BOB DYLAN : THE COMPLETE BUDOKAN 1978

BOB DYLAN : THE COMPLETE BUDOKAN 1978

Disc One (66:53)

A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
Repossession Blues
Mr. Tambourine Man
I Threw It All Away
Shelter From The Storm
Love Minus Zero / No Limit
Girl From The North Country
Ballad Of A Thin Man
Maggie's Farm
To Ramona
Like A Rolling Stone
I Shall Be Released
Is Your Love In Vain?
Going, Going, Gone

Disc Two (70:25)

One Of Use Must Know (Sooner Or Later)
Blowin' In The Wind
Just Like A Woman
Oh, Sister
Simple Twist Of Fate
You're A Big Girl Now
All Along The Watchtower
I Want You
All I Really Want To Do
Tomorrow Is A Long Time
Don't Think Twice, It's All Right
Band Introductions
It's All Right, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)
Forever Young
The Times They Are A-Changin'

Disc Three (63:55)

A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
Love Her With A Feeling
Mr. Tambourine Man
I Threw It All Away
Love Minus Zero / No Limit
Shelter From The Storm
Girl From The North Country
Ballad Of A Thin Man
Maggie's Farm
One More Cup Of Coffee (Valley Below)
Like A Rolling Stone
I Shall Be Released
Is Your Love In Vain?
Going, Going, Gone

Disc Four (68:25)

One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later)
Blowin' In The Wind
Just Like A Woman
Oh, Sister
I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
You're A Big Girl Now
All Along The Watchtower
I Want You
All I Really Want To Do
Knockin' On Heaven's Door
The Man In Me
Band Introductions
It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)
Forever Young
The Times They Are A-Changin'

Label : Columbia

Venue : Nippon Budokan Hall, Tokyo, Japan

Recording Date : February 28, 1978 + March 1, 1978

Release Date : November 15, 2023

Review (Pitchfork) : Given enough time, every one of Bob Dylan’s transgressions in taste is bound for reappraisal. Self Portrait, the double LP that Greil Marcus infamously dismissed upon its release with “What is this shit?,” had its reputation restored through The Bootleg Series, Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait (1969-1971). Dylan’s misunderstood Christian phase sounded fiery and invigorating on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 13: Trouble No More 1979-1981. It would seem at least possible that The Complete Budokan 1978 could perform a similar feat, challenging conventional notions about a Dylan album that critic Dave Marsh claimed was “his worst record by such a wide margin it’s hard to fathom it.” The 1978 double-LP live set At Budokan, one of the beloved artist’s least beloved releases, is the next maligned Dylan album ripe for critical revision thanks to this new 4xCD box containing all of the source recordings for the original LP. The Complete Budokan 1978 comprises two concerts, held February 28 and March 1 in Tokyo, at the beginning of the tour Dylan launched in 1978 with the express intent of raking in badly needed cash. Fresh off a divorce and tapped out from making Renaldo and Clara—his rambling four-hour half-fiction, half-documentary film about his touring extravaganza Rolling Thunder Revue—Dylan turned to Jerry Weintraub, the manager who’d greased the wheels for Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra’s transitions into stadium-conquering touring juggernauts in the 1970s. Bassist Rob Stoner, who played on the Rolling Thunder Revue and stayed on through the 1978 world tour, remembered that “Weintraub told Bob, ‘If you want to take it to the bank, you gotta do one of these slick, money-making tours. Just go out for a year, bust your ass, then you can go back to doing whatever you want.” Dylan heeded his manager’s advice. He expanded a basic band retained from Rolling Thunder with a trio of backing vocalists and saxophonist/flutist Steve Douglas, dressing the entire ensemble in matching stage outfits. When he received word that the Japanese promoter insisted he haul out his greatest hits for the tour’s opening stretch at Budokan, Dylan responded by reworking the tunes to showcase the full range of his band’s skills. Aware of the shifting tides of the business and the culture, Dylan aimed these rearrangements at an audience that was maturing toward the middle of the road, partially inspired by witnessing a Las Vegas spectacle by Neil Diamond—another Weintraub client—in 1977. “Vegas” became a common buzzword in the reviews that greeted both At Budokan and the tour once it arrived Stateside later in 1978, an intended pejorative surely stoked by the spectacles staged by Weintraub. Time may have softened those Vegas associations, yet a listen to The Complete Budokan 1978 shows they’re warranted. A galloping soft-rock instrumental rendition of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”—a hoedown performed as a show tune—sets a suitably loungey tone, one sustained by the snazzy flourishes scattered throughout the concerts. “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” punctuates each verse with stabs of horns; the blues of “Maggie’s Farm” is reduced to a glitzy stomp; “I Shall Be Released” gets consumed by swaths of saxophones. Hints of modern radio drift into the arrangements: The tropical gale blowing through “Shelter From the Storm” evokes Jimmy Buffett and the island vibes intensify on the reggae bounce of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” As telling as the specific arrangements are the straightlaced performances of Dylan and the band: They’re dutifully hitting their marks, playing the songs the same way both evenings. Dylan was still in the process of road-testing his band and these arrangements, which could explain some of the restraint heard throughout The Complete Budokan 1978. The North Carolina show from December 1978, captured on the bootleg Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte, showcases a band playing with energy and verve absent from the Budokan concerts. Compared to the original At Budokan release, the expanded length does offer glimmers of a livelier set, primarily in a pair of blues covers performed early each show to help loosen up the band: from the first night, “Repossession Blues” by Roland James, and from the second, Tampa Red’s “[You’ve Got to] Love Her With a Feeling,” both played with a raucous vigor that makes the rest of the record feel straightlaced. Those two blues covers vaguely hint at the roadhouse ramble that came to characterize Dylan's Never Ending Tour a decade later, as do the startling rearrangements of familiar songs. A case can be made that the 1978 world tour is the genesis of Dylan’s latter-day incarnation as a restless and mercurial road warrior. That knowledge doesn’t change that, as an album, The Complete Budokan 1978 isn’t just a drag, it’s often dorky, too. Hearing the band galumph through an attempt to turn “All I Really Want to Do” into a cheerful shuffle crystallizes how Dylan’s attempt to entertain just winds up as enervation.

Review (Americana Highways) : When it first appeared in 1979, Bob Dylan’s Live at Budokan garnered mixed reviews. It did go gold and receive some praise, particularly in Europe, but many listeners derided its radical rearrangements of classic material as well as its use of backup singers and brassy, big-band instrumentation. Dylan may have been in Japan, but it seemed to a lot of people as if he’d gone to Las Vegas. Of course, when he gave these performances, he already had a history of reinventing his material in concert—just listen to his renditions of songs like “Lay Lady Lay” and “Shelter from the Storm” on 1976’s Hard Rain, for example. So, nobody should have been shocked by his Budokan renditions. That said, these performances—culled from Dylan’s first concert series in Japan—are a million miles from the songs’ original studio versions. His group occasionally sounds like the 1970s Saturday Night Live house band, and the beginning of “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)” could be mistaken for something out of Fleetwood Mac. “All Along the Watchtower,” meanwhile, features prominent flute while saxophone plays a major role in many other tracks. A new, limited-edition box set called The Complete Budokan 1978, which expands dramatically on the original release, gives us a fresh opportunity to consider what to make of such renditions. While the 1979 album offers 22 tracks, the box serves up 56—two complete shows from February 28 and March 1, 1978—including 36 previously unreleased performances. Everything has been remixed and remastered for this handsomely packaged anthology, which includes a 40-page, LP-sized booklet with previously unseen photos and new liner notes, as well as two large posters, replicas of the tour program and tickets, and other memorabilia. Dylan’s desire to shake things up does not extend to the setlists: most songs appear in both concerts in the same order and with the same arrangements, with the two versions of most of them clocking in within only about 10 seconds of each other. Still, there are a few differences, and there are a dozen songs that the 1979 album didn’t include: “I Threw It All Away,” “Girl from the North Country,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “To Ramona,” “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),” “You’re a Big Girl Now,” “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below),” “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met),” and “The Man in Me,” plus covers of Tampa Red’s “Love Her with a Feeling” and Roland Janes’s “Repossession Blues,” neither of which Dylan has performed since 1978. The Complete Budokan 1978 is not likely to result in the sort of wholesale reappraisal that Self-Portrait underwent after the release of The Bootleg Series, Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait (1969–1971). Some of these arrangements still seem to make little sense—even some that sound terrific—because they clash with the lyrics. The sax and organ on “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” for instance, seem at odds with the song’s apocalyptic vision, and brassy approaches to “Maggie’s Farm” and “Ballad of a Thin Man” rob them of much of their venom. “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” similarly loses its sarcasm in a flute-spiced version with a reggae-influenced beat. Still, there’s a good deal more to like here than many early critics acknowledged. Dylan’s vocal work is excellent throughout. So is the backup from his band, which includes nearly all the players who showed up less than four months after these shows on the seriously underrated Street-Legal (which, one hopes will someday be the subject of a reputation-mending Bootleg Series release). That album’s “Is Your Love in Vain?” sounds great in the live versions here, as do a sax-and-chorus-augmented “Like a Rolling Stone,” “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),” and quite a few of the other tracks. Missteps notwithstanding, in fact, there’s more than enough good stuff in this box to suggest that it belongs in any Dylan fan’s collection.

Review (Super Deluxe Edition) : Forty five years ago, in February and March 1978, Bob Dylan played his now historic first concert tour of Japan, which included eight shows at the Nippon Budokan Hall in Tokyo. Two of the gigs from that venue – February 28 and March 1 – were recorded on 24-channel, multi-track analogue tape and 22 performances were released as Bob Dylan at Budokan, a 2LP set which was originally intended for Japan only, but was issued globally in April 1979, due to widespread demand. This month, Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings have released Bob Dylan – The Complete Budokan 1978 – it’s the first time any of the complete performances from that year’s world tour have been officially available. Newly remixed and remastered from the original recordings, the collection comes in three physical formats – a deluxe 4CD box set, which has 58 tracks, 36 of which are previously unreleased; 8LP (Japan only) and a 2LP version, featuring 16 previously unreleased tracks from the box set. The master tapes were discovered in 2007 – they’d been stored in a vault in a factory in Shizuoka, Japan, for nearly three decades, wrapped thoroughly in a plastic bag to protect them from moisture. Mercifully, the tapes were immaculately preserved – in his liner notes, Tetsuya Shiroki, co-producer of the box set, says it “felt like uncovering the Holy Grail”. Interestingly, the tapes were kept under wraps for another 15 years before the project finally got the go-ahead in 2022. Commenting on the new mix, chief engineer, Tom Suzuki, says the intention was to make it crisper and clearer than the original 1978 release, and you can’t argue with him on that – it sounds great, adding a new depth and clarity to the performances. Dylan is accompanied on stage by a 12-piece band – nine musicians and three female backing singers. The box set also includes facsimile memorabilia, such as concert tickets, pamphlets, posters and flyers, as well as a 60-page, full-colour photo book, with previously unpublished pictures. Watch the SDEtv unboxing video for a look at this presentation. For the new version, the engineers wanted to reproduce the sound the Japanese audience would’ve heard in the concert hall – nothing has been removed or altered in any way, says Shiroki. So, on the first night of the tour, before a reggae-tinged ‘Shelter From The Storm’, we hear the hum of the amps, and the audience laughing, as Dylan struggles with tuning up, and then tells the crowd: “I’ve got a temperamental guitar”. At the time it was released, Bob Dylan at Budokan polarised fans and critics – the New York Times called it “a challenging listen, but a rewarding one,” and writing for Rolling Stone, Janet Maslin, criticised Dylan’s “sanctimonious, Las Vegas-style bastardization of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, adding, “Can it really be that Bob Dylan had to go all the way to Budokan, to Japan, to find an audience with a short memory, a crowd that didn’t think he had anything to prove? In any case, the jig is up: he’s given up trying to outdo himself and begun something new.” Ouch! Despite some of the discouraging reviews, the record still went platinum in the U.S and peaked at number 4 in the UK. The 1978 world tour, which saw Dylan play to two million fans across 114 shows, found the singer-songwriter at a crossroads. It was an unsettling period in his personal life and career – his marriage to his first wife, Sara Lownds, had ended in a divorce the year before, and he was also smarting from the failure of his film Renaldo and Clara. On top of that, he hadn’t released an album since 1976’s Desire – Street Legal was recorded and would be released in June 1978 – and he hadn’t performed live since the end of the Rolling Thunder Revue in May 1976. Dylan has always confounded his fans as well as delighted them, and, on that note, the first CD in the box set opens with the surprising rendition of the first song he played at Budokan on February 28 1978 – a slick and funky instrumental version of ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.’ It’s an odd listen, as at times it wanders dangerously close to sounding like a hotel bar band – there’s a MOR sax break – but it’s powered by some great bass playing from Rob Stoner, and saved by an epic electric guitar solo, colourful country violin and dobro. We’re in more familiar and agreeable territory with the next track from that night’s set – ‘Repossession Blues’, which is Dylan’s take on a song by Memphis rockabilly act Roland Janes and has some superb honking sax and killer riffing from lead guitarist Billy Cross. There’s a sprightly reworking of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ with Steve Douglas on flute (he played sax as part of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound crew) and a neat organ solo from Alan Pasqua, while a truly lovely, impassioned rendition of ‘I Threw It All Away’ adds female gospel backing vocals and sax. The slow, tender and soulful version of ‘Girl From The North Country’ is stunning, ‘To Ramona’ is heartfelt and moving, and the vitriolic ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’ is a dramatic showstopper, but it’s not all good… ‘Maggie’s Farm’ gets a full-on, ‘70s power-rock overhaul, with howling guitar and even some dubious disco stylings, and no one needs a cod-reggae reworking of ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.’ One of the highlights of the 1 March Budokan concert – on CDs 3 and 4 – is a magnificent, warm and organ-soaked ‘The Man In Me’ with a sax solo – it was only the sixth time the song had been played live. The Complete Budokan 1978 may at times be “Dylan going Vegas,” – Maslin was right, the version of ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ is very cabaret – but to be able to hear two these two full performances from 1978 is a wonderful thing. Dylan is in fine form vocally and from the playful band introductions he sounds like he’s enjoying himself. There are some genuinely brilliant, fascinating and radical reinterpretations, which, thanks to the impressive remixing and remastering, sound superb, even if some of the versions might be too MOR and Vegas-like for some listeners to handle, Dylanologists and diehard fans will be delighted that what happened at those two full concerts in Budokan didn’t stay in that vault in Japan.