Not sure. Do you usually start the post-studio recordings with the earliest bootlegs or official live recordings?

Shut up.

Let's do Live albums chronologically, the bootleg series in order by release.

Bob Dylan and the Band both needed the celebrated reunion tour of 1974, since Dylan's fortunes had been floundering since Self Portrait and the Band stumbled with 1971's Cahoots. The tour, with its attendant publicity, definitely returned both artists to center stage, and it definitely succeeded, breaking box office records and earning great reviews. Before the Flood, a double-album souvenir of the tour, suggests that these were generally dynamic shows, but not because they were reveling in the past, but because Dylan was fighting the nostalgia of his audience — nostalgia, it must be noted, that was promoted as the very reason behind these shows. Yet that's what gives this music such kick — Dylan reworks, rearranges, reinterprets these songs in ways that are still disarming, years after its initial release. He could only have performed interpretations this radical with a group as sympathetic, knowing of his traits as the band, whose own recordings here are respites from the storm. And this is a storm — the sound of a great rocker, surprising his band and audience by tearing through his greatest songs in a manner that might not be comforting, but it guarantees it to be one of the best live albums of its time. Ever, maybe.

I think if we were doing regular bootlegs, we never would have gotten out of the Dick's Picks thread alive. Sticking with the "official" live and then the Bootleg series is the only reasonable course of action here. I'll put up Before the Flood in the AM.

The only live Dylan records I've heard are the Bootleg Series, Hard Rain and Dylan and the Dead.

You poor, poor soul. These suck so bad I might not even download them...(who am I kidding?)

It's a good listen, but I just never reach for this over the Last Waltz.

Well yeah, but I don't really consider that a live album per se thanks to all the (alleged) overdubbing, sweetening and other Hollywood trickerization that went on.

I should amend my remarks from above: I was only focused on the Dylan songs. The Band is mostly good on their stuff.

I'm not gonna quibble over those little things. Europe '72 is still live to me.

Hard Rain is a snapshot of Bob Dylan's fabled Rolling Thunder Revue, a traveling circus that was more notable for its excess and character than the music. Hard Rain bears this out, being neither as sacrilegious or as exciting as Blood on the Tracks, and never seeming necessary — after all, it arrives just two years after the last live album. There are some new interpretations along the lines of what appeared on Before the Flood, but this lacks kinetic energy, rolling along on its own sense of inevitably. That's not to say there isn't good material tucked away here, as a few of the new versions hit home and Dylan is generally spirited throughout, but ultimately, this remains the province of the dedicated.

...the province of the dedicated.

Dylan and the Dead is like bad granny porn. You get it up and want to jack it, but you feel fucking horrible afterwards.

Robert Christgau criticized the Rolling Thunder Revue as "folkies whose idea of rock and roll is rock and roll clichés."

I guess the 9 song thing is because there was an accompanying TV special but still, too short.

On his third live album in a mere five years, Bob Dylan brings the big, professional showmanship of Street Legal to the stage, recasting recent and classic favorites into that album's image — and, he does that over the course of two albums, no less. It's a bit much, even for the diehards, even if moments work pretty well. Nevertheless, those moments work because of pizzazz, although those are the very moments that will make most long-term Dylan fans bristle. Which, of course, raises the question — who is this for? The dedicated aren't going to be dazzled by the slickness and the casual fans certainly aren't going to pay much attention to a live album from 1978. Interesting historically, perhaps, but only marginally.

Which, of course, raises the question — who is this for?

Me. I'm a big fan of this schmaltz fest.