Rolling Stone
5 July 2001
Covering not thirty-nine but forty years—that’s what recordings from 1961 to 2000 add up to—the sixteen tracks on this official but bootleg-like Japanese collection seem to come out of nowhere. “Dead Man, Dead Man,” from New Orleans in 1981, rushes by like a gang of thieves. The posturing gospel of “Wade in the Water,” recorded in a Minneapolis apartment in 1961, is somehow not as fake as it sounds. “Things Have Changed” was recorded last year in Portsmouth, England; heard now, it seems as unimpressed by its Oscar as it is by the price of gas or the meaning of life.
This album is a Bob Dylan show. When he takes the stage today, no song is older than any other. “Handsome Molly,” from the nineteenth century, recorded in New York in 1962, seems in this performance hundreds of years older than its provenance, like a dream of the past—but wherever he is tonight, Bob Dylan could make it seem older still, which is to say even more present.
But the same is true of Dylan’s own “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” recorded with the Band in 1974. This too takes you back to the nineteenth century, where it holds—but what doesn’t hold is the face on the song. The old man in the music is no longer Slim Pickens, sitting on the ground in Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, ready to die as the song plays in the background; the old man is the singer, or whoever is listening. “Slow Train,” from Dylan’s 1987 tour with the Grateful Dead, is no longer the flag of the singer’s late-1970s conversion to fundamentalist Christianity but a sign of hope little different from the blue-grass spiritual “Somebody Touched Me,” from Portsmouth in 2000, which opens the album—a song no less scary than the version of “Things Have Changed” recorded the next night.
As with any show, there are the numbers you take away and those that might never have been played, and which those are depend on who you are. I keep coming back to “Grand Coulee Dam,” recorded with the Band at a 1968 Woody Guthrie tribute—and done as a drunken rockabilly rave-up at the party thrown by the men who built the thing, on the night they opened the spillway for the first time. That, and “Dead Man, Dead Man.” The singer and the people around him look the devil in the eye, daring him to take their lives. Suddenly you can feel the devil tremble, like a vampire with a cross shoved in his face. Then comes “Born in Time,” and you figure it’s time to hit the restroom.
There’s a long line, though, and you lose out on “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” It will never be sung and played quite like it is this night in 1975. You missed it. Or would have, if this record didn’t exist.