Positively Bob Dylan

For the past three years Dylan was rarely ever seen performing on stage with a guitar. The typical set-up was him playing on the left side of the stage standing in front of a keyboard, the other musicians on their usual spots. Only for two or three occasions a night he moved into the center of the stage to play his harp.
Something is happening and we don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones? Why is he exchanging his guitars for a keyboard? The most likely reason is that Bob might be suffering from arthritis. Also his sets are no longer than 90 minutes, about 30 minutes less than a usual rock concert. But what’s “usual” in the world of Bob Dylan anyway? Isn’t it the variety of styles, performances and interpretations of songs that fascinates us the most? And having heard a few of his latest live sets, he seems to enjoy the jam-session like stage set-up. There is no electric and acoustic set anymore and his set-list mainly includes songs from the mid-60s and his latest two albums. Bob might not be a piano man like Billy Joel or Elton John, but the new arrangements are interesting to an audience that has heard the songs a million times and thinks to know them by heart.

Following the release of “Desire” Dylan continued his Rolling Thunder Revue in 1976, but it was hard if not impossible to recreate the spontaneity of the 1975 tour. When the Revue finally performed in Fort Collins on May 23rd, it just seemed so symbolic that in probably one of their best shows of the tour they had to confront a hard rain. The concert had been recorded on film (for an NBC broadcast) and for an album, both entitled - of course - “Hard Rain”.
The show was recorded at the Hughes Stadium of the Colorado University and broadcast on TV on September 14. Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, T-Bone Burnett, Scarlet Rivera, Rob Stoner, Bob Neuwirth, Mick Ronson and Howie Wyeth joined Dylan among others from the 1975 leg of the tour.
A month after the “Hard Rain” concert and 30 years ago on April 22, 1976 they performed at the Belleview Biltmore Hotel in Clearwater, Florida. This indoor show had also been recorded for TV, but was never released.
DVD copies of both TV recordings are circulating among traders. And now on the 30th anniversary of “Hard Rain” one can only wonder why there still is no official DVD release of those great shows.

> Hard Rain album details

In August 1971 George Harrison gathered his friends for what has probably become the world’s first benefit concert, “The Concert for Bangladesh”. A new DVD version of the concert movie including never before seen footage will soon be released. Bob Dylan had his own acoustic set at the end of the concert, where he played “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, “It Takes A Lot To Laugh,It Takes A Train To Cry”, “Blowin’ In The Wind”, “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Just Like A Woman”. The new DVD version will also include “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” which was not included in the original movie, as well as George and Bob rehearsing “If Not For You”. Proceeds will go to UNICEF.

It’s the news that every Dylan fan has been waiting for since last year’s “Live 1964″: There will be a new release soon. The bad news about it is that there isn’t going to be any new material involved, the good thing however is that there will be two releases of rare early recordings.
“Dylan: Live at the Gaslight 1962″ will be available for a limited time at “Starbucks” in the U.S. and Canada starting August 30. The New York Gaslight Café recordings are among the earliest recordings of Dylan performing live and have been available on various bootleg releases for many years now. The 10 tracks on this release will be newly remastered though.
Plus “No Direction Home: The Soundtrack” will be released as Sony’s official “Bootleg Series Vol. 7″ at the end of August. It will include 26 previously unreleased recordings from 1959-66. They have been compiled for Martin Scorsese’s forthcoming Dylan TV-documentary in late September.