cases, the drummer deserves almost as much credit as the singer. Nevertheless, it's easy to predict that what you'll remember of "VoM" and rave to your friends and children about is the singer's phrasing on "Johanna's not here!" and "the BONES of her face," and "...all that remain." The drum beats and tones get into your bloodstream. But in the singer's phrasing you can see and hear and feel a man being born. At age 58, with visions of Madonna pulsing through his body and brain. Everything's been returned which was owed," indeed. If you want to really learn something, listen to the Blonde on Blonde and Tramps versions of this song back to back, again and again, contemplating the thirty-three years of life experience that separate and unite the two performances... --pw =================== =================== =================== === md5.fingerprint.txt =================== =================== =================== e1576817a7310c4bd468507b0ad66b39 101.flac 7b2d7f8ac04d6bc3a56ecfbb00e81c87 102.flac afaf3ac2e9fc9f81e810046d10c5b6d9 103.flac 86f8159da2bbbd9659ea9c6e2730db5e 104.flac a8ebf54da260421b80230510dc8f0fd0 105.flac eaf4f3b90dbda50e8569188b743508a0 106.flac b9d4485a16a290ef7174fb9033dc3ea2 107.flac 9eb1b5a809dece1f22d1f6c9bba73368 108.flac 254859bd9c085a412b58544cbdb6abfc 109.flac 2fd1ef9cd2100db20e5d8df62af67f57 110.flac db819d5eb20a5cf8b1a69fcca57b82d4 111.flac 8703a236ddfb38241dcd1e82237c1d8b 201.flac efdeedc2d1d9409057f8fd3650844406 202.flac 9955b145d9f507192a1ace4285779d84 203.flac 0b3aa8394defcb5cb94f4608366030ec 204.flac c7447c7288ce95e2a9837602790cba23 205.flac d305fcbbcffd0a6eb17a399ef2b9b5c3 206.flac 3e1905d55241afc3d83ddc56baccbcae 207.flac efde7722118d5afb1e0cc5b396743746 208.flac f1bf43d9873bc6abeb3a5a66ece3bdd0 209.flac =================== =================== ===================