The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: Live 1966 The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert (1998)
Disc One
1. She Belongs to Me
2. Fourth Time Around
3. Visions of Johanna
4. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
5. Desolation Row
6. Just Like a Woman
7. Mr. Tamborine Man
Disc Two
1. Tell Me, Momma
2. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Met)
3. Baby Let Me Follow You Down
4. Tombstone Blues
5. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
6. One Too Many Mornings
7. Ballad of a Thin Man
8. Like A Rolling Stone
There are few live albums whose reputations precede them quite so dramatically as The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert—a title knowingly cloaked in quotation marks due to a long-standing misattribution. The show, in fact, took place at Manchester Free Trade Hall, yet the mythos surrounding the evening has rendered such factual corrections almost trivial. What matters here is not geography, but transformation. This was Dylan’s breaking point. Not artistically—he was in furious ascent—but in the eyes of an audience struggling to comprehend the scale and swiftness of his reinvention.
The concert is split down the middle, as if illustrating the fracture at the heart of Dylan’s career in 1966. The first half, recorded in crystalline solitude, sees Dylan alone with acoustic guitar and harmonica—still the people’s poet, the scruffy laureate of Greenwich Village. This is what the purists came for, and for a time, they are appeased. Yet even in these quieter moments, a weariness creeps through. His voice is nasal, dry, punctuated by the occasional cough—more defiant whisper than warm invitation.
Then comes the pivot. The second half, performed with The Hawks (soon to become The Band), is electrified in every sense of the word. With guitars snarling and rhythm section pounding, Dylan kicks open the gates to a sound no longer rooted in folk convention but something altogether more dangerous. What unfolds is not merely a musical set, but a cultural standoff. The audience—torn between reverence and rebellion—grows restless. Murmurs swell to heckles. The infamous “Judas!” accusation cuts through the air like a bullet. And Dylan’s retort—“I don’t believe you. You’re a liar.”—delivered like a curse, is followed by a scorched-earth rendition of Like a Rolling Stone that echoes as both indictment and liberation.
It is, undoubtedly, a moment of musical history. And yet, for all its mythic charge, the recording itself remains imperfect. The sound quality retains the raw edges of its bootleg roots. The performance—electrifying in spirit—is occasionally chaotic in execution. The Hawks, still adjusting to their volatile frontman and hostile audiences, sound tight but tentative. Dylan, though magnetic, is audibly battling both physical strain and psychic fatigue.
For the archivist, the release is essential: the first official window into one of Dylan’s most tumultuous periods. For the casual listener, however, it may prove a challenging experience. The recording doesn’t flatter the performance, and the tension that animates the evening also, at times, inhibits it. There are brilliant moments—the snarling venom of Ballad of a Thin Man, the barbed elegance of Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues—but they come wrapped in the ambient friction of a divided room.
What The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert offers, then, is not a polished document of musical mastery, but a snapshot of artistic upheaval. It captures the instant when Dylan shed the burden of other people’s expectations, even if it meant being booed in the process. It is less a live album than a rite of passage—uncomfortable, uncompromising, and ultimately, necessary.
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