When I tell people I collect concert recordings, I often get blank stares. Sometimes I get questions like, “Why?” or “How many versions of the same songs do you need?” Sometimes I wonder the same thing. Do I really need hundreds of shows from a single artist?
And then I hear things like this. This is why I collect shows. This is why this insane hobby is so gratifying. Every once in a while, you find a version of a song that is transcendent. And that makes it all worthwhile.
My wife and I are pretty big fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the TV series. We came to it late. I had some friends in college who loved it, and I gave it a shot back then, when it was originally airing, but I found it to be cheap-looking and cheesy. It wasn’t until years later, after my daughter was born, that we finally got into it.
When our daughter was a baby, we spent a lot of time binge-watching TV shows. We weren’t big on taking her out on the town – way too much prep work for our tastes – so we’d just sit with her watching TV. That might have been the beginning of our homebody years, come to think of it.
We’ve since watched it a couple of times through, and we’re currently watching it with our now-teenage daughter, and she’s become a fan, too.
But before the series, there was this movie. Joss Whedon wrote the script for the movie, but he was quite dissatisfied with the result. The studio removed a lot of his jokes, toned down some of the darker elements, and apparently Donald Sutherland did a lot of improvisation in his dialogue.
It’s probably a good thing the movie didn’t turn out as well as Whedon wanted it to, for this caused him to create the TV series. And it is kind of amazing that someone gave him the money to do so, as the film bombed.
The film, like the series, follows Buffy Summers (Kristy Swanson), a stereotypical California valley girl. She’s blonde and pretty, a cheerleader who cares about fashion and boys. One day, she is approached by Merrick (Sutherland), who tells her she is the “Chosen One,” a vampire slayer, and that she has a calling.
It takes him a while to convince her, but when the vampires attack and she’s able to easily kill them, she decides to listen. There is a fun training montage, and some decent jokes, and then a final showdown with the head vampire (Rutger Hauer) and his main minion (Paul Reubens).
This is not a good movie. You can see the beginnings of something special, the bones of what became the TV show, but something feels off. Swanson is good. You get a sense in those early scenes that she’s not exactly happy being the ditzy blonde. Like she doesn’t really like her friends, but this is the lot that’s been chosen for her, so she just runs with it. It is interesting to think about how things would have gone had she been given the role in the TV series.
Sutherland can’t seem to get the tone right. He’s good at playing mysterious men who know more than they let on, and he can play the jokester as well. But he doesn’t get the blend right. And yeah, his improv isn’t great. It is a little difficult to understand who he is and what he’s doing.
Paul Reubens is the only one who seems to truly understand what kind of movie he’s in. He’s wonderfully campy and funny. It is no wonder they show some of his outtakes as the credits roll.
It isn’t a terrible film, but it certainly isn’t a good one. Worth watching if you are a fan of the series, just to see a different take on the material.
I’ve been married for twenty-four years or so. I love my wife. I enjoy spending time with her. I enjoy watching movies with her. We share an interest in animated films and fantasy films, certain types of comedy, etc., but she has little to no interest in horror. For most of our married life, we only had one television. So, when I wanted to watch a horror film, I had to wait until she was in bed or gone somewhere without me. We now have two televisions, so I can go upstairs and watch what I want in our bedroom. But before then, it was a bit of a challenge.
Several years ago, she took our daughter to visit her parents in Kentucky. I had a lot of work going at the time, so I stayed home. For the first few days, it was a lot of fun; I felt like I was single again. But then I just missed them and counted the days down until they came home.
With nobody home, I watched a lot of horror movies. Including The Conjuring.
Obviously, I love horror. I watch a lot of it. But I got to say watching two or three horror movies a night for several nights in a row and then going to bed in an empty house proved a bit much for me. By the third night, I started freaking out a little. I’d lie there in bed, eyes wide open, jumping at every little creak or crack, knowing some monster was out to get me.
After that, I started watching comedies.
The Conjuring is a movie that’s capable of giving me nightmares, even if I hadn’t watched numerous other horror films over the course of those few days.
A lot of modern horror just throws jump scare after jump scare at you. As if all we need from a horror movie is for something to jump out at us from the darkness or for the editor to make stark cuts.
Good horror movies know how to build tension over the course of a film. They can create a mood and build on it. That’s the kind of thing that gets under your skin and stays with you long after the initial fright of a jump leaves your memory.
The Conjuring does a great job of mixing the two. It takes time to develop its characters and build its story. It creates a mood of tension and builds upon it. But it also utilizes some great jump scares. Jumps can be effective, especially if they come out of the story. Anybody can have a maniac or a monster or a cat jump out at you unexpectedly. That will generally elicit a scream. But a good jump scare has been well developed. It makes sense within the realm of the story. There is background to the scare.
The film begins with some college girls telling a story. They were dabbling in the supernatural and were talking to a spirit. They invited the spirit into a doll called Annabelle. The doll started acting up. It started to scare them. They are telling this story to Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga), two self-described demonologists who study the supernatural and help those with infestations or possessions.
From this brief scene, we understand who the Warrens are, what they do, and that within the confines of this film, the supernatural is real. Then the movie pulls out a bit, and we realize the story we’ve just been watching is actually being told to an audience at a college seminar by the Warrens. The Annabelle story is in the past; it has been solved. The Warrens use it as an example of what they do to academics and students.
Then our story shifts to Roger and Carlyn Perron (Ron Livingston, Lili Taylor) and their five daughters. They’ve just bought a big country farmhouse. We watch them move in, unpack, and play. They are a nice family. The film takes its time with them; it lets us get to know them and like them. Nothing bad happens at first.
For its first half, the film will move back and forth between the Perrons and the Warrens. The Warrens will give more talks. We’ll see them go to a possibly haunted house and determine that the spooky noises are coming from the pipes and the wind. Not every case is real, you see. The Warrens are good people, not charlatans or fakes. If your house isn’t really haunted, they’ll let you know. But if it is, they are here to help.
This has drawn quite a bit of criticism from critics because the real-life Warrens were charlatans and fakes. Their cases have been proven to be false. Their personal lives have been inspected and found severely lacking. This film and its sequels make them out to be saints. I’m not here to criticize those decisions or really to talk about the real-life people. I’m here to talk about the movie, and it’s a good one.
Slowly, weird stuff starts happening at the Perron house. There are strange noises and terrible smells. The dog refuses to come indoors. They discover a basement whose entrance has been covered over. One of the girls begins sleepwalking, banging her head into a wardrobe. One of them creates an imaginary friend.
As the horror escalates, eventually the Warrens are brought in. There are some nice scenes between the families before things get crazy. Again, the film takes time to develop relationships. The Warrens are caring and kind. The Perrons are frazzled, but they take comfort in their new friends.
The Warrens bring a crew with them. They set up cameras and audio recording devices. They need to prove the house is haunted before the Catholic church will do an exorcism. These scenes are so well done. They bring a new edge to the thrills and terror. It all culminates in a big showdown between the evil spirit and these two families.
Not everything works. Some of the stuff with the Warrens before they meet the Perrons runs a little long. They keep returning to the Annabelle doll, and after a while it really feels like they are just prepping us for the inevitable Annabelle movie.
I’ve seen this movie three or four times now, so the jump scares no longer thrill, and it no longer keeps me up at night. That’s to be expected. But I do keep coming back to it. That’s the sign of a good horror movie – when you watch it again and again even though it no longer truly scares you.
I love 1950s sci-fi and horror movies. The anxieties over the newly discovered nuclear powers and the real possibility of space exploration created some wonderful films. A lot of those films were decidedly low-budget, but they still managed to create some pretty terrific special effects.
Invasion From Mars isn’t a particularly good film. Its story is pretty basic, and its low budget is a little too present, but there are some good sets and the alien design is wonderful.
David MacLean (Jimmy Hunt) is a young boy who loves astronomy. Lucky for him, there is a giant telescope in his hometown. One night he’s awakened by a terrible thunderstorm. He looks out his window, and he sees a flying saucer touch down on a sandy beach just behind his yard. He tells his dad about it, and he promises the boy he’ll check it out in the morning.
But Dad is a bit of an astronomy nut himself, and he decides to check the story out that night. He isn’t back when his wife wakes up, so she calls the police. They check out the spot David said he saw the UFO land, and they, too, disappear.
Later that morning, Dad shows back up, but he’s acting strange. He shouts at the boy to never mention what he saw again and gives him a good smacking when he asks questions. Dad’s also got a weird scar on the back of his neck.
David almost immediately figures out what’s going on and runs to the cops. They get him to talk to Dr. Pat Blake (Helena Carter), who believes his story and gets the military involved. They’ll blast a hole in the sand and discover a series of underground tunnels and eventually the Martians.
Most of the Martians are dudes in goofy-looking suits, but the king (or emperor? or something) is this big, round head with a human face, spray-painted gold, with some tentacle-looking things sticking out of it, all encompassed in a glass dome. It is kind of awesome. The cave system is pretty cool too. It’s covered in these wild bubbles.
The story is all standard stuff. I did appreciate its similarities to Invasion of the Body Snatchers with the aliens basically controlling humans and it being difficult to tell who was ok. When the military comes in, we see a lot of stock footage of tanks and other armored vehicles moving about. And when I say a lot, I mean a whole lot. They keep cutting back to tanks, but because it is all stock footage, we don’t see them interact with anything else in the film. They also reuse a lot of footage of Martians and soldiers running around in the caves.
It gets a little dull after a while, but those sets do look good, and the little Martian is awesome.
For the last several years, I’ve tried to watch every film in a horror franchise during the month of October. I’ve seen the Friday the 13th films and all of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, plus Halloween and Scream and their respective sequels. It has been a fun endeavor. Everyone knows that horror sequels can take a pretty steep decline in quality the further you get into them. For a long time, I tended to avoid them as I didn’t want to taint the originals with terrible sequels. But since I’ve become a bigger horror hound, I like being able to say I’ve watched an entire franchise.
And it is true, oftentimes the sequels are dreadful. But sometimes they can be quite good. Or at least they can take things into interesting new dimensions.
This year I’ve decided I want to tackle The Conjuring universe. Well, I’m not sure I’m going to watch all of the films, as there are a lot of them, depending on how deep you want to go. This is where I definitely say I won’t be reviewing all the films in this franchise.
The Conjuring films follow Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), real-life demonologists who studied the supernatural. There are currently four Conjuring films, but it has also spawned a couple of spin-offs. Three of them follow a possessed doll, and two involve some kind of evil nun.
The Warrens also visited the house in Amityville that contained so many horrors. Amityville Horror spawned two official sequels (which I reviewed here) and a remake, but because you can’t copyright a town’s name, there have been loads of unofficial sequels. I definitely won’t be reviewing all of them.
I’m also not sure if I’ll watch all the Annabelle and Nun movies. I’ll probably dip my toe into them, but if the first ones are bad, I doubt I’ll watch the sequels. But I will definitely watch The Conjuring movies and write about them.
To start this series off, I thought it would be fun to go back and watch the original Amityville Horror. Without it, there would be no Conjuring films.
I’ve seen Amityville Horror a few times now (and I even reviewed it here). It is not a good movie. The pacing is weird. There aren’t enough scares. It never builds any real sense of dread, and in the end there just isn’t any boogeyman or villain.
But there is something about it that makes me keep returning to it. Every couple of years I’ll get a hankering to watch it again, despite me knowing it isn’t as good as I want it to be. I think I want to like it, and after a few years I forgot how not good it is. But I do remember James Brolin’s big hair and awesome beard, and how amazing Margot Kidder looks in it. So I watch it and then go “oh yea, this film is bad.” Give me a couple more years, and I’ll probably watch it again.
One thing I always forget is that Ed and Lorraine do not make an appearance in this film. I always expect them to show up at the end, but they never do. I don’t believe they appear in the book this film is based on. My understanding is that they did show up at the house for some kind of TV special after the book became a hit. So, I guess this film really shouldn’t be included in The Conjuring universe, but as I say, there would be no Conjuring films without this one.
I pretty much stand by my original review, so I don’t think there is any need to rehash those thoughts. I was thinking about the screenplay as I watched it this time, and it is a bit of a mess. My guess is that it follows the book pretty well and, in a supposed non-fictional account, the book is probably pretty scary (at least if you buy into any of this stuff. I should probably note that this is all nonsense. The Warrens were charlatans. They made up most of their stories out of whole cloth and likely fed into the delusions of many others.) But reading a book about a haunting can sound real. Watching a movie like this borders on the ridiculous.
Because unlike something like The Exorcist or Poltergeist, there doesn’t seem to be any real villain in this film. A couple of chairs move on their own, a girl gets locked inside a closet, a priest gets attacked by a bunch of flies, etc. Even at its most hysterical, all we hear is a voice, and a door gets blown off its hinges. We never see the entity or get any kind of explanation for it. The priest (an overacting Rod Steiger) thinks it’s the devil, but his story never really gets going.)
The film literally ends with them just driving away. Nothing really tries to stop them. And that’s it.
I watched 38 movies in September. Eighteen of them were made before I was born. Thirty-five of them were new to me.
It must have been a pretty good month, as I handed out a lot of four-star ratings. Or maybe I just got lazy with my ratings.
I only went to the theaters once, and that was for The Killing. Well, actually, I went to the theater to see the new Resident Evil movie, but something went wrong, and I went home with a refund. I meant to tell that story, but I guess I forgot.
I reviewed quite a few films for Cinema Sentries, and I’m still enjoying the Kino Film channel. Once again, there was no theme this month. But October is here and I plan to watch lots of horror movies and write about them. If that goes well I hope to reinstate the monthly themes.
Lino Ventura and Tom Baker remain number one on my most-watched actors list. Charles Bronson has jumped onto the list, tied at number two with seven films. He’s one of those actors who I liked a lot. I loved him in films like The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape when he felt more like a character actor. Then he became a major star and played in a lot of dumb action films in the 1980s. I still kind of love those films, and I’ve been watching a lot this year.
It is good to see Martin Scorsese on the list again. He’s my favorite director, but I’ve seen almost everything he’s made. At least his narrative films; I still have quite a few documentaries I haven’t seen. Anyway, when I first started this list, he seemed to make it onto my most-watched directors, but I try to watch more new films than ones I’ve seen before, and so I’ve kind of stayed away from him. But now I’m coming back to him.
Here’s the full list.
The Killing (1956) ****1/2
Apology for Murder (1945) **1/2
Holiday Affair (1949) ****
Cunk on Life (2024) ****
Labyrinth (1986) ****
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026) ****
Mad Love (1935) ****
The Big Caper (1957) ****
One Body Too Many (1944) ***1/2
Fear in the Night (1947) **1/2
Secret Agent (1936) ***1/2
Barbarian Queen (1985) *
From Hell (2001) ****
Supergirl (2026) ***
The Golem: How He Came Into the World (1920) *****
Ghostwatch (1992) ****
The Hot Spot (1990) ****
Yakuza Graveyard (1976) ***1/2
The Inugami Family (1976) ****
Hot Enough for June (1964) ***1/2
Weapons of Death (1977) ***1/2
Shadows in an Empty Room (1976) ****
Once a Thief (1965) ****
Erotic Rites of Frankenstein (1973) ***
Tintin and the Blue Oranges (1964) ***
Lust of the Vampire (1957) ***1/2
The Sentinel (1977) **
The Counsellor (1973) ***
They Can’t Hang Me (1955) ****
Two Small Bodies (1993) ***
Time Is My Enemy (1954) ***
The Teckman Mystery (1954) ****
The Evil That Men Do (1984) **1/2
10 to Midnight (1983) **1/2
Caboblanco (1980) **
The Outside Man (1972) ****
Point Blank (1967) ****
One Cut of the Dead (2017) ****
The Rolling Stones
Western Australia Cricket Ground
Perth, Australia
February 24, 1973
and
Royal Randwick Racecourse
Sydney, Australia
February 26, 1973
Disc 1 (Perth)
01. Brown Sugar
02. Bitch
03. Rocks Off
04. Gimmie Shelter
05. Happy
06. Tumbling Dice
07. Honky Tonk Women
08. All Down The Line
09. Midnight Rambler
10. Little Queenie
Disc 2 (Sydney)
01. Brown Sugar
02. Bitch
03. Rocks Off
04. Gimmie Shelter
05. Happy
06. Tumbling Dice
07. Love In Vain
08. Sweet Virginia
09. You Can’t Always Get What You Want
10. Honky Tonk Women
11. All Down The Line
12. Midnight Rambler
13. Little Queenie
14. Rip This Joint
Originally posted on my Substack
The Midnight Cafe Review:
The first Bob Dylan tapes I ever obtained were from his 2010 Japan tour. They were audience recordings, of course, and I thought they sounded terrible. The thing is, I came to recordings of independent origin through the Grateful Dead – a band that has a seemingly infinite supply of superb soundboard recordings. Slowly, I obtained tapes from Grateful Dead-related and adjacent bands like Bruce Hornsby and David Grisman, but they were still nice-quality soundboard recordings.
At some point, I connected to the old Phil Zone site and all of their various vines. This opened my world up to all sorts of bands I didn’t know had recordings of shows available. But again, most of these were soundboards. Now, I certainly was aware of audience tapes. I had numerous audience recordings for the Dead and others. But they were much rarer than the soundboards I had collected up to this point, and generally went unlistened to.
I was excited to get those Dylan tapes, at least until I listened to them. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to listen to such poor-quality tapes.
Years have passed, and I’ve since listened to a great many audience recordings of all sorts of bands, including more than my fair share of Bob Dylan tapes. I’ve come to enjoy audience recordings in all their shapes and sizes. I can’t remember the exact date of those Japan shows, but I’ve listened to that whole tour and enjoyed them.
Of course, those recordings haven’t changed. It is the same sound as always. My sound equipment hasn’t gotten better either. It is me that has changed. I’ve learned how to enjoy an audience recording with all its flaws.
Now you may be asking yourself, why is he talking about a Bob Dylan show during a review of a Rolling Stones bootleg? The answer is that I’ve plugged this boot into my system on several occasions, only to turn it off after the first few songs. The sound has always seemed off to me.
It is clearly a soundboard, so there is none of the audience noise or distant sound you get on an audience tape. But it does sound slightly cold. In my notes, I tried to explain it by the stadiums they are playing in. The Western Australia Cricket Ground is a big stadium. Wikipedia says its capacity is 10,000, but that’s for when they are playing cricket – a sport that needs a big ground to play on. One presumes that for the Stones concert they had loads of seats on the grounds. Playing in a big stadium takes a different kind of performance and sound than playing in an intimate club.
The band is playing for a stadium crowd. This is big, loud rock and roll. The guitars thunder. Mick doesn’t exactly shout his lyrics, but his singing isn’t subtle. It is an assault on the ears. Or as a commenter noted on my old blog, “the band is feral.”
I have a hard time listening at first. On other listens, I turned it off and found something else to listen to. But this time I kept going. And like those Dylan audience recordings I found, I got used to it. Then I enjoyed it.
I don’t know what was going on with the band in Perth. The band had planned a 13-night tour of Japan and Australia. Japan got cancelled because they wouldn’t let Mick Jagger into the country due to his prior drug convictions. The Perth show was their seventh gig in Australia, so it wasn’t jet lag as I had thought it might have been. Maybe they partied too hard the night before. Or maybe they got some bad drugs just before this gig.
Who knows, but they play like mad men. Keith Richards and Mick Taylor light the place up with dual guitars. Mick Jagger sings like a man strung out.
The Sydney show does settle down a bit. They sound more relaxed. The songs have more nuance and detail.
They brought additional musicians with this tour. There is Nicky Hopkins (whose birthday was the 24th, prompting Mick to lead the audience in a sing-along and giving this boot its name) on piano, as well as Ian Stewart on keys and Bobby Keys on saxophone and Jim Price on trumpet and trombone. Those horns really add a lot to these shows. The keys are great when they aren’t being drowned out.
“Gimme Shelter” from Perth is awesome. It rages like the storm it is. Keith sings on “Happy”; his vocals are worse than Mick’s, but the song rocks. “Tumbling Dice” finds the band finally finding its stride. “Midnight Rambler” has a killer middle section where they slow everything down and it gets real bluesy. “Little Queenie” lets the pianos be heard, and it’s quite nice.
Though they play some of the same songs, the Sydney show is by far the better gig. I always wonder about boots like this: why they include both shows like this. I get that these are soundboard recordings from the Australian tour, but is anyone really wanting to hear the same songs again within the same boot?
I imagine when I listen to this again I’ll just skip to the Sydney performance.
The performances of the songs shared on both nights sound much better in Sydney to my ears. I do think the Perth show is worth listening to just for how energetic (and yes, feral) it is.
“Love in Vain” is pure blues. Mick’s vocals are soulful, full of hurt and loss. The guitars are beautiful. “Sweet Virginia” is one of my favorite Stones songs, and it’s really good here.
“You Can’t Always Get What You Want” is a showstopper. The entire band completely gels. This is the nuance I was talking about. “Honky Tonk Women” is tons of fun. The horns really kick off here. Ditto with “All Down the Line,” with big guitars and big horns.
“Midnight Rambler” slowly builds into a righteous fury, then slows back down into a soulful blues riff before ramping back up again.
My brain is an idiot. While listening to “Little Queenie,” I thought, ‘man, they are really ripping off Chuck Berry with this song.’ Friends, it is a Chuck Berry song. He wrote it; the Stones covered it. I knew that, but forgot, I guess.
“Rip This Joint” ends the tape on a high note.
This is a great bootleg. Terrific sound and fantastic performance. I was listening to this on my phone in my car. When the show ended, it naturally started back at the beginning. It’s weird, but I suddenly didn’t have the same problems I did on my first listen. It didn’t sound as distant as I first thought. Mick’s vocals didn’t bother me. I guess I really did get used to it. The music didn’t change, but it changed me.
Bob Dylan
Sun Theater
Anaheim, CA
March 10, 2000
Early Show
01. Roving Gambler
02. Tomorrow Is A Long Time
03. It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding
04. Tangled Up In Blue
05. This World Can’t Stand
06. Dignity
07. Tell Me That It Isn’t True
08. Things Have Changed
09. Not Dark Yet
10. Highway 61 Revisited
11. Love Sick
12. Not Fade Away
13. Blowin’ In The Wind
Late Show
01 I Am The Man, Thomas
02 My Back Pages
03 Desolation Row
04 Mama, You Been On My Mind
05 This World Can’t Stand Long
06 Dignity
07 Country Pie
08 We Better Talk This Over
09 Things Have Changed
10 Not Dark Yet
11 Highway 61 Revisited
12 Ballad Of A Thin Man
13 Not Fade Away
14 It Ain’t Me, Babe
15 Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
Bob Dylan (vocal & guitar)
Charlie Sexton (guitar)
Larry Campbell (guitar, mandolin, pedal steel guitar & electric slide guitar)
Tony Garnier (bass)
David Kemper (drums & percussion)
Originally posted on my Substack
The Midnight Cafe’s Review:
I can’t remember when I first started listening to Bob Dylan shows from 2000. I’m guessing I posted some shows on the old blog, and some people highly praised them. That caused me to give one or two a listen, and I found I liked them, so I uploaded more. Those got praised. I listened to more; I collected and shared some more.
It has become one of my favorite years. I know some folks prefer 1999, and I have nothing bad to say about that, but I’m all about 2000. That may be because I listened to it first, or I’ve listened to it more. It doesn’t matter; both years are terrific.
I love that they almost always start with an old traditional song. Bob is steeped in the folk tradition; he got his start there, and starting his shows like this seems to call back to his early days. I love that there is so much acoustic guitar in these shows. I love that they often do a little jamming.
Really, I just love this band. This lineup is something special. Larry Campbell and Charlie Sexton on dual guitars is my jam. When I listen to these shows, I wish he’d kept this band forever. But that wouldn’t be Bob Dylan. He’s a changeling. Constantly on the move and constantly doing the unexpected. Besides, to have kept this band would have let us miss so many other great lineups.
So, I thought it would be fun to go on tour with Bob Dylan and his band in 2000. I’m not sure if I’ll cover the entire year or just the Spring Tour. I might get bored of this after a while and want something different. But for now, I’m excited to see where Bob will take us. And on to the show.
I always find it strange when an artist does two shows in one day. I generally assume it’s because tickets are selling fast, but the rest of the tour is booked, so they can’t add a second night at the same venue, so they just double-book the day. But I have no idea if that’s really true.
I also feel like the early shows are a little shorter and not as good. Like the band always seems to be saving their energy a little bit for the second show. But again, I might just be talking out of my arse.
The early show on this day begins with “Roving Gambler,” a traditional song that dates back to the earliest part of the 20th Century. It is wonderful, with some terrific harmonies. Next comes “Tomorrow is a Long Time,” which sounds like an old traditional but is actually a Dylan original.
This is where I admit I have no idea how to tell Charlie Sexton’s guitar parts from Larry Campbell’s. I like them both. “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding” has some great guitar work, whoever it is.
For “Tangled Up In Blue,” it seems like Bob is taking a deep breath before each line, or something. He’s always just slightly late coming in. That’s probably intentional, and Dylan has always had a very interesting delivery. He also screws up one of his lines, which seems unusual to me.
Their cover of Roy Acuff’s “This World Can’t Stand Long” is just lovely. “Things Have Changed” is one of my favorite late-period Dylan tunes, and the band just nails it here. Ditto for “Not Dark Yet,” a song I find myself listening to a lot these days, and it usually makes me tear up.
Some dude near the taper gets super excited when they play “Highway 61 Revisited,” as he hoots and hollers when it begins. He sings the first verse really loudly, and you can hear someone clapping along on this tape.
So many of these shows sound very light and warm to my ears. A lot of that comes from the choice of songs, especially the fun cover songs, but it’s also the use of acoustic guitars and vocal harmonies. It sometimes feels like some fellas sitting on their front porch just having fun.
And yet, they handle the darkness of “Love Sick” really well. You can really feel the heartache and pain of the lyrics.
Then we get “Not Fade Away,” the Buddy Holly song that’s played with utter joy. The early show closes out with a nice version of “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
The late show opens with another cover, “I Am the Man, Thomas,” which I believe is an old Ralph Stanley song, but it sounds like it could have come from a thousand years ago. It is a wonderful performance. Dylan played it something like 60 times from 1999 to 2002, and then I think he dropped it completely.
I’m usually not a big fan of “My Back Pages,” but this version is just lovely and tender. “Mama You Been On My Mind” gives us that back porch feel. It is so casual-sounding. They make it sound so easy.
“Dignity” is great; it reminds me of his performance on that MTV Unplugged thing.
My thoughts on most of the rest of this show are a little hazy. I typically listen to shows I’m going to review on my way to and from work, or maybe to the post office or whatever. These are relatively short trips. Ten to fifteen minutes, maybe twenty at the maximum. That gives me time to listen to two or three songs before I stop. While I’m listening, I make little mental notes, and then when I stop, I jot them down on a notepad.
I have a terrible memory, so if I don’t jot my thoughts down, they disappear. I listened to the back end of the late show on my way to a movie in downtown Tulsa. That’s more like a thirty-five-minute ride. When I got there, I thought I was late, so I rushed in without jotting anything down. When I got home, it was late, and I was tired, so again I didn’t jot anything down.
Guess what? My thoughts on those songs are gone. I very much liked them, but I have nothing specific to say. The only other notes I have are that “Not Fade Away” is spirited and that “It Ain’t Me, Babe” is tender and goes down easy.
In general, I’d say this is a very good show, but not as good as I remember this tour being. The start of the tour is often a little rough, and I feel confident we’re gonna get blown away soon.
For the early show, I listened to LB-440, which Lossless Bob rates an “A.”For the late show, my notes just say it is from a CDR and is probably not the source for an LB. I should note that this is the first review I’ve done on this Substack that is taken from an audience source. Previously, I’ve only done audience recordings. I’ve certainly listened to plenty of AUDs, so that’s no big deal, but I should make a note of it.
These two recordings are quite nice. The late show has a bit of crowd noise, but it isn’t too distracting.
It turns out trying to run two blogs is more difficult than just running one. I’m putting all of my energy into the new Substack, so I forget to post anything here. But we have now entered spooky season so I hope to do a bunch of horror movie reviews.
But for now I’ve got another Five Cool Things.
This time I’m talking about The Big Caper – a fun little noir, a couple of films I’ve already written about in these pages, The Golem – an excellent German silent film, and watching The Killing on the big screen. You can read all about it over at Cinema Sentries.
I’ll have more to say about this in this week’s Five Cool Things article, but I wanted to show off some swag I got this weekend. To celebrate Jim Thompson’s birthday, the Circle Cinema showed Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (which was partially written by Thompson). They gave away free T-shirts, some postcards from the upcoming Criterion Kubrick box set and a cool little Thompson pin.
I had a blast!