The Album
This bootleg preserves the electric half of Bob Dylan's controversial 1966 world tour, the set backed by the group then known as The Hawks and soon to become The Band, playing material from Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde alongside reworked earlier songs. Dylan had shocked folk purists months earlier by going electric, and these shows were met with booing and walkouts from audiences expecting the acoustic troubadour of his early records; the tour became one of the most mythologized episodes in his career. Tape of the performance circulated widely among collectors for years before any official release, and this unlicensed pressing was one of the vehicles by which that tape reached a wider audience. The set captures a tight, loud, confrontational band sound quite unlike Dylan's studio arrangements of the same songs, with Robbie Robertson's guitar and Garth Hudson's organ pushing the material into something closer to rock performance than folk accompaniment. The concert is frequently associated with an audience shout of "Judas" and Dylan's retort before the band tears into the closing number, an exchange that became emblematic of the rock-vs-folk debate of the era. Decades later the performance was recognized as historically significant enough to be issued officially as part of Dylan's ongoing archival series, cementing its status as one of the most bootlegged and eventually most celebrated live recordings in his catalogue. For long stretches before that official release, pressings like this one were the only way fans could hear the show, giving this title an outsized importance in Dylan bootleg collecting circles.