Bob Dylan - Philips Arena, Atlanta, GA, 2-9-2002

When it comes to posting music by Bob Dylan, I have been working my way chronologically through his career. As I write this in January 2025, I've only made it to the late 1970s, so I have a long way to go. But I'm posting this concert from 2002 way out of chronological order because I only recently discovered it, and I think it's fantastic.

From the late 1980s onward, Dylan has toured a remarkable degree, and he's still going today as I write this. But since the late 1990s, there have been almost no soundboard bootlegs, no FM radio concert broadcasts, and no official live albums that weren't archival from previous decades. So, if you've wanted to hear his concerts from at least 2000 onwards, you've had to cope with audience bootlegs that sometimes sound good, but never great.

However, this concert is a staggering exception. It's one of only two soundboard bootlegs from him after 2000 that I know of. The sound quality and performance is so good that there's even a Rolling Stone Magazine article about it, written in 2021. The title of the article is "Hear a Pristine Recording of a Stunning 2002 Bob Dylan Concert," and it's basically a plea to listen to this show.

Here's some excerpts from that article:

[This bootleg] was reportedly sourced to an Assisted Listening Device connected straight to the soundboard, which explains why the sound quality is absolutely perfect. Simply put, it sounds just about as good as any official live album. The show also captured Dylan during a peak era of the Never Ending Tour. This was just five months after "Love and Theft" hit stores, and the new songs infused the show with incredible energy and purpose. Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell are two of the best guitarists he’s ever played with, and he gave them a lot of freedom to stretch out and even harmonize with him on the vocals.

The song selection is excellent, mixing the Love and Theft tunes with hits like "All Along the Watchtower" and "Like a Rolling Stone," deeper cuts like "Drifter’s Escape" and "My Back Pages," and traditional folk covers like "Searching for a Soldier’s Grave" and set opener "I Am the Man, Thomas." And while his vocals are no match for the heights he reached back in 1966, 1975, or 1980, they’re crisp, clear, and haunting. 

Hear a Pristine Recording of a Stunning 2002 Bob Dylan Concert

I agree with all that. But there was one big problem with the recording, which I have now fixed. Namely, the recording caught what happened on stage perfectly, but at the cost of virtually no audience noise whatsoever. When each song ended, you basically just heard silence, which is weird for a concert. Thankfully, now there are many ways to edit audio files. First, I split each song into crowd noise and everything else using the MVSEP program. The crowd noise part was basically a flat line when I looked at it in Audacity. For some songs, I literally would have to zoom in to see anything there at all. But I tried increasing the volume of the cheering after each song, by ten or twenty times or more. For normal recordings, this wouldn't work, because one would get an overwhelming amount of hiss. But this recording was so pristine that it actually worked really well. After I joined the crowd noise back with the music, the result has the crowd cheering a normal level after every song. And it's exactly what was really there, just buried, as opposed to many times where I've had to paste in cheering from the ends of other songs and things like that.

So even if you have a recording of this concert already, I highly suggest you get this one. And if you're a fan of Dylan's live performances at all, this is a "must have," for all the reasons mentioned in the Rolling Stone article.

This album is two hours and 20 minutes long.

01 I Am the Man, Thomas (Bob Dylan)
02 My Back Pages (Bob Dylan)
03 It's Alright Ma [I'm Only Bleeding] (Bob Dylan)
04 Searching for a Soldier's Grave (Bob Dylan)
05 Lonesome Day Blues (Bob Dylan)
06 Lay Lady Lay (Bob Dylan)
07 Floater (Bob Dylan)
08 High Water [For Charley Patton] (Bob Dylan)
09 It Ain't Me, Babe (Bob Dylan)
10 Masters of War (Bob Dylan)
11 Tangled Up in Blue (Bob Dylan)
12 Summer Days (Bob Dylan)
13 Sugar Baby (Bob Dylan)
14 Drifter's Escape (Bob Dylan)
15 Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35 (Bob Dylan)
16 Things Have Changed (Bob Dylan)
17 Like a Rolling Stone (Bob Dylan)
18 Forever Young (Bob Dylan)
19 Honest with Me (Bob Dylan)
20 Blowin' in the Wind (Bob Dylan)
21 All Along the Watchtower (Bob Dylan)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/UpMdJ2zL

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/eFnEN5WXekqSuBm/file

The cover photo is from a concert in Bournemouth, Britain, on May 5, 2002.