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In Concert - Brandeis University 1963

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A short live set recorded at a university gym in Waltham, MA, just weeks before the release of The Freewheelin' saw Bob Dylan become a star.In May 1963, Bob Dylan travelled to Massachusetts for a small folk festival at Brandeis University. Just a few weeks later, his second album The Freewheelin' will be released and he'll rarely play such a modest event again.Arnie Reisman, who worked at the student newspaper that organized the Brandeis festival, later recalled the events surrounding the recording of Dylan's set.He met Dylan before the show and memorably describes the singer as “the poster child of dyspepsia”. Reisman later drove Dylan to Cambridge after his set and remembers dropping him outside a hotel where “he threw his arm around a waiting Joan Baez“.The festival, which also featured Pete Seeger and Jean Ritchie, was supposed to take place in the university's outdoor amphitheater, but an unusual fall of late spring snow forced them indoors to the gym hall.Fortunately, the late change in venue didn't prevent the university's audio-visual guy from setting up a tape recorder to capture Dylan's performance.However, the tape went missing after the festival. Reisman suspects it was in the hands of Boston-based Folklore Productions, who had helped to schedule the concert.How exactly it ended up in the collection of esteemed music critic Ralph Gleason is unknown though it wouldn't have been unusual for the Rolling Stone co-founder to have been passed tapes of interest. The Brandeis master tape gathered dust for decades until Gleason's archive was finally catalogued, long after his death in 1975.Bob Dylan: In Concert Brandeis University 1963 was officially released in 2010 as a bonus disc with special editions of The Bootleg Series Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos.However, I first heard this concert way back in the mid-90s when a schoolfriend lent me a bootleg cassette, whose photocopied cover mistakenly called it “The Gaslight Tapes”.While my experience doesn't match the official story of the tape's rediscovery in the early 2000s, unofficial copies must have existed before then. I'm relatively certain about the accuracy of my memory because my tape also began with Dylan already part-way through Honey Just Allow Me One More Chance.Unfortunately, Brandeis' AV guy had left a photographer in charge of hitting record on the tape machine, leaving us with just a part-preview of one of the new songs from Dylan's upcoming Freewheelin' record. The bit we do hear is a jaunty, chuckling live performance that often undercuts the song's shambling desperation.The audience laughs when Dylan introduces Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues, though the teenage me had no idea what he was talking about. The song's hard-hitting Hitler verse and the line about “red stripes in the American flag” soon got me on board with its chomping Red Scare satire.Dylan was due to appear on CBS's The Ed Sullivan Show the week after Brandeis. He played John Birch in the pre-show studio rehearsal but the network's producers began to fret about lawsuits from real-life John Birch members and asked him to consider an alternative.After refusing to change his song choice, Dylan eventually decided not to appear on Ed Sullivan. This was a remarkable choice by a still-up-and-coming artist given this high-profile television show had introduced Elvis Presley to millions of Americans in 1956 and would do the same for The Beatles a year after Dylan's non-appearance.The nervousness spread to execs at Dylan's record label (Columbia was an offshoot of CBS) who wanted to cut the song from The Freewheelin', even though copies had already been pressed.This time Dylan did back down though turned the situation to his advantage. He had begun to feel that some of the songs he'd chosen for The Freewheelin' were too old-fashioned and wanted to replace them with newer compositions.I still remember first hearing one of those songs, Masters of War, when I was teenager listening to this tape and feeling that cold fury in Dylan's vocals and the precise focus of his words. It's an extraordinary performance that closes the first half of the set at Brandeis University.Talkin' World War III Blues is another preview of the newer Freewheelin' songs and the second of three talking blues in this short set. Dylan is really appealing to this crowd of students with his mix of witty topical numbers and hard-hitting protest songs.Another Freewheelin' dream song follows though this time it's the wistful Bob Dylan's Dream, yet another late addition to the upcoming album. It's nice performance though after this the song won't feature in a Dylan live set for nearly 30 years.One cut that didn't make Dylan's second album was The Ballad of Hollis Brown. He performs a haunting version of the tragic tale of a poverty-stricken farmer at Brandeis after introducing it as “a true story”.Dylan had been playing Hollis Brown live since September 1962. But it seems he still hasn't found a satisfactory arrangement as it didn't appear on record until his third album, 1964's The Times They Are A-Changin'.The Brandeis set concludes with Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues, the song Dylan debuted at The Gaslight Café back in 1961. He spends a long time introducing the tale of the doomed boat ride, perhaps suspecting that this younger, non-New York audience may need a primer on the two-year-old news story. It's the last time he'll ever perform it.Overall, this slight set is made worthwhile by the central, essential one-two punch of Hollis Brown and Masters of War. For me, it's a fun reminder of my introduction to these early Dylan classics.Most fascinating is that the Brandeis University performance is our last chance to hear the man that the MC still refers to a “Bobby Dylan” before he becomes an icon.&mdash; Colm Larkin

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