Thursday, April 30, 2009

BOB DYLAN - New York City, 1993

Continuing our celebration of the fact that Bob Dylan is alive and healthy, walking tall and looking good and making terrific new music, I hereby post my first Bob Dylan show ever. That's right, the first of the four legendary NYC Supper Club gigs was the first time I ever saw the man live.

It's actually sort of a bittersweet memory, in my case, being a classic example of glass half-full vs. half-empty...

The beauty part was that since the shows were to be taped and videoed -- a project financed by Dylan himself, no less -- the tickets were free. Dylan would do two hour-long shows per night over two nights.

So, one frigid November dawn, I lined up by my lonesome outside the Tower Records at 4th & Broadway to get a pair of tickets for me and my bud, D. Micah Quince. No problem: got the tix, went to the venue. It was there, however -- as I observed the two dudes in front of me each swapping one ticket for another -- that I realized: if my bud had come along with me to Tower, we could have each gotten a pair of tickets, one pair for the first show and one pair for the second. Thus, we could have swapped ours as well, and gone to both shows instead of only the first one. I just...was not...clever enough to have thought of that at the time. Or maybe I was just too hiiigh...

Oh well. God knows I've been to an assload of Dylan shows since that night, and this beautiful boot more than makes up for my long-ago brain fart. As I said, all four shows were recorded, but none was released, for reasons yet unknown. The upside is that the show I attended seems to have been the best of all, and is certainly the most widely circulated. So here it is.

BOB DYLAN
Supper Club - New York, NY - November 16, 1993 {Late Show} (SBD)
DOWNLOAD 1 / DOWNLOAD 2

PS -- The album of traditional folk covers which Dylan released just prior to these shows, World Gone Wrong, is a gorgeous, glorious masterpiece and easily Dylan's most underrated album ever, if you ask me. So there.

3 comments:

J said...

I was at that show, too! I camped out all night at Tower Records on east 4th and got into both shows the first night & the final show on the 2nd.

I love your blog.

jjbirdsong@gmail.com

Heli0tr0pe said...

Nice one. Damn, that's gotta be a record -- I had barely finished writing the post before you commented.

Cheers for that -- you just made my night!

thx,
TSM

darkstar, m'cr said...

Thanks to the bootlegger, & the uploader...& the reason the shows never appeared officially is that the first 3 were leaked on a p2p tree, maybe a day or two after being recorded - hence the 4th one is hard to find, & no video ever appeared - ah well...