Review:

on 2011-03-08 CharlesMartel Said:

According to what may be an urban myth, this album was released because a bootleg was doing the rounds of one of the Budokan concerts Dylan did in 1978. CBS wanted to cash in by issuing a legitimate version which would have the added effect of putting the bootleggers out of business. The result is somewhat disappointing as the quality of the album sounds like a bootleg. To make matters worse, in spite of its popularity as a venue, the acoustics there are pretty poor as it was not designed for concerts but for sumo wrestling.

Having said that, this is, at heart, a good collection of Dylan's better known songs and it is interesting to hear some alternative versions of well known tracks. However, it is not a good introduction to Dylan's works in a live context because of the circumstances surrounding its issue. Making a recording a few days into a world tour in an attempt to stave off bootlegs is either stupid or crass commercialism. I am not sure which is the case on this album but given CBS' record for awful commercial decisions, I suspect a combination of both.

The facts are there for all to hear. Though Dylan altering his songs' arrangements from the original is nothing new when it came to live performances, he seems to have adapted them to sound as if they are all being prepared for release on MTV. The results are correspondingly bland at times. Perhaps the reason for this could lay in the arrangements of the tracks. Dylan's choice of a small orchestra with which to perform would have required a much greater degree of preparation than he had perhaps been used to. The tendency to improvise would have to be rehearsed out of the set and this comes across all too strongly in the recording. This is not a recording which conveys with it any warmth. There is no joy in this, no pleasure in the making of music. This is a performance, nothing more, nothing less, like some sort of contractual obligation. Take that, and then produce the life out of it and you have something anodyne and unsympathetic. Then combine that with the sometimes bombastic arrangements and you get Bob Dylan like you have never heard Bob Dylan before.

It may come as no surprise therefore that on release the album was panned and it remains among the Dylan-albums-I-hate-most in many of his fans' views. But for all its faults, that is somewhat unfair. Dylan's propensity for changing things around meant experimentation and in spite of the apparent lifelessness of this, it is a valid experiment. This is what Bob Dylan would have sounded like if he had taken Elvis's place on the stages of Las Vegas. Whether that is what you want of your Bob Dylan is up to you. But you cannot knock the man for at least having the guts to give it a go.

But then again, this period was something of a fallow period for Dylan. He was relying on his reputation to a certain extent during this period and in all honesty the cracks are beginning to show on this album. This is Dylan going through the motions. His songwriting had entered a phase which he would perhaps best wish to forget and his personal life was not putting him at his best either. The result is a certain tiredness about the whole thing. I doubt this album is one of which Mr Zimmerman is particularly proud.
Rating: 6/10