Uproar at Bob Dylan concert,” reads one headline adorning his bootleg. “Sydney’s wackiest concert,” reads another, jostling against “Bad Boy Bob!”, the shock revelation that “Dylan brings own group” and the perennial favourite, “Traitor”. “Oh my god,” Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power, gasps.
“It’s like they wanted to beat his ass every night.” His crime, old timers will recall, was in the eyes of the folk/protest establishment he’d left behind: an urge to power his increasingly psychedelic poetry with the ragged might of a rock’n’roll band called the Hawks. “He did the tour.
He wasn’t gonna stop. He was like, ‘I’m doing this shit’,” Marshall says. “And that’s where great art comes from: sticking to your gut and doing exactly what you need to do.
Sometimes it’s like that. You think, ‘I don’t know what the f--- I’m doing, but I gotta do it.’” There was a bit of that in November 2022, confesses Marshall, in her bold decision to re-record Dylan’s infamous 1966 set live at London’s Royal Albert Hall.
Today she’s resting in Woodstock, where Dylan too took refuge after that world tour, in the midst of her own world tour that will bring her to Australia in March. Former Melbourne journalist and record retailer David Pepperell recalls “it was like hearing rock and roll music for the first time”. He heard a few boos early in the electric half, but the folkies soon retreated.
He vividly remembers a more confrontationa.