Real Life Rock Top 10: October 14, 2024
Bob Dylan 1974 x 27, Albert Camus 1942, The Twilight Zone 1960, Carlos Fuentes 1974, R. Crumb, 1994, Geeshie Wiley 1930
It’s Sisyphean, Bob Dylan and the Band, The 1974 Live Recordings (Columbia Legacy), these twenty-seven CDs drawn from the shows they played that year from Chicago on January 3 to Los Angeles on February 14. The songs change only rarely. At the start the old, unreleased “Hero Blues” is the first song and after one more show it disappears. “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” come in late in the tour. Except when the songs draw something from the performers—as with “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” which seems to grow more soulful, more spiritually open, every time (and it can be a shock to look again at the brutal shootout in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid to see that, as Slim Pickens sits dying and Katy Jurado puts down her shotgun and approaches him but does not touch him, how little of the song actually plays in the film)—the dynamics of the tunes don’t grow. I once wrote a book called Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations; one of the songs, which I looked through in many versions, was the 1964 “Ballad of Hollis Brown.” There are more than twenty performances of it here and if I’d had these recordings then I wouldn’t have had anything to say about any of them.