However, I never even had this in my music collection until a couple of days ago, due to poor sound quality. All that has emerged from the concert is an unreleased audience bootleg. But things changed in mid-March 2025 when Captain Acid posted an upgrade to it. He did phase and level correction, and new equalization. I listened to the result, and I was impressed.
Then I decided to do what I could to improve that version still more. I'm willing to make more drastic edits than most people. When it comes to audience bootlegs, my one big trick is to use the MVSEP audio editing program to remove the crowd noise. The taper had to be standing in the middle of a packed audience that was very excited to see Dylan do such a special show in a small venue. That meant there was a constant ambient noise of people talking and hollering through the songs. I basically got rid of all that, while keeping the crowd noise at the ends of songs and between songs. This technique more or less can make an audience boot sound like a soundboard instead.
After that, I ran all the songs through the UVR5 audio editing program, to adjust the balance between the vocals and everything else. I boosted Dylan's vocals a little bit overall. But I also made extra little boosts here and there when some of his singing was harder to hear. This also allowed me to get rid of more crowd noise that had been missed by the MVSEP program. For instance, at the start of "Everything Is Broken," someone standing near the taper could be heard saying over the music, "get down to her level... can't see anything." I got rid of that entirely, and other little bits like that.
I could have put "[Edit]" in the titles to many songs, due to the extra editing work I did. But I only put that in the titles of the two songs I did the most work on, "Across the Borderline" and "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry." The latter was the biggest pain in the butt, because some excited fan kept shouting "Woo!" noises through the song. I had to get rid of each of those individually. There's only a couple that remain, when the "Woo" noises overlapped with Dylan's vocals. I also got rid of some dead air between songs, but there wasn't much of that.
I wouldn't say this sounds as good as an excellent soundboard now, but there certainly some soundboards that sound worse than this. It's still rather rough, but I think that's part of its charm, capturing a small club atmosphere, where you can hear individual people clapping and cheering.
Here's some more information on the concert and how it came to be. In late 1989, Dylan's career was revitalized with the release of the studio album "Oh Mercy," his best album in many years. However, his concerts didn't seem inspired... until this one. Rolling Stone Magazine wrote an entire article about this concert, entitled "Bringing It All Back Home: Dylan Thrills With Exhaustive Show." It read: "The January 12th show was a striking contrast to Dylan's recent lackluster, perfunctory performances, at which he has appeared so indifferent that the audience has been lucky if he acknowledged its presence, much less invested any of himself in his songs. But at Toad's, he rose to the challenge of his first scheduled club date in countless years with a brilliant marathon show."
Here's a link if you want to read the entire article. I highly recommend giving it a read:
Before Dylan, other musical acts had started using Toad's Place for secret open rehearsals. The most famous of these was the Rolling Stones, who gave a legendary performance there just five months prior to this concert. (I've thought about posting that concert too, but the audience bootleg for that one sounds much worse than this one.) Probably, Dylan heard about the Stones doing that, and decided he wanted to give that a try as well. He demanded 100 percent of the ticket sale profits, which the club happily gave him. No doubt, they more than made up for that with alcohol sales during the extremely long concert. Plus, the credibility it gave the venue was priceless. Since then, many other musical acts have done similar open rehearsal type shows there.
Dylan was backed by G.E. Smith on lead guitar (who was in the Saturday Night Live band), Tony Garnier on bass, and Christopher Parker on drums. The band came onstage shortly before 9 P.M., and played for an hour, then left the stage. Brian Phelps, the owner of the club, was later interviewed about the concert. Here's what he said happened next:
"Dylan asked me if he could play another set. And we said sure, go ahead! You know, and they asked again, and played a third. Can I play another? You know what? Yeah! Go ahead! There's no problem! He wasn't sure what he was going to play, it was like a practice session, because he was going on this theater tour. I think most of the theaters were 5,000 seats on up, and our show was like a practice session... Well for him anyways, but for the people that were there, they were just loving it, and they really couldn't believe it."
Dylan's fourth and final set began around 1:00 A.M. Phelps had to shut the bar down at that time due to state law. But instead of stopping the show, staffers just collected all of the drinks from the crowd so the show could go on. Dylan finally finished at 2:20 A.M.! He threw his harmonica into the adoring crowd, and walked off after 4 hours, 20 minutes.
He ended up performing 50 songs in total. But what's really interesting in that he generally avoided playing most of his best known, most frequently played songs in favor of rarities. Many of the songs had never been performed by him before. All of these were done in concert for the first time: "Trouble No More," "I've Been All Around This World," "Political World," "Where Teardrops Fall," "What Was It You Wanted," "Oh Babe, It Ain't No Lie," "Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love)," "Wiggle Wiggle," "Key to the Highway," and "Dancing in the Dark." And yes, you read that right, that last song mentioned was "Dancing in the Dark," as in the huge 1984 hit by Bruce Springsteen. It was the one and only time Dylan played it in concert. If you listen carefully to the recording, it's clear Dylan didn't remember most of the words to it, but he was having a fun time winging it anyway.
In addition to all those debuts, there were lots of rarities played. For instance, he did the Traveling Wilburys song "Congratulations," apparently after someone in the audience shouted for it. That was only one of three times he ever performed that. A bunch of the debuts I mentioned were covers: "Trouble No More," "I've Been All Around This World," "Oh Babe, It Ain't No Lie," "Key to the Highway," and "Dancing in the Dark." But he played many other covers too: "Walk a Mile in My Shoes," "Everybody's Movin'," "Across the Borderline," "Paid the Price," "Help Me Make It Through the Night," "Lonesome Whistle," "Confidential," "So Long, Good Luck and Goodbye," "Peggy-O," "When Did You Leave Heaven," "In the Pines," and "Precious Memories." That's a lot of covers, 18 in all.
Unfortunately, because this concert was a kind of open rehearsal, Dylan repeated some songs to make sure the band played them to his satisfaction. "I've Been All Around This World" and "Where Teardrops Fall" were played twice. That wasn't so bad, but "Political World" was played three times. I decided I didn't want to hear all those repeats every time I listen to this. But some other people might, so I'm including the extra versions, but only as bonus tracks. I kept the last versions in the main song list, assuming they improved as they played the songs more.
This really was a remarkable concert for Dylan. It seems to have been the only one he ever did like this, where he let it all hang out and played whatever the hell he wanted for as long as he wanted. He even warmed up enough to chat some with the audience and take requests, which he basically never did. It's not just the longest Dylan concert by a mile, it's also one of a handful of the longest concerts by any famous rock musician, period. He even beat the longest Bruce Springsteen concert ever by a few minutes, and Springsteen is famous for his long concerts.
Here's one more anecdote from Brian Phelps, the owner of Toad's Place:
"[Many years later,] I actually gave the whole rundown to his son Jakob, from the Wallflowers, who have played Toad's a number of times, and I told him about his father's show. He started peppering me with questions about it, and he really enjoyed the whole story about how it happened, and the length of the show, and everything that went on that night. He was a great great guy too. Jacob enjoyed the history of the club, and the history of playing in the same place where his father played his longest show in."
This concert is three hours and forty minutes long, without the bonus songs. Including those, it's four hours and two minutes long. The actual concert was still longer than that, due to some short breaks between sets.
01 Walk a Mile in My Shoes (Bob Dylan)
02 One More Cup of Coffee [Valley Below] (Bob Dylan)
03 Rainy Day Women No. 12 and 35 (Bob Dylan)
04 Trouble No More (Bob Dylan)
05 Tears of Rage (Bob Dylan)
06 I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine (Bob Dylan)
07 It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry [Edit] (Bob Dylan)
08 Everybody's Movin' (Bob Dylan)
09 Watching the River Flow (Bob Dylan)
10 What Was It You Wanted (Bob Dylan)
11 Oh Babe, It Ain't No Lie (Bob Dylan)
12 talk (Bob Dylan)
13 Lenny Bruce (Bob Dylan)
14 I Believe in You (Bob Dylan)
15 talk (Bob Dylan)
16 Man of Peace (Bob Dylan)
17 Across the Borderline [Edit] (Bob Dylan)
18 Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat (Bob Dylan)
19 All Along the Watchtower (Bob Dylan)
20 talk (Bob Dylan)
21 Tight Connection to My Heart [Has Anybody Seen My Love] (Bob Dylan)
22 What Good Am I (Bob Dylan)
23 Wiggle Wiggle (Bob Dylan)
24 Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again (Bob Dylan)
25 Paid the Price (Bob Dylan)
26 Help Me Make It through the Night (Bob Dylan)
27 Man in the Long Black Coat (Bob Dylan)
28 Congratulations (Bob Dylan)
29 Dancing in the Dark (Bob Dylan)
30 Lonesome Whistle Blues (Bob Dylan)
31 Confidential (Bob Dylan)
32 In the Garden (Bob Dylan)
33 Everything Is Broken (Bob Dylan)
34 talk (Bob Dylan)
35 So Long, Good Luck and Goodbye (Bob Dylan)
36 Where Teardrops Fall (Bob Dylan)
37 talk (Bob Dylan)
38 Political World (Bob Dylan)
39 Pretty Peggy-O (Bob Dylan)
40 I'll Remember You (Bob Dylan)
41 Key to the Highway (Bob Dylan)
42 talk (Bob Dylan)
43 Joey (Bob Dylan)
44 Lay Lady Lay (Bob Dylan)
45 I Don't Believe You [She Acts like We Never Have Met] (Bob Dylan)
46 When Did You Leave Heaven (Bob Dylan)
47 Maggie's Farm (Bob Dylan)
48 I've Been All Around This World (Bob Dylan)
49 In the Pines (Bob Dylan)
50 Highway 61 Revisited (Bob Dylan)
51 Precious Memories (Bob Dylan)
52 Like a Rolling Stone (Bob Dylan)
I've Been All Around This World [First Version] (Bob Dylan)
Political World [First Version] (Bob Dylan)
Political World [Second Version] (Bob Dylan)
Where Teardrops Fall [First Version] (Bob Dylan)
https://pixeldrain.com/u/c3pudHMC
alternate:
https://bestfile.io/3lYIq83WpMHkgLV/file
The cover photo is from this exact concert. In the original, his eyes couldn't be seen due to the shadow from his hat. But thanks to the magic of AI art, I was able to make an adjustment there while keeping the rest of the image the same. I also found a photo of one of the tickets from this concert, and I thought that was nice, so I added that in at the top left.
Thank you!
ReplyDeleteI used to have a vinyl bootleg of this. I'm sure this will sound much better.
ReplyDeleteAn all-time favorite marred by dull sound - can't wait to hear your upgrade - thanks!
ReplyDeleteI'd be curious what you think of the sound of it now.
DeleteThanks for this piece of history!
ReplyDeleteThank you!
ReplyDelete