Photo special: Bob Dylan Oakland CA November 1978

All photos taken by Chris Bradford:
 “I am a high school English teacher, but have also taught French and. Photography. My passion for  many years, besides photography and music, has been baseball. I coached at the same high school for 35  years and have had 4 players play in the Major Leagues. I also coached for 10 summers in the Alaska  League, a college-level league, 5 summers in Anchorage and 5 in Honolulu, Hawaii. My photographic  interests these days revolve primarily around travel. My wife and I go somewhere every summer, our  favorite destinations being Cuba, Italy, Croatia, Morocco, France and Southeast Asia, and numerous  other destinations. I am currently in the laborious process of scanning most of my thousands of rock n roll slides and negatives. Feel free to email me if you have questions about artists you may want to see photographs of [email protected]”

A while ago we here at Alldylan got an email from Chris where he told us that he had started digitizing his old slides, among them quite a few Dylan photos never before published. He asked if we would like to publish some of them on Alldylan. We were stunned, what an offer! We wrote back and said that we would be honoured.

We will publish several posts with photos from Dylan’s tours in 1974, 1978,1979 and 1980, and after that we will maybe post other artists. Chris has pictures of great historic value and he can be contacted if anyone wants to buy Hi-Res shots for printing. He has 99 shots from the 1978 Oakland show! We are not sure if it was the first or second night.

Here is the first photo special with Chris Bradford’s pictures, Bob Dylan & The Band Oakland 1974

Here are the 14 photos from Oakland 1978 that I picked from a 99 picture collection:

Some of the pictures have been published on web before, but all these are newly digitized, and most of them have never been seen before by other than the photographer, Chris Bradford.

“Oakland CA November 1978. Oakland Alameda County Coliseum. I have no recollection of that show to be honest, especially how I got so close in that monstrous basketball arena.”

” … While I was not a fan of the artistic move on his part, it was a great opportunity to see him in a small venue in 79 and 80 (the Warfield is basically a very nice movie theater) where they allowed cameras and fairly unfettered access to move around.

The Warfield was then, as it remains today, located in a seedy stretch of Market Street, so the walk to the venue and back again to my car was somewhat unpleasant. Once inside, however, the ambiance and acoustics were first-rate. I have very few specific memories of the concert and, since I didn’t love the music, I was free to focus (no pun intended) on getting the best shots possible. No one bothered me, I was relatively discreet, and took about 270 photographs. Today, with digital, I would have taken many more. These days Dylan is obsessed with not allowing photographs at his shows.

It seems remarkable to look back and see how free we were to photograph whatever we wanted. I have spent the past three weeks scanning and Photoshopping a large number of slides and negatives from those days and will be posting some of them in the next few weeks.I was using a Nikon FM 2 with a lens I cannot remember for these photographs.”
– Chris Bradford

Pictures from the Warfield shows will be up soon 🙂

– Hallgeir