Just look at how Bob hops across the stage w/ his guitar, in his glitter suit, and acts all in control-- and then, he just puts it down,-- no change discernable in the music-- He cracks himself up at his own performance-- and then he just turns around, walks off stage-- Bob is in charge-- but NOTHING ever stops Bob from laughing about himself... I do love that about the guy :)
Dude this song is SO GOOD I’m surprised that even some die hard Dylan fans don’t know this one, but Street-Legal wasn’t one of his most notable albums. Such vivid imagery and storytelling though.
What matters with a Dylan song is its 'feel' in performance and its impact on the listener. What is it that stays in the mind after we listen and bear witness? The 'feel' here is astonishing. Complex lyrical images, at once dense and elliptical, are driven home with enormous power and speed by a crack band whose musicianship underpins Dylan's startling vocal command. This combination and its serendipity drives the narrative. On the page, in part of this song, Dylan addresses apocalyptic and end of times concerns. In this performance, it is these concerns that are placed front and centre. Whilst a sense of foreboding about what is to come has often been embedded in Dylan's songs, this has rarely been revealed in performance as powerfully as it is here where Dylan tells us we must look to ourselves: ..."your hearts must have the courage of the changing of the guards".
I still have Bob Dylan's first album. Yes I am that old but I still listen and absolutely loved him with Traveling Wilburys everybody can say what they want or think what they want but it was our generation that brought it all out
When I listen to this live version I cannot stop from crying. This song takes out of me all suffering and contradiction inside of me giving me a hope one day I will succeed thanks to the Queen of Spades.
Interesting fact: Dylan hasn't played this song live since 1978. He has only played it a total of 68 times while touring from July to December of 1978. It is amazing that this footage even exists for such a rare song. Thanks for sharing!
@@tomc2681 Can't go wrong with any of them, and fantastic versions of each exist. If you haven't yet look up "movie 204" and you'll find a version of Like a Woman, by a youtuber named hollis1960 with a very special guest guitarist.
I saw him three nights earlier in Columbia, SC. He did thee same encore and it looked and sounded just the way I remember it on 2/9/78. One of the best concerts I ever saw.
Definitely agree with that. The whole album is underrated. Senor, , Is Your Love In Vain, Changing of the Guards...........this albums damn near perfect.
This is a great live version but I have to say, I love the original version better. In it, Bob sings very precisely and the whole melody is so original and different from anything I've heard him do before. It's an amazing song, especially the last two verses from "gentlemen he said".
God. such beautiful music. Love these cryptic lyrics. No idea what it means, but I just let the words flood over me and let my mind transport a million miles away.
Songs from Street Legal & this tour my fave!! First witnessed him, as an impressionable 16yrold, in June78 on tour feat.Street Legal tracks. I'll always believe this "full band sound (horns,keys+b3,bkgrd chorus,et al)" with such high-passion performances from Bob will be my fave era Dylan. Though being a Dylanophile you can't ever have any bad Bob.
Oh yeah , it’s one of my all time favourites , especially the studio version it’s such an amazing piece of work you just go with it , and play it again and again .
I do feel that only Bob Dylan, after the great 1965-66 shows and later the transcendent Rolling Thunder Tour (among other stuff, in between), can do as follows. Take a back-up band including both talented artists, and a myriad of other performers, and lead them all into majestic performances like this one. And still, there's 'no time to think'.
I don't need your organization, I've shined your shoes I've moved your mountains and marked your cards But Eden is burning, either getting ready for elimination Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards ....My favorite song
I am a huge fan of this album and was there in '78. Fans should buy the 2003 remix of Street Legal - you will know it's the remix as this track is now 7:04 instead of 6:37. The remix is superb - much better than the original release. :)
I agree. I've always loved this song, but I was pleasantly surprised when I first heard the extended ending on the 2003 album. The original version now feels like it ends a little too quickly!
Love love love this song & lyrics. How in the world he remembers all the lyrics is amazing - Meaning of the song - I don't think Dylan will ever let us know . . . . .
Street Legal is my favorite and least favorite Dylan album. Changing of the Guard got better on the road the more Steve Douglas bent his sax reeds to Dylan's rooting around voice. The loss of drummer Howie Wyeth, Greenwich Village street engine of the Rolling Thunder Revue was tragic. His replacement behind the traps was deadly dull. Percussionista Bobbye Hall added colors and spices desperately needed. This clip doesn't seem to feature Wyeth's downtown rhythm section partner Rob Rothstein Stoner on bass and as Dylan's hired musical director. Rob added real kick even to the shamefully depressing Dylan tracks (couldn't really call 'em songs) like "New Pony" or cliched rhetorical sap from the battlefield of marriage like "Is Your Love In Vain?" Then there are the surprise woke moments on the breezy "True Love Tends to Forget" that are brilliant in their throwaway psychic improv reflexivity. "Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)" is a necessary addition to the Dylan songbook. Now if he'd only had some of his literary pals like Ginzy, Shepard, Joni, Eric Andersen or Neuwirth provide some editing help to wrangle the spontaneous spewing forth scroll of a runaway megillah "No Time to Think" into the desperate and despairing reach for intimacy that lay under the IDiotic primal wail of emotional overload. But bless this rare rock star for trying to stay human scaled even when indulging what must've been reptilian temptations beyond imagining for demagoguery and playing the prophet... Dylan's lasting legacy will be his determination in his better human moments to undermine the whole mystique he so ingeniously colluded to create and that carried the out-of-tune Folk City open mic night warbler to truly literary and musical heights. With collaborators and mentors like Freddy Neil, Dave Van Ronk, Susie Rotolo, Teri Thal, Eric Andersen, Tuli, Ed and the Fugs, Joni Mitchell, Mavis, Pops, Pervis, Yvonne and Cleotha or the Staples family (who cut the 1963 kid's Masters of War before Tim Hardin and the rest of U.S. even knew of U.S. boots on the ground in Viet Nam), Catskill community, Richmond Shepard, Leon Russell, Christine Lakeland, Clydie King, Carolyn & Gabba Gabba Hai Dennis plus underground theater scribes like Murray Mednick, Jacques Levy and tour guide Jim Roger McGuinn along with his harshest serious critics in the rock and alt press like the Soho Weekly News and VILLAGE VOICE (especially the headline writer with newsprint ink in his veins that dared greet Dylan's wannabe underground rough cut vanity\mytho-poetic film project RENALDO & CLARA with this classic crown GONE WITH THE IDIOT WIND...). Not to forget Arlo & the Guthrie family living in the segregated Howard Beach public housing development built and owned by our President and inherited CEO's Dad, Fred Trump and way too many other Canadians (men and women of the North Country) to properly acknowledge. Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Shifters Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa Media Discussion List
@@ulpana I dig Is Your Love in Vain?...it is not more cliched than any of a zillion songs from Bach to CSN to Zep that utilze diatonic descending liason lines and I like the quotidianess of a line like "you can take the house, take the money, too"...or "I have dined with kings/been offered wings/but never been too impressed"....I am a big fan of Street Legal....I agree about New Pony, though...and overall, yeah, Bob has handled his ultra fame well enough...he is a strange dude, but who wouldn´t be with that early resume, a resume he has successfully added to for decades...he never took up the cause or the mantle, I like that...always kept people guessing, hahahahahaha
sonny, mr bob dylan has a history of notoriously manipulating the media, and he was a forerunner of "fake' news that you are seeing right now in 2017. "selling your soul" is a insiders term for signing on the dotted line to a record company of human beings. you are forced to produce albums to "sell". your "finite" wisdom about "christianity" is showing. you have no more real insight to bob dylan's personal life than i have about the size of nancy pelosi's turd feces that fall out onto the earth as she flys back and forth over the earth. it is my assumption that she dropped one on your house in bangor maine, or wherever you live in ignorant bliss.
JImmy nobody forced me to buy a single Dylan Album. Bob is a singer and no messenger, certainly not elected to office, gotta take what you can from his slant. I think it's sad when comments get nasty here, so let's agree to disagree. Dylan could have set himself up as a messiah in the 1970s and would probably have been killed by some nut, he just sings his songs. He has also had flop albums too, but not many.
More guitars than I can count. I always wondered if all the guitars were his idea of a joke. I know it has given my friends and I much laughter after a toke and a listen.
You have no idea...Yes many, many thrilling times. And you? Evidently it thrills you to pester random people on the internet, oh well, they say all tastes are to be found in nature. Thrills are something one experiences when they take their eyes off their little screens and GET A LIFE.
This is one of Dylan's songs that I can play forever and ever. I never put on the album "Street Legal" to do anything really but listen to this tune over and over.
Easily one of his best songs he's ever written and sang just wish there was a live recording with Crisp clear sound. Street legal is such a great under appreciated dylan album
He doesn't....While warming up for a tour in the nineties in a bar in Mass. his band members would suggest and play HIS SONGS ! And He would go 'Oh Yeah'....Look it up!
Thanks for posting this. I was in row 4, center for this show. I have a copy from 1978, but it has tracking issues and was shot from farther away on the left side..
I saw him in 1979 at the Hollywood Sportatorium in Fl. A guy had a sign that said, Dylan Is God, and then he turned the sign over and it said, I Found It. Great concert.
I was at the same show. Effing Sporthole - I was sitting in the corner under the upper deck/balcony. Infamous Sporthole acoustics were in full effect there. Everything sounded like one big blare. Could barely tell one song from the next. Reserved seats or not, I can't remember why we didn't move. Goddamn giant aluminum tool shed out in the Everglades. What a dump.
Mate in my eyes the way Dylan is as a person is part of why I love the guy, I'm doing a school project on Don't Look Back and Eat The Document and some interviews, honestly think his attitude is needed for the life he has just the coolest guy
This frantic live version makes me kinda feel how every time he took the stage the band were just hanging on for dear life trying to keep up. I know there have been anecdotes like GE Smith mentioning how Dylan would say "we're gonna do [song] in [key] then start playing it in a totally different key, and the band just hung on and did it in Bob's key. This version is so different to the record but so like it too. Badass in a way nobody's been able to be that loose but tight since the 70s.
In the middle of covering this with a collaboration group, hard to nail down. This is my first time hearing this live version. Sounds like the same tempo with we have down already. The lead solo, we are going to have ad that in no doubt
Indeed. Up until Desire His voice remained with pretty much the same and any vocals that were different were stylistic choices. But starting Street Legal AND the 78 Tour, his voice was never the same, and this time it was not a choice.
"Peace will come .With tranquility and splendor on wheels of fire but it will bring us no reward when her false idols fall. And cruel death surrenders with its pale ghost retreating between the King and Queen of Swords".~~BOB DYLAN❤:*.:+
Now I know where Bruce Springsteen got his bugle-playing ideas for his songs, Everyone has learned from Bob Dylan, even me so thanks a million Bob for everything
