Why is Cat Power covering Bob Dylan’s 1966 live concert?
Starting in 2022 and continuing through 2024, Cat Power has performed a new show called “Cat Power Sings Dylan.” This show finds her recreating the famous 1966 live concert sets performed by Bob Dylan and the Hawks (who would become The Band within two years). The shows begin with an acoustic first set featuring only Dylan or Cat Power on guitar and harmonica. The second set features the lead singers performing loudly with certified rock ‘n’ roll bands.
It's been nearly 60 years since Dylan toured the world in 1966 and found himself getting booed by the paying audience. What would inspire Cat Power to recreate these performances and spend years of her life devoted to recreating those shows?
Dylan on tour in ‘66
When Bob Dylan was booked for a world tour in 1966, he was continuing the work that he began in 1965 to transition from a folk singer to a pop/rock singer. He originally emerged as a folk singer, mirroring himself after Woody Guthrie, and quickly became the “voice of the generation” against his own wishes, but his first love was always rock ‘n’ roll.
As a quick breakdown, consider his timeline as a folk star from 1961–1964, the short years before he went electric.
1961: Dylan arrives in New York performing Woody Guthrie covers.
1962: Dylan records his first album and begins writing originals.
1963: Dylan becomes a hero of folk music and protest music when he begins performing with the current Queen of Folk, Joan Baez, and releases Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and The TImes They Are a-Changin’. He also performs at the March on Washington, right before Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gives his I Have a Dream speech.
1964: Dylan records one acoustic album with no obvious protest songs and only performs sporadically.
By 1965, he was ready to explore and expand the dimensions of what rock songwriting could be. He recorded Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited in 1965; the second album featured “Like a Rolling Stone," which expanded him from the songwriter of “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’” to a full blown pop star.
After doing a final solo tour of England in 1965, captured in the important documentary Dont Look Back, Dylan introduced an electric band to his set at the Newport Folk Festival. This first show was tumultuous and received mixed reviews from attendees and boos from audience members.
Dylan’s next move, along with more songwriting and getting married in secret, was to book a world tour featuring an electric band. He recruited Ronnie Hawkins’ touring band, the Hawks. Dylan first rehearsed with the Hawks (who would become The Band a few years later) in Toronto at Yonge and Dundas Square at what was the Friar’s Tavern (but is now a Shoppers Drug Mart).
From February through May 1966, Dylan travelled the world with a new show. As can be heard on the Bootleg Series Vol. 4 and The 1966 Live Recordings releases, the electric set triggered European audiences into unleashing scores of boos most nights. This famously culminated in an incident at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, though it was long mistaken to have happened at the Royal Albert Hall, when an audience member yelled “Judas!” at Dylan, which inspired the artist to unleash an even louder and more intense “Like a Rolling Stone” than they usually performed.
Why were audiences so upset?
This has been a well-documented subject, with the “break-up” between folk loyalists and Bob Dylan having been discussed and analyzed in many articles, books, and conversations between Dylan fans since the ‘60s. It’s hard to understand now how people could have booed the shows that might now be many people’s answer to “if you had a time machine, what concert would you go back to see?”
By looking at the setlist that Dylan chose to perform at these shows and how he divided the song choices, along with the consideration that the electric sound was probably awful at most theatres, it’s possible to see that Dylan was also being difficult and confrontational in his choices.
Acoustic set
In what could be regarded as looking out for the wishes of the audience, Dylan continued to perform an acoustic show regularly every night of the show.
His acoustic set was made up of seven songs. There were three songs from 1965s’ Bringing It All Back Home (“She Belongs to Me,” “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” and “Mr. Tambourine Man”), an 11-minute epic from his other 1965 album (“Desolation Row”), and three songs from the unreleased Blonde on Blonde (“4th Time Around,” “Vision of Johanna,” and “Just Like a Woman”). These are seven stone-cold classics, but they completely ignore the foundational work that Dylan laid out over the first few years of his career. Most audiences, even the biggest fans, go to concerts wanting to hear their favourite songs. Dylan always had an abundance of song choices, but ignoring his biggest hits only a few years in was bound to make audiences grumble.
Electric set
The second set saw the band return with three songs from those early records, totally revamped into hard rocking songs (“I Don’t Believe You,” “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” and “One Too Many Mornings”), three from Highway 61 Revisited (“Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” “Ballad of a Thin Man,” and “Like a Rolling Stone”), and one still unrecorded song, “Tell Me, Momma.” These sets would have been loud and difficult to hear Dylan sing the words that would win him a Nobel prize many years in the future, and now was when Dylan was willing to perform a few of those early hits. Even then, he chose personal favourites like the transformative “One Too Many Mornings” instead of giving the people a hard rock version of “Hattie Carroll” (which would take another ten years with the Rolling Thunder Revue).
Reports say it just sounded bad because the theatres of the world hadn’t universally figured out how to properly set up for rock music. To enjoy it, you had to be willing to follow Dylan exactly where he wanted to go, even if it wasn’t where you thought it’s where you wanted him to go. That hasn’t changed much since.
Cat Power’s set
Cat Power is now bringing this experience to the people all these years later. She’s no stranger to covers, especially Dylan covers, but this is her most sustained and full project recording the albums. She performed at the Royal Albert Hall in 2022, where an audience member dutifully played the role of yelling “Judas!” between “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” She’s touring this show throughout North America in 2024.
The power of an interpretive artist like Cat Power is often underappreciated these days in favour of the pursuit of originality. Cat Power has proved time and again since her first Covers Record in 2000 that a cover can transform a song. But that’s no novelty of Cat Power’s; it’s an integral part of the folk music experience and how humans have always built new stories on the foundations of our current ones.
After Cat Power has digested this much of Bob Dylan’s music into her psyche so viscerally, where will it take her next and what will it inspire? I know I’ll be waiting to hear.