«LESS

The Halloween 1964 performance captured in Bootleg Series Volume 6 captures Dylan enjoying his life, his music, and his audience before his growing fame begins pressing in upon him. His manner is breezy, full of nervous excitement and still steeped in the stylized phrasing of the folk tradition for which his duets with Joan Baez were an apotheosis.

By May 7, 1965, the arrangements are tighter, the tone harder-edged; Baez is in attendance but not as a performer. The emerging Dylan is perfectly captured in the first verse of Don’t Think Twice played this evening. In his 1964 concerts, Dylan would strike improbably high notes on the first stanza of each verse, prompting nervous laughter from some in the audience, plainly audible on the Halloween 1964 recording. This evening, Dylan begins in a similar fashion, striking the same unsettling high note on the first verse. Yet this time, Dylan himself seems unsettled by the note, laughing at the attempt, and modulating the next verse towards a more wearied, measured rendition which carries through the rest of the song. He is, quite literally, shaking off one stage persona even as he tailors a new one.

Other performances this evening reveal a more aggressive approach, moving beyond the stylized, iconoclastic folk cadences and elocution which make the Halloween concert so compelling; towards the hip, alternately bemused and dismissive irony which would propel Dylan to icon status over the next eighteen months. Where It’s Alright Ma is a wandering contemplative twelve-minute mantra on Halloween 1964, here Dylan plays an electrifying rendition — a tongue-twisting manic chant clocking in at barely eight minutes. By way of introduction, Dylan offers, “This is called, ‘It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding’ ho-ho-ho.”

In a similar vein, Dylan transforms If You Gotta Go from a coy come-on at Halloween to a knowing back-handed seduction this evening; foretelling the sharper-edged version which Dylan would record a few days later in a London studio. Talking World War III Blues is no longer the self-effacing send-up of nuclear nightmares. This evening, it’s been distilled to a cock-eyed word-play with pointed references to Donovan and T.S. Eliot, coming across more as a send-up of the song itself and, perhaps, its audience.

Dylan songbook has also expanded in the intervening six months. Here, Dylan presents breathtaking performances of recent compositions Love Minus Zero/No Limit, She Belongs To Me, and, as a final encore, It’s All Over Now Baby Blue. Some commentators characterize these performances as professional rather than passionate, based on Dylan’s later comments that he had grown tired of the solo concert format and rapt audiences by this time. One need only listen to his plaintive Love Minus Zero, or ferocious It’s Alright Ma, to appreciate the fierce focus of this one man playing his songs on guitar and harp, where the professional and the passionate mesh perfectly into performances which touch his audience as directly as any music ever made. Dylan may have tired of the solo concert format – as he’s grown restless with every other stage of his performing career — but the performances still demand our silent, awed attention forty years after they silenced and awed those in attendance at the Manchester Free Trade Hall.