Bob Dylan in Cardiff: part one 1966

Desmond Clifford

There’s a photograph, famous among fans, of Bob Dylan in front of the Severn Bridge, at England’s edge with Wales behind him.

It was a rainy day, 11 May 1966.  The picture was taken by Barry Feinstein at Aust where a small car ferry – the NV Severn Princess – took passengers across the river to avoid a long detour by road.

The ferry docked on the other side at Beachley, still, just, by a quirk on the map, in England.

From there Bob crossed the border and continued his first journey into Wales.

Bob had played Colston Hall, Bristol and was on his way to play Cardiff’s Capitol Theatre on Queen St.

History

The photograph captures a moment of transport as well as musical history.  The water crossing was active since Roman times but just a few months later, on 8 September, the Severn Princess made its last crossing before it anchored forever and the new bridge was opened by the Queen.

It was a dull day. but we can see the new structure clearly over Bob’s shoulder.  The suspension bridge and the motorway network it joined, connected Wales in a new and dramatic way.  An ancient slow border was erased.

Bob’s 1966 tour was one of the most influential of all time.  Plenty of people saw Bob as a prophet, even if he didn’t, and his tours as evangelism.  At the first height of his fame, he had worked non-stop for four years through a period of extraordinary and intense creativity.

Bob was two weeks short of his 25th birthday when he appeared on stage in Cardiff.

He had already sung alongside Martin Luther King at the Great March on Washington in 1963, been dubbed “the voice of a generation” – a title he hated and rejected – toured the world, and released his seventh album, Blonde on Blonde, one of his greatest and the first double album ever.

Bob propelled himself from obscurity to stardom taking command of New York’s folk scene within months of arriving from small-town Minnesota.

The film “A Complete Unknown” takes a few dramatic liberties but captures all this very well.  Bob’s exceptional talent and verve made him America’s biggest star since Elvis.  He came to see acoustic folk music – his mastery and reinvention of which made him famous – as a cul-de-sac and so “went electric”, dismaying some fans, thrilling others.

His 1966 tour was the frontier between the two forms, acoustic and electric.  Through the tour he performed an acoustic set in the first half and electric in the second.

He introduces the electric set with these words: “it used to be like that, now it’s like this…”.

Right there and then he invented a new form of music: folk-rock, soft-rock or just rock – call it what you will – but there exists a species of music which would never have happened in the same way without Bob’s leap of imagination.

This was the tour which excited the “Judas” cry from a fan who felt Dylan’s electric shock as a betrayal.  The “Judas” cry occurred a week after the Cardiff date on 17 May at Manchester Free Trade Hall (confusingly the live recording of this concert is known as the “Royal Albert Hall” concert because of a mix-up in the popular mind about some cotemporary film footage: Dylan-ologists are apt to get excited about these details; the actual concert at the Albert Hall – where there was no “Judas” cry – was finally released in 2016).

The contrast between Bob’s acoustic and electric performances at this period was astonishing and can be heard on any of the versions of the 1966 tour now in circulation.  Dylan completists can hear the second half of the actual Cardiff concert on disc 11 of the 36-disc complete edition of the 1966 tour.

Sadly, only the second half is preserved, and the first acoustic part remains unavailable, presumably lost.

Transformed

Listen, for example, to the 1966 electric version of One Too Many Mornings. Compare it to the acoustic version from the 1964 album The Times They Are a-Changin’.  It’s a song transformed by electricity.

A wistful lyrical ballad of regret becomes a tortured expression of longing. And fast-forward 10 years to another live album, Hard Rain, recorded outdoors in 1976; it mutates again into a desperate, desolate cry for a life not lived.

This is the genius of Bob Dylan, his ability to re-interpret and recharge the same songs so they are always alive and never frozen in time.

The fan who shouted “Judas” in Manchester also spoke, in his way, for a generation.

Bob turning electric at the Newport Folk Festival marked the effective end of folk music as a serious force in mainstream popular music – and the bearded ones knew it.

Bob Dylan had exploded out of NYC as the saviour of folk music and became its destroyer. That’s what the 1966 tour amounted to, the end of one thing, the start of something else.

At the time this all seemed very important.

Sons and daughters everywhere were beyond their parents’ command. Bob opened new ways of thinking about music and didn’t see it as his job to sustain a past which had run its course.

Geraint Jarman

The late Geraint Jarman was 16 in 1966 and was in the audience for Bob’s Cardiff concert (as was confirmed by the man himself on audio archive during BBC Radio Cymru’s excellent tribute programmes).

Jarman’s first album appeared in 1976 and helped rescue Welsh music from the grip of the Celtic twilight.

In Ireland, Rory Gallagher played delta blues and released Irish youth from the bondage of the showbands. Middle-class, Welsh speaking Jarman saw no reason not to be a reggae man if that was his calling.

Impactful artists look forward, not back, and be who they want to be, not who they once were.

The second electronic half of Bob’s Cardiff show can be heard loud and clear. Bob and his band – not yet known as The Band – were on tight, sparkling form.

Tight-lipped

Bob is famously tight-lipped at concerts and rarely talks but Cardiff found him loquacious that night. He gave a rambling cock ‘n bull introduction to “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” which lasted over a minute, practically a podcast for Dylan.

The crowd was well-behaved and appreciative.  No Judas shouts here.

I envy that crowd hearing “Ballad of a Thin Man” for the first time. No song like it had been written before.

60 years later it still sends a shiver along the spine: such menace, jitteriness, such desperation, such paranoia – like a malign bird’s call for the years which lay ahead in America.

If ever a song challenged the cosiness of popular music, this was it. Then he belted out “Like A Rolling Stone”, a song in a major key but infused by Bob with anger and perdition.

He gives an occasional blast on the mouthorgan, the first time anyone had mixed this most traditional instrument with electronica.

Finally, unmistakably, the most incongruous and bizarre part of the recording.

By convention at the time, the national anthem was played by the theatre at the conclusion of the concert.

Weirdly, to my ears, it was God Save the Queen, not Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau.

Cardiff, 1966: the times were a-changing, and not a moment too soon.