With origins stemming from a recent visit by Page McConnell to Miami, Vida Blue and the Spam Allstars quickly developed a working relationship, which in turn culminated with a new collaborative album, The Illustrated Band, and a subsequent short winter tour. The seven-strong Spam Allstars played lead to Vida Blues’ groovy foundation, making this two set shows quite the memory.
Bob Dylan enthusiasts will have plenty to celebrate on March 23, when Columbia/Legacy issues “Live 1964: Concert at Philharmonic Hall … The Bootleg Series Volume 6.” The 19-track, double-disc set is drawn from Dylan’s Oct. 31, 1964, solo acoustic performance at New York’s Philharmonic Hall, two months after the release of the album “Another Side of Bob Dylan.”
At the show, Dylan previewed three cuts (“Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Gates of Eden” and “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”) that wouldn’t see the light of day until the March 1965 release of “Bringing It All Back Home.” According to the label, the show constitutes the earliest all-acoustic Dylan concert to be officially released.
Joan Baez guests on four songs: “Mama, You Been on My Mind,” a new arrangement of the traditional “Silver Dagger,” “With God on Our Side” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe.”
“Live 1964” is bolstered with a 52-page booklet featuring unpublished photographs and an essay by Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz, who attend the concert as a 13-year-old. The albums comes on the heels of the November 2002 release of the fifth volume in the “Bootleg Series,” which chronicled Dylan’s 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour.
Source billboard.com.
