I heard the sound of thunder
And then it was drowned out by a saxophone, or, how the new "The Complete Budokan 1978" from Bob Dylan expands upon one of the man's missteps.
Almost unfailingly, Bob Dylan's "Bootleg Series'' releases have been revelatory. Even with eras we think we know intimately — such as Blood on the Tracks or the material on The Cutting Edge — something new is found thanks to the additional context. This has been most evident in the sets that covered Self-Portrait and his Christian era, each of which sought to reclaim albums and phases that had been dismissed critically and commercially in their time.
It is no surprise then that the new The Complete Budokan 1978 is not a Bootleg Series entry, because simply offering more of the same does nothing to rescue Dylan's least-successful live album. If you liked the original, you were in a fairly small club, and you'll probably be happy to have the tracks that were initially omitted. If you didn't like it, there might be a take or two here that could sway you to reconcile with Budokan Bob, but it will take an open mind to come away satisfied.
This set presents the two full shows performed in Budokan from the 1978 tour: February 28, and March 1. The original Live at Budokan release offered a selection of those tracks, 22 in all, and was released in Japan and then Australia and New Zealand. Once it started to show up in the U.S. on import and in bootlegged versions, Columbia decided to issue it here. This new set includes 58 tracks, 36 of which are unreleased. But those 36 unreleased tracks are mainly alternate performances of the 22 songs on the original album. along with 11 songs that weren't on the original set.
As a listener, I am drawn first to the music and then, much later to the lyrics. This is the case with every artist, but it makes me fairly unique as a Dylan fan. So much of what you hear and read about Dylan revolves around his lyrics, and rightly so. I do often find myself hooked by and fall in love with the way Dylan uses words. But it is the music — his melodies and phrasing and chord choices — that made me a fan. As Dylan said in his Nobel Prize lecture, "I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days."
It is this preference for the music over the lyrics that has made the "Bootleg Series" so satisfying for me. I haven't bothered to count, but I would imagine the number of actual unique songs contained on "Bootleg Series" releases is smaller than you might guess from 17 multi-disc collections. The joy of these sets, beyond the occasional new-to-our-ears composition, is hearing a familiar song done in a new way. (And yes, I am well aware that Dylan frequently changes lyrics when performing live, and appreciate the work by those obsessed with such alterations to catalog these iterations).
Dylan's songs might sound musically simple, but that leaves an immense canvas on which to paint new versions each time out. Take "Ballad of a Thin Man," one of the songs included on the original Budokan release and a second time on this expanded set. Including those two tracks, I have 33 versions of the song on my hard drive from 10 legitimate releases and eight bootlegs. And mine is a modest Dylan collection. Not all of these are revelatory, but enough are that I could spend a couple hours on nothing but this one song, discovering nuances of phrasing and new colors brought out by the differing musical contexts.
That is what was disappointing about Budokan then and now. Dylan simply wasn't finding much of anything new in these performances. Others have written eloquently about this period and this album in particular, so I've no need to rehash all of that here. Suffice to say that Dylan was seeming to take a victory lap in lieu of having much new to say, performing his hits in simplified, uninteresting ways. Though the studio album he recorded and released during this tour, Street-Legal, has become a favorite to many, it was clear his creative tank was not topped off, and he was months away from the personal changes that led to Christian-centered albums like Slow Train Coming that showed a new creative spark.
The sets here draw from some of his earliest recordings all the way up through his most-recent studio recording at the time, 1976's Desire. To be honest, I haven't spent much time with Budokan over the years as I find it to be the least-satisfying of his live albums. Hoping to find the same sorts of recontextualized revelations that have come with many of his other archival releases over the past couple of decades, I decided to focus on the 11 previously unreleased songs. Dylan does try new things, but these new avenues are mostly dead-ends.
The first track on this set is a fine example. Dylan opened both Budokan shows with "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." It's a song that has gone through many iterations, none more powerful than the rousing version that was a highlight of his Rolling Thunder Revue sets (captured in fine form on The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Dylan Live 1975. Here, after a meandering opening that builds on a light disco beat to take in a saxophone solo that makes Clarence Clemons1 seem restrained, a bongo-driven guitar solo that feels pulled from a Santana B-side, and a little fiddle hoedown (all offered sequentially and for no seeming reason), we reach the end… with no Dylan vocal at all. I suppose it was the band members playing on their leader, each taking a turn to show off, but it was wisely left off of the original set.
Next up are a couple of blues covers, one from the first show, and one from the second. "Repossession Blues" will be familiar to listeners of "The Rundown Rehearsal Tapes," a bootleg that captures rehearsal sessions for this tour. A slow take there is amped up into a bluesy stomp here. "Love Her With a Feeling" is a chugging blues. Both songs are fine, and it's always nice to hear Dylan dig into his carpetbag for something from the past, but neither adds much to our understanding or appreciation of Dylan and his music.
The new songs that come closest to being revelatory on the set follow, with a searching take of "I Threw It All Away," which makes much better use of the saxophone, and "Girl From the North Country," which finds Dylan accompanied by his own guitar and an organ. On the former, Dylan wrings more emotion from this Nashville Skyline track than on the plodding Hard Rain version from two years prior. The latter is nearly hymn-like thanks to the swelling notes from the organ that underpin his jousting guitar figures. It's really quite beautiful, and it's the first real surprise here. While Dylan was right to keep everything previous to this off of the official set, the absence of "Girl" is a head scratcher. A good take exists from each of the two shows, but neither made it to wax in 1978.
"To Romona," is next, a serviceable version of a workhorse that stands up to the additional backing singers and other instrumental elements (though as elsewhere, you can certainly feel Clarence Clemmons, and thus his, um, Boss, looming over this entire affair).
"One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)" is one of my favorite Dylan songs, but the jaunty disco take here is not the sort of thing an artist should do to one of his best songs. I'll just leave it at that. 2
"Tomorrow is a Long Time" is a nice find. The song dates to Dylan's earliest days, though it didn't make it onto a record until 1971's Greatest Hits Vol. II. That was a live take from a 1963 show at Town Hall. It also showed up on the "Bootleg Series" entry for the Witmark Demos. It's wonderful to hear it here, a more age-appropriate version given gravitas by the life Dylan had lived in the subsequent 15 years. As with much of this, I could personally do without the saxophone and would dial down the backing vocals a bit, but it's a rare example here of Dylan finding something new in an older song.
There are so many live versions of "I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)" that I can understand why Dylan chose to leave this version behind. As has been the case with some of the misfires in these shows, it's a bit too peppy. Ultimately, it's an easy omission when you're trying to fit a certain number of songs on four sides of vinyl.
"You're a Big Girl Now," a relatively recent song at the time drawn from Blood on the Tracks, eases into a bluesy, almost countryish seam here. It starts out promising, but takes on too much musical baggage that the song can't or won't support, and it capsizes, that saxophone pulling the whole thing under. A slightly shorter take appears from the second show, but the attempt by the lead guitarist to wrest the solo section away from the sax player leaves a mess as both battle for dominance, and both attempts at the song were wisely left on the sidelines for the original release.
The final new song is "The Man in Me" from the underrated New Morning LP. It's the rare song here that seems a good fit for the band configuration here. The sax and the backing vocals work. I still prefer the original version, but nothing here is out of place.
It's clear I'm not a fan of the saxophone here, though it is used tastefully once or twice. To show I'm fair, I'll add that I'm also opposed to the other woodwind, the flute, that runs through the songs that were issued on the original Budokan set. "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" is a good example of what could have gone right and what went wrong. The song takes on the odd little boogie shuffle that Dylan favored in this era. It's not the best setting for such a beautiful song, but one imagines there is no way to ruin such an indelible melody. And then the flute comes in, quietly at first, and then with the backing of mariachi horns and swelling strings. The marvel of Dylan's melodies is their sturdiness. They can carry a song with little more backing than the strum of a guitar that might generously be considered to be in tune, or they can slice, jab and float through and over nearly any amount of orchestration. But Dylan does his damndest to disprove the point here, slathering on so much unnecessary window dressing that the melody is nearly swamped and lost. The flute also mars "Mr. Tambourine Man," another song one imagines it would be difficult to ruin.
Not a rousing thumbs up by any means, but am I glad this was issued? Sure. Any time you have the chance to hear something from Dylan that you haven't heard previously, you should take it. There are a handful of tracks here that deserve to be heard.
Look, I love Clarence Clemmons, but he works best soaring above the bombast of something like the E Street Band. This isn’t Clemmons here — it’s Steve Douglas, a saxophone legend in his own right — but the constant presence makes me think Bob was noticing the attention paid to the latest “New Dylan” and wanted to try out that sound. Despite the larger ensemble Dylan assembled for this tour, it just doesn’t work to my ears.
Instead, an artist should be so lucky as to have another artist do this with one of their songs: