Huh, I didn't realize that. Definitely helps explain the 9 song length and the purpose behind releasing another live album so soon after Before the Flood. I may have to find that video and check it out...

...and oh yeah, Garth Hudson's synthesizer is annoying as fuck.

Maybe it's because I feel like a real piece of shit today, but I fucking fell in love with Hard Rain, particularly the 11 min or so 'Idiot Wind'. I played it twice through.

I don't know about Budokan though. This flute...

Maybe it's because I feel like a real piece of shit today, but I fucking fell in love with Hard Rain, particularly the 11 min or so 'Idiot Wind'. I played it twice through.

It may be his first live album in six years, but Real Live still is his fourth live album in ten years, and, as such, it still feels a little redundant. Nevertheless, it doesn't feel anywhere nearly as unnecessary as At Budokan and if it doesn't capture a historically significant tour, as Hard Rain did with the Rolling Thunder Revue, this is a better record all the same, capturing a working band — a working band featuring ex-Stones guitarist Mick Taylor, no less — on a pretty good night. That means there are few revelations — though diehards will certainly revel in "Tangled Up in Blue," which has several brand-new (not necessarily better) verses — but it's still pretty good all the same, providing lean, relatively muscular renditions of Dylan's great songs. This isn't an important, necessary Dylan record, but it's a good, solid live album, his best live album since Before the Flood, even if it's hardly as monumental as that.

Please, God- make it stop.

For the record, I really have no desire to hear this album but am going through with it for the sake of art and science. In a way, I'm a hero of sorts.

Wait until we do our Emerson, Lake and Palmer thread.

Really? I'm genuinely excited about it.

Quite possibly the worst album by either Bob Dylan or the Grateful Dead, the live Dylan & the Dead completely squanders its promise. Working from an intriguing selection of songs -- it includes staples like "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" and more obscure gems like "Joey" -- the Dead and Dylan contribute listless, meandering versions that are simply boring. Both artists have done much better -- reportedly they have done better together, according to various bootleg fans -- but Dylan & the Dead is a sad, disheartening document.

Bloor can probably embellish or clarify here, but the story has always been that they rehearsed for this tour, worked up set lists, etc, and then Dylan came out for the first night of the tour and played songs they hadn't rehearsed, in keys they never even tuned to, in tempos completely different than agreed upon. Apparently because he's Bob Dylan...

I'm as excited about this atrocity as anything since Oh Mercy.

This show, taped for MTV, finds Dylan turning in an 11-song set, with eight of the songs dating from his 1963-1967 heyday, including such standards as "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and "Like a Rolling Stone." ("John Brown," a powerful antiwar song from 1963, had not been released on a Dylan album previously.) The '70s are represented by "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," and the '80s by "Shooting Star" and "Dignity" (a trunk song, the studio version of which had emerged only the previous November on Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, Vol. 3). Dylan, accompanied by a competent five-piece band, approaches his material in a gentler fashion than on some of the originals -- "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and "With God on Our Side," for example, seem sadder and less defiant than they did back in 1964. Otherwise, unlike some other Unplugged performances, this one doesn't offer a noticeably different view of the artist's work. But then, Dylan has been unplugged for much of his career, anyway.

I'm pretty high on this album and have actually had parts of it back in the rotation in the last few weeks.

"Dignity", "Shooting Star", "Tombstone Blues", "John Brown" and "Desolation Row" (which seriously might be my favorite version of it ever) are my favorites. Some things don't work as well but that's why "Skip" was invented (presumably).

A quick note on "Rainy Day Women": I was reading that interview in Rolling Stone with Chuck Berry and it occurred to me that the two most important figures in American rock music both have a song that is both absurd and embarrassing, but yet both refuse to acknowledge said absurdity and in fact continue to regularly play it 40 or more years later. (Speaking of course of "My Ding-A-Ling")

Hey Dump, do you have the boot of the complete Unplugged sessions for Dylan?

The mysterious tape of early Bob Dylan performances said to have been recorded at the Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village in 1962 began turning up on bootleg albums such as Ode for Barbara Allen, The Gaslight Tapes, Dylan '62, and Barbed Wire Blues in the 1970s. In 1991, one track, "No More Auction Block," earned legitimate release on The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased), but this ten-track disc is the first extensive issuance of the material in legal form. The mystery of the origins of the recordings remains, however. Dylan scholars tend to date them from the fall of 1962, but there is no assurance they were actually made at the Gaslight, and tapes circulating among collectors contain more songs than the 11 now commercially available. (Among the missing songs is an early version of "Ballad of Hollis Brown," later heard on 1964's The Times They Are a-Changin'.) Nevertheless, this album is a valuable missing link between Dylan's self-titled debut album (released in March 1962), which consisted mostly of cover tunes, and The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (released in May 1963), which unveiled Dylan the songwriter. Most of the songs Dylan performs here are covers, but there are early versions of "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," two of the major songs that would appear on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, as well as "Rocks and Gravel" (a free-form adaptation of Brownie McGhee's "Solid Road" and Leroy Carr's "Alabama Woman Blues"), which was recorded for The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan and even included on its initial version, and the antiwar "John Brown," later recorded for the various-artists album Broadside Ballads, Vol. 1. Those songs reveal Dylan's emerging songwriting talent (the lyrics of "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" don't even seem quite finished), while the other six songs are more reminiscent of the gruff traditional folksinger of the Bob Dylan album, though one who can be gentler ("Barbara Allen") and more provocative ("Cocaine") than he seemed on his first LP. The recordings are considerably clearer than the bootleg versions, but they retain their unofficial quality, with occasional flaws, the most notable of which is the abrupt ending of the final track, "West Texas."