Have You Heard: Bob Dylan - Live 1966

A stunning piece of music-history documentation. A great album. Call it what you will, but investigate this record.

Sunday 18th April 2010

A Crimean shadow spills soft on the silence; the daggers are deep in the seatbacks.  And out in the Manchester evening, a vast, oiled river of cyclical history roars at the door.

A ghost has appeared at the window – a hollow-eyed banshee that walks to the stage.  He is tarred with the night, and is feathered with stained-glass applause that erupts as he strums an acoustic guitar.  They propose that they love him, and welcome him home as he sings his sublime and illusory verse; and his voice is as taunt and as gaunt as the darkness where beauty is born in the space between words.  In the Manchester Free Trade Hall, time is abandoned – the voice is the future, the present and past.  It is purity, fragile; beholden to everyman; asking of nothing; or so they believe.

Yet something unnatural stirs in these moments; a restless and tense agitation; impossible, still, to commit to a theory - a syllable spat with the fury of change in a rippling pool of the gentle, familiar poetry.  Hands that do dishes reach back to the knife.

Like a back-alley wildcat scratching the wind; like some strange and Imperial shantytown prince, he is down and upon them, unmasked and electrical, babbling weirdly of terrible things. The stage is a battlefield, artist and audience tearing their flesh on the barbs of a song.  The ghost has been altered past all recognition; destruction and majesty soar to the rafters – he cries, and his voice is a tyre on tarmac, and ancient blues, knowing of everything, war.      

When Caesar gave word of his latest desire –that he plug in his fire and light up the world – he was beaten and bloodied, and died at the hands of the people who only acknowledged the night.  I ask of you, now, to commit to the lantern; let history play on the paths of your ear, and bear witness to change, and remark on its making, and echo its lessons in tasks of today.

In ’66, Dylan defied his adoption.  Decide for yourself which side victory chose. 

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