Bob Dylan: At Budokan

Let's start at the end. Somewhere over in the eastern part of the US, "Bob's people" have drawn up two or three alternative tracklistings for a future release in the Bootleg Series, offering the definitive take on the 1978 world tour, right? And it will blow Bob Dylan at Budokan out of the water. I just assume all of that because it has become routine now.

In Michael Gray's Song and Dance Man III, he's not nearly as dismissive of Budokan as he was of MTV Unplugged or Real Live: "it is a pity it caught Dylan and The Band [sic] before they reached the magical, incandescent form they hit later that year in Europe and North America… The album is a pale souvenir of what went down." As you know I narrowly missed what went down, so seven years later I bought the album as a souvenir of what I'd missed.

Gray has to concede that it has redeeming features. I think the reinvention of I Want You is fantastic — the equal of Barb Jungr's version. The poppy take on Love Minus Zero just steers the right side of gauche: it will never be my favourite take, but it helps me get more out of the other, subtler ones.

The Boy has got into the habit of asking "Who are we having?" as he settles down for his bedtime drink of milk. Yesterday evening his comment on All I Really Want to Do was "sounds like Bob the Builder, can we fix it?" It wasn't a comparison I'd considered, but I could almost see his point.

I'm hoping the Bootleg Series album has more songs from Street Legal, because I've never heard them live (and I'm hoping they might be more adventurous than the version of Is Your Love in Vain? on this record).

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