It’s a moment that looms in the popular American mind. “When Dylan went electric” ™ connotes so many different things—the post-lapsarian moment for American pop music, one generation’s middle finger to another, the emancipation of a formerly constrained artist, the dawn of a new era. In reality, while it could be any of these things, it was also a wise career move by a popular musician who was widely acclaimed but wasn’t exactly dominating the charts. “Like a Rolling Stone” was Bob Dylan’s first bona fide commercial hit.
Personally, I’ve always preferred Dylan’s late 60’s-mid 70’s period to the wild, undisciplined if at times brilliant period of 1965-66. In my mind he matured as an artist only after the latter; the focused, economical-yet-powerfully-evocative lyricist of "John Wesley Harding, New Morning and Blood on the Tracks," the Dylan of "Before the Flood" and The Rolling Thunder Revue. Even "Street Legal," I think, is a brilliant album, and wrongfully maligned. “Changing of the Guards” and “Senor, Tales of Yankee Power” are among the best songs Dylan ever wrote, in my opinion. He found his real stride in these years. His voice never sounded better, his lyrics were never tighter.
But there is certainly a powerful appeal to pre-motorcycle resurrection Dylan. The caustic interviewee. The punk-surrealism. The sun-glasses under spotlights. The vagabond rapping at your door. Well, if this is your preferred Dylan, the recently released "Real Royal Albert Hall Concert, 1966" is probably the best live distillation you’re likely to get. The last concert of that year’s tour, one that had seen Dylan get booed off stage by his former folky devotees and be equated with Judas Iscariot, this feels like a culmination in more than one way. The manic sprint of the "Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde" trilogy had come to an end, Dylan was drug-addled and near total collapse, and the next album he released would be influenced not by fog and amphetamine but by cowboy mythology and the King James Bible. He can barely talk in between songs here, and at times, especially on the second, electric half of the performance, he sings like a writhing animal. But all of this adds to the mystique, to the persona, to the emaciated genius portrayed by Cate Blanchett in "I’m Not There" and that perhaps has been cemented as Dylan’s most recognizable incarnation.
As do his songs. The version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” that closes the first half is inspired. Inflated to nearly double the length of the original "Bringing It All Back Home" track, it proves Dylan was doing, uh…Celtic dream-world music?...years before “The Battle of Evermore.” His strumming at the song’s beginning, punctuated with dissonant chords that sound like lightning strikes on a rainy night of omens, and the "Astral Weeks-esque" harmonica solos, serve to create an incredibly dream-like air around the song. The (likely substantial) number of attendees on LSD were, I do not doubt, able to see haunted, frightened trees sprouting from Dylan’s afro.
There’s always been a part of me that felt sympathy for Dylan in this period. Even up until this day, he’s always expressed his bitterness about getting booed and slandered during this period. And the first acoustic half of the album, in particular “Just Like A Woman,” which on this record Dylan in my opinion gives a brilliant and definitive rendition of, is delivered powerfully and sincerely. “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” sounds less like a good riddance and more like a pained farewell, to whom, or what, it’s hard to say, but that’s the point.
And much, though certainly not all, of the electric portion is sublime. The radical update of “I Don’t Believe You,” which shows an early example of how fundamentally Dylan has been able, throughout his career, to transform his songs as the times go on changing, is a terrific rock song. The word “swampy” comes to mind listening to Robbie Robertson’s sleazy riff, as do echoes of the Allman Brothers and "Sticky Fingers" Rolling Stones. The Band here deserves much of the credit for creating some credible, and at times superb, rock musicianship around the un-hingement of Dylan. By the time Dylan dedicates “Like A Rolling Stone” to the Taj Mahal (why, the journalist’s pen scrawls in his notebook, perhaps to protest British imperialism?), it feels like he and the Band have created a real edifice around them with their colossal performance, a wall of sound if there ever was such a thing.
With this package, you get a superb run of solo Dylan acoustic performances punctuated by an epic, if at times messy, electric second half. In between the songs you get some rebellious, amphetamine induced stuttering that, if you’re feeling generally anti-establishment, is appealing in a sort of way (“these are all protest songs,” Dylan says to a jeering audience before ripping into “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”). It’s the capstone of one of Dylan’s more celebrated, imitated, and mythologized period, and as that, it’s of supreme value to any serious Dylan fan who doesn’t already possess a version of this album from the torrent and bootleg circuit.
