Dylan Revisited: Rare Live 1962-66

Revisiting an epic two-disc collection of early live Bob Dylan recordings from quiet Greenwich Village folk cafés to a raucous Royal Albert Hall.

This is a series by DylanRevisited based on former Twitter threads, now available here in an easier to read and longer lasting format.

Live 1962-66 – Rare Performances from the Copyright Collections (henceforth Rare Live) is a valuable by-product of an admin job. Starting in 2012, Sony Music released a series of multi-disc compilations of Bob Dylan recordings in order to maintain their European copyright.

These 50th anniversary collections were extremely limited edition with just 100 copies made available of the first two volumes. Much like some of the more in-depth Bootleg collections, their existence is a rubber stamp, of interest to only the most dedicated Dylan fans.

Rare Live is a pared-down compilation of 29 live performances from the copyright collection. Originally just for the Japanese market, it inevitably found its way around the world as a more accessible way to hear early live Dylan.

The collection opens with history in the making: a record of the first time Bob Dylan performed Blowin’ in the Wind. At Gerde’s Folk City on April 16th 1962, he gives his new song a 50-second guitar and harp intro before singing that famous first line.

This original Blowin’ in the Wind is slower than the version that will appear on The Freewheelin’ album and only has two verses. But it’s remarkable that we can hear this initial incarnation - a seminal moment in the life of Bob Dylan and the wider world.

Earlier in this Gerde’s set, he played another Freewheelin’ song, Corrina Corrina. The album version is one of the few early Dylan recordings that features a backing band (though they’re hardly The Hawks), so it’s nice to hear Dylan’s solo take here.

He begins Corrina Corrina with an offhand comment that makes the Gerde’s crowd laugh – a nice reminder of how genial and fun he was in those early live shows. His guitar playing and vocals are excellent, while there are some surprising lyrical switches.

When Dylan sings “I got a devil on my trail and a hellhound by my side”, it’s like an extreme twist on the familiar, sweeter album version. This line also re-emphasizes his song’s debt to Robert Johnson’s Stones in my Passway – already highlighted by the “bird that whistles” lift – in its use of the “I got a…and a…” format.

One of the early peaks of Dylan live recordings happened at New York’s Town Hall a year later. Rare Live has a clear and confident Town Hall take on John Brown, the anti-war song he had previously played at The Gaslight.

This is the last time he will perform the song until Jerry Garcia persuades him to revisit it during his 1987 tour with The Grateful Dead. John Brown will also be a surprise inclusion in Dylan’s mid-90s MTV Unplugged show.

Dylan draws out the melancholy of Don't Think Twice, It’s All Right at Town Hall, while playing with the vocal melody. However, he then forgets his tweaked phrasing in one of the later verses before overcompensating for his error in a ragged final stanza.

Don’t Think Twice had been part of Dylan’s repertoire since the previous year, but Bob Dylan’s Dream is a new song for the Town Hall crowd, unless they caught its debut at Gerde’s two months earlier. This good performance is only slightly marred by some ringing feedback from his vocal mic.

Dylan played Boots of Spanish Leather for the very first time at Town Hall. After a lovely picked introduction, he weaves the story’s wondrous spell through a soft, sorrowful performance.

A highlight of this April 1963 Town Hall set (which really deserves a full official release) is a pulsing, poised performance of Seven Curses. I’d previously only heard this song as a studio outtake on the first volumes of The Bootleg Series and the demo for Witmark, so really enjoyed this live version.

Dylan would only ever play Seven Curses one more time, six months later at New York’s Carnegie Hall. By October 1963, we’ve reached firm protest-era Dylan and he delivers Masters of War at the legendary venue with a low-broiling fury, while a new sounding high-string strum adds melodic menace to the music.

There’s excellent guitar playing on a passionate first-time performance of The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. Dylan introduces short flourishes after some of the choruses, expanding the musicality of a song that is typically more about the words.

We get another moment of history with a song from Dylan’s appearance at The March on Washington in August 1963. The scratchy, resonant recording from that famous day opens with a man saying: “I can tell from your applause he needs no further introduction…Mr. Bob Dylan.”

Dylan plays When the Ship Comes In with vigor and is complemented by Joan Baez’s at-first hesitant but later resolute backing vocals. It’s an appropriately compelling and triumphant opening to such a significant set.

Photo by Rowland Scherman

Of course, Dylan will go on to play Only a Pawn in their Game to the masses gathered in Washington, which proved a touch more contentious – as I explored in my revisit to The Times They Are a-Changin’. The title track of that album provided the regular opener to his live performances during this period, as we hear on Rare Live from London’s Royal Festival Hall in May 1964.

Dylan had questioned the validity of his protest anthem after the assassination of JFK in November of the previous year. While his Festival Hall lyrical tweak of “The cross is bending / the curse it is cast” doesn’t seem fully thought through, it feels like he was trying to incorporate some sense of doubt to The Times They Are a-Changin’s strident certainty.

In 1964, the singer was looking to expand his horizons beyond topical songs and Rare Live is also interested in the other side of Bob Dylan. We get a fine Festival Hall version of Girl From the North Country and debuts of a few significant songs.

Many live performances of It Ain't Me Babe from around this time see Dylan accompanied by Joan Baez, so it’s nice to hear his solo take. It’s sadder and more wistful than the firm version that closes his Another Side record and avoids the playfulness that comes when Baez is involved.

The Royal Festival Hall show hosted the first outing for Mr. Tambourine Man. While this live take is slower than the studio version we’ll eventually hear on Bringing It All Back Home, this Dylan masterpiece is largely in place by April 1964.

Dylan had written Mr. Tambourine Man on a trip across the US earlier that year and the Festival Hall audience witnessed the debut of another song written on the road. The extraordinary Chimes of Freedom will undergo some lyrical reshaping but this measured performance is superior to the shoutier take he’ll unleash at Newport later that summer.

Rare Live provides one moment from Bob Dylan’s triumphant appearance at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival: a somewhat forced performance of To Ramona with a mercifully toned-down harmonica than the shrill version he’ll play at The Philharmonic in October.

The collection returns to the UK for performances from the 1965 tour that was captured in DA Pennebakker’s documentary Dont Look Back. Dylan plays One Too Many Mornings at BBC Studios with even more mournfulness than the album take, plus a new emphasis on “behind” that foreshadows the following year’s raucous electric version.

US Presidents standing naked gets a big laugh from Dylan’s Sheffield audience, without breaking the spell of a mesmerizing performance of It’s Alright Ma. This April 1965 show happened just a month after Bringing It All Back Home was released, but Dylan’s delivery is markedly different.

His voice is more open and inviting, as opposed to the album’s tone of stern admonishment. He understands that the crowd already agrees with him so he can cut the hectoring without letting anyone off the hook for their complicity in capitalism’s long and crooked chargesheet.

Dylan is in great form during this tour, sounding calm and confident on Love Minus Zero in Liverpool. It’s starts with a long harmonica intro, which I would have loved more of at the end. If this near-perfect performance has a flaw, it’s that it’s over too quickly.

On a good Liverpool performance of It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, Dylan gets a lot of bass out of his acoustic guitar. Though nothing beats the haughty, disdainful version he plays to Donovan in a room at the Savoy Hotel that Pennebaker recorded for brutal posterity.

Dylan remains un-heckled at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall during a loose and lithe version of Gates of Eden. While his phrasing is more precise than usual, the song lacks a strict rhythm. He speeds up and slow down at will, drifting into empty spaces as if to emphasize the dreamy nature of the lyrics.

The Royal Albert Hall is also a welcoming venue in 1965. Dylan's wonderful performance of She Belongs to Me is a jaunty contrast to the hushed, breathy take he’ll deliver throughout the controversial 1966 tour. This section of Rare Live is the magnificent calm before the storm.

In July 1965, Bob Dylan announced his new electric side with a shocking plugged-in version of Maggie’s Farm at the Newport Festival of Folk. On Rare Live we hear that Dylan and his band have toned it down two months later.

The Maggie’s Farm they play at LA’s Hollywood Bowl in September 1965 is less aggressive and kinda funky, especially that slappin' Al Kooper organ.

Rare Live revisits that infamous 1965 Newport appearance with It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry. It's a song that went through many evolutions before its final Highway 61 Revisited album version.

At Newport, the song adapts to the band especially Mike Bloomfield’s explosive guitar work. It was the conclusion of a controversially short set and at the end we hear Dylan order his band off, saying “Let’s go man, that’s all.”

Next comes an epic tempo change in the form of a lovely solo acoustic version of Desolation Row, as performed for TCN-9 TV in Sydney in April 1966. I love that Dylan decided to take over a full ten minutes of airtime, but it passes so fast as he envelopes the listener in that masterfully-drawn cruel and unusual world.

Then we hit the UK for the infamous Judas tour that I covered extensively in my revisit to Bootleg Vol. 4. On Rare Live, we get two songs from Cardiff’s Capitol Theatre, where a rowdy Baby Let Me Follow You Down is greeted with applause by Dylan’s Welsh fans.

I Don’t Believe You gets the iconic “it used to go like that, now it goes like this” introduction. At Cardiff, it sounds more like the joke he probably initially intended it to be than the challenge it became later.

I really like the extra-sinister version of Ballad of a Thin Man from Edinburgh's ABC Theatre. Though as with the Free Trade Hall version, there's a lot of distortion on Dylan's vocals.

The obvious place to end Rare Live would be with Like a Rolling Stone. While the original Japanese version of the compilation does this, here we conclude with Visions of Johanna from Belfast's ABC Theatre.

I'm always happy to listen to any performance of this masterpiece, even if my favorite live take remains the one I first heard on Biograph, from the penultimate date of the tour at Royal Albert Hall.

Like most of the 1966 section of Rare Live, these are performances many Dylan fans will have heard a version of before. But overall the collection is a delightful summary of Dylan's early years and his development of a live performer. With historic debuts, unique takes and exceptional versions of great songs, it's of interest to aficionados while also being a great best-of record.

I first revisited Rare Live in Feb 2023. Coming back to it 18 months later with the A Complete Unknown movie on the horizon, I believe more than ever it’s a great starting point for anyone looking to get a handle on early Dylan.

What did you think of Rare Live? Let me know in the replies.

DylanRevisited is a Twitter (or X if you must) account where writer and longtime Dylan fan Colm Larkin revisits Bob Dylan's back catalogue one album/bootleg/live record at a time.

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