May 17: Bob Dylan & The Hawks: Free Trade Hall, Manchester, England 1966
The most enthralling, truthful, priceless concert performance ever issued by a great artist.
~Michael Gray (BD Encyclopedia)
The most famous bootleg in rock history, with the possible exception of Dylan’s own Basement Tapes, finally makes its official appearance 32 years after the event, and nearly 30 years after it started circulating in the underground.
~Richie Unterberger (allmusic.com)
May 16: Bob Dylan released Blonde On Blonde in 1966
The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It’s that thin, that wild mercury sound. It’s metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up. That’s my particular sound.
~Bob Dylan (to Ron Rosenbaum – Nov 1977)
Blonde on Blonde is all resonance. The songs and their stories and evocative lines and seductive melodies inhabit a realm of sound unique to this album, different from anything created before or since by Dylan or anyone else. Dylan called it “that thin, that wild mercury sound-metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up.”
~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan Performing Artist I: The Early Years 1960-1973)
To have followed up one masterpiece with another was Dylan’s history making achievement here…Where Highway 61 Revisited has Dylan exposing and confronting like a laser beam in surgery, descending from outside the sickness, Blonde on Blonde offers a persona awash inside the chaos…We’re tossed from song to song…The feel and the music are on a grand scale, and the language and delivery are a rich mixture of the visionary and the colloquial.
~Michael Gray (Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan)
…The Sheffield show is perhaps the best of the tour. The quality is incredible, and the performance can move you to tears. The Gaumont adds a warmth and depth to the overall sound that is lacking at many venues, and Bob pours his heart into every syllable. This set represents some of the finest of the tour…
~bobsboots.com
CBS records this concert. A PA recording of the acoustic half of the show is subsequently widely bootlegged. The extant tape features “Visions of Johanna,” “Fourth Time Around,” “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” “Desolation Row,” “Just Like a Woman,” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” (but not “She Belongs to Me,” presumably performed). Although the acoustic set seems to be well received, the audience is hostile throughout the electric set. One review of the show is headlined “Night of the Big Let Down.” According to Robbie Robertson, some of the audience were even holding up placards saying “Stop the War.” A recording of “I Don’t Believe You” from the electric set is eventually released on the Biograph set, incorrectly assigned to Belfast.
~Clinton Heylin (Bob Dylan: A Life in Stolen Moments Day by Day 1941-1995)
MB: Do you consider yourself a poet or a songwriter?
BD: I don’t consider myself either one of those two things. I did when I first heard the words, you know, of course – “songwriter” – you hear that when you’re very young. “Poet,” I never heard that word really. I never really could think of myself as such until I came to New York and then for a while I did think I was a poet, but I don’t consider myself anymore from seeing all the rest of the people who’re called poets too and I just don’t like to refer to myself as a poet because it puts you in a category with a lot of funny people, you know
Place Des Arts
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
20 February 1966
Released in the UK on ON THE CREST OF THE AIRWAVES VOLUME ONE, Music Melon MMLTDBOX12, 13 February 2012.
Released on The Classic Interviews 1965-1966, Chrome Dreams CIS2003, 19 May 2003.
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