Upgrade From Waz From Oz Master DAT Bob Dylan 2001 Australian Tour Parade Ground Centennial Park Sydney, New South Wales Australia 25th March 2001 01. Intro > Roving Gambler 02. Mr Tambourine Man 03. Desolation Row 04. Absolutely Sweet Marie 05. Til I Fell In Love With You 06. Maggies Farm 07. Mama, You Been On My Mind 08. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall 09. Tangled Up In Blue 10. Standing In The Doorway 11. The Wicked Messenger 12. Band Introductions 13. Leopard Skin-Pill-Box Hat Encores # 1 14. Love Sick 15. Like A Rolling Stone 16. If Dogs Run Free 17. All Along The Watchtower 18. Knocking On Heavens Door 19. Highway 61 Revisited 20. Blowin’ In The Wind Encore #2 21. Rainy Day Women #12 & #35 Bonus Tracks The 73rd Academy Award Los Angeles, California USA 25th March Dylan Transmitted From Ch 9 Sydney 26th March 22. Introduction By Jennifer Lopez 23. Things Have Changed 24. And The Winner Is…………. 25. Dylan’s Acceptance Speech For CD-R burning may I suggest 01 to 13 & 14 to 25 2021 Remaster From Master DAT By audiowhore Recording & Artwork By Waz From Oz ----------------- 12th Never-Ending Tour Band : Bob Dylan - Vocal & Guitar Charlie Sexton – Guitar & Backing Vocals Larry Campbell - Guitar, Mandolin, Pedal Steel Guitar Electric Slide Guitar & Backing Vocals Tony Garnier- Bass Guitar David Kemper - Drums & Percussion ----------------- 2001 Australian Tour Perth Entertainment Centre, Perth WA 18th March – Taped Adelaide Entertainment Centre, Adelaide SA 20th March - Taped Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne VIC 21st March - Taped Tamworth Regional Centre, Tamworth, NSW 23rd March - Taped Newcastle Entertainment Centre, NSW 24th March - Taped Centennial Park, Sydney NSW 25th March – Taped Cairns Convention Centre, Cairns QLD 28th March - Taped Brisbane Entertainment Centre, Brisbane QLD 20th March - Taped Seagulls Ruby Leagues Club, Ballina NSW 31st March -Taped ----------------- For those of you who grabbed my Dylan 2001 Tamworth Australia torrent, you will have read that I went up there plus Newcastle in a mini-bus with a group of hard-core Dylan fans from a local Dylan group. After Tamworth Newcastle was the next stop, by this time I’d started to distance myself from many of my travelling companions as well as other members of the Dylan group that came directly from Sydney to this show. Many of them felt that because they were hard-core Dylan fans that they were superior to the average fan that maybe only owned Dylan’s Greatest Hits Volume One & Two plus Desire because Hurricane is on it. At every Bob show I’ve gone to from 1998 on since I started going to the Dylan group meetings they’ve had that attitude because they’re hard core Bob fans they have the god given right to stand at the lip of the stage in front of their hero, bugger those casual Bob fans who have scored front row seats fairly & squarely, they don’t give a flying fuck if they block others view. To be honest some of their behaviour I’ve witnessed during a show was scary. Because of this attitude Newcastle remains the worst Dylan show I’ve gone to. Nothing to do of course with Bobs performance. Pre-show some of them were already standing against the stage in front of those seated in the front row, voices & objections are raised by those whose view are now blocked but to no avail, they’re not even acknowledged by the selfish bastards. The lights go down, more of the Dylan group members seated further back run up the front to join their mates who immediately accommodate them at the front of the stage, this rush also sets off others to do the same. This unleashed a domino effect, those seated at the front whose view is now blocked have to stand to see Dylan, the people behind them have to do the same because they can’t see & so on it went. I was seated with a few normal members of the Dylan collective in the last row of the front section (who like me were pissed off with the other’s behaviours) we all had to stand to see, immediately behind our row there was a wide aisle going from left to right. By now the sections behind us are doing the sit down, sit down chant. Newcastle is a working class, coal, steel, shipbuilding city (well it once was) & its citizens have a reputation for being tough buggers. As the sit-down chants fizzled out, the missiles started flying & as I wrote above being in the last row of a section everyone in that row had their backs exposed. We became dead set living breathing targets! Cans, plastic bottles some full as well as empty ones along with other assorted items started raining down on us, scored direct hits on some of us, but what was worse were the coins also being chucked at us with great force, they really hurt. I only turned around once early in the peace to have a quick gander but once the coins started I didn’t dare for fear of being hit in the eyes. I copped a few of these coins, afterwards I picked up quite a few 50 cent pieces, they are the largest Australian coin, they’re dodecagonal shaped, that 12 sides folks, good for throwing. Our row suffered the worse than those in front of us because our backs were fully exposed. The aerial bombardment slowly petered out, a combination of them having run out of things to throw at us, staff intervention plus the fact that people in front of us started to sit down because they were being hit as well, we were also yelling at them to sit down. Have to state that it wasn’t everybody behind us throwing things only a select few but enough of them to make ahem their presence felt! The Newcastle gig was one of the few times in my taping career that I stopped taping; it wasn’t worth it with all the yelling & screaming going on around me. I rewound the DAT cassette & used it to record next day’s Sydney show. On the positive side of the Newcastle show I got to hear one of the handful of live renditions of Highland, one of my favourites from Time Out Of Mind plus four older numbers I hadn’t heard in a live setting before. From that night on I wound down my appearances at future Dylan get togethers. Little did I know the same group of troublesome individuals would cause more bother the next night at the Sydney show. More about that later. The Sydney show was an open-air show held in a fenced off area in the parade ground in Centennial Park. Centennial Park is located 4 kilometres (2 miles) south-east of the Sydney central business district, so its close to the city as well as the eastern suburbs. Estimates of the crowd ranged from 15,000 to 18,000 paying customers, add to this the crowd that gathered for free outside the fenced off areas plus those who watched the show from the balconies / windows of their high-rise apartments that are on the park outskirts. Lots of younger people attended this night, no doubt because apparently for the first-time tickets could be brought with student discounts. Ruby & I had seats in the top priced ticket front section A in the 4th row, nearly in the middle, just a few seats away from the middle aisle. We had a great view of the stage as we did of some of the usual suspects from the Dylan group who once again stood directly in front of those who had landed front row seats. We could clearly see the rightly pissed off front rowers challenging these intruding clowns, it developed into a pushing – shoving yelling affair. So much so that the well-known Australian tour promotor Michael Chugg who was promoting the tour got on the mic telling them if they didn’t stop the police would be called. It didn’t stop, the security guys didn’t seem to know what to do & so the police did arrive. Being 4 rows away from the disturbance I could see the cops ask people to show their tickets to prove who should be there & who shouldn’t. The most aggressive bloke of the Dylan collective carried on like prize fool, the cops ended up escorting him away with his arm behind his back, a few others soon joined him. They were allowed back in later on as I saw them sulking around. In the Boblinks reviews of the Sydney show a fellow writes that he was one of those thrown out, would you believe he actually blames Bob for this happening to him. Of course he conveniently makes no mention of what was actually occurring. It had rained the night before, also earlier on the day of the show, by night fall it hadn’t rained for some time, however it had become somewhat windy, you can heard a big gust of wind in Mr Tambourine at 01.14 after that it settled down. The rain had held off until just before the 7th song of the night. On Boblinks it’s mentioned that rain started to sprinkle in of all songs A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall, a nice bit of Bob folklore but its incorrect, it actually started just after Maggie’s Farm ended & just before Mama Your Been On My Mind started. You can hear a bloke say “Here comes the rain” plus ever so slightly you can hear me pull my plastic poncho over the recording gear to stop it getting wet. Thankfully this light shower didn’t last long, the rain didn’t bother us again. From our seats the sound for this outdoor gig was excellent, Bob wasn’t as up as he was in Tamworth but he still looked to be enjoying himself. The crowd cheered when he did his funny little jig. It was a bit of a greatest hits show, with yes a few requests for Hurricane to be played. Mama, You Been On My Mind gave the crowd the first Bob harmonica solo of the night the second during The Wicked Messenger. Surprisingly Sydney didn’t get a snippet of the Aussie unofficial national anthem Waltzing Matilda in a song as Tamworth & Newcastle did. In Mr Tambourine Man at 04.58 the only member of the group I’m still in contact with to this day spots me & calls my name. There’s a funny moment in Bob’s introductions of the band members at 00.15 he introduces on drums David Kemper then at 00:28 an Aussie chick pipes up saying, “What about the drummer?”, she must have been stoned………man & missed it! I was well pleased with the sound I captured at this outdoor gig, now made even better by audiowhore. There’s the odd comment by someone near me, some background chit chat can be heard plus my shotgun mic picked up people talking as they passed by in the aisle but nothing that interferes with the enjoyment of the music nor is there any real beat clapping to be heard. I traded a few copies of the show on CD-R in 2001, one of which went was copied & become a silver bootleg entitled Roving Gambler on the delightfully named Hello Cobber Label with bonus tracks from my Tamworth recording. It’s listed on Lossless Bob as LB-2559. Once you have downloaded this 2021 torrent you have the superior version & as always you can bin all previous versions. For this recording I named it "I Received A Yellow Letter" because it sounded like Bob sang that instead of "I Received A Letter". The bonus tracks are taken from the 2001 Academy Awards broadcast on the 25th of March in Los Angeles, with Dylan nominated for best song for Things Have Changed which took out the award. As he was touring here in Australia at the time Dylan & the band performed the song live at the Sydney Channel 9 Studios, this & his acceptance speech were transmitted live to the Awards in Los Angeles but as we are a day ahead of the USA it actually took place on the 26th of March, the day after the Centennial Park gig. Sydney was my 12th Dylan show since Sydney 1978, the 2nd favourite of the three shows I saw on the Australian 2001 tour. For those interested I taped 7 of those previous 10 Dylan shows, hopefully some of those will be up on DIME sometime in the future. Thanks again to audiowhore. Enjoy, Waz