DYLAN AND THE BAND: from emotional depths to frenzied highs. Highlights from their 30 years of "telepathic interplay"

by JOHN MULVEY.

I’m with The Band: Bob Dylan and Robbie Robertson spar during Dylan’s second set at the Academy Of Music, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, February 24, 1966.

Bob Dylan

Maggie's Farm (Live At The Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, CA-September 1965)

From: Live 1962-1966 – Rare Performances From The Copyright Collections (Columbia, 2018)

Bob Dylan’s electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival, July 25, 1965, might have been a historic inflection point, but the band who backed him there with such fervour weren’t built to last. Notably Mike Bloomfield, whose stinging guitar lines had been so disruptive, and the rhythm section of Jerome Arnold and Sam Lay, were all committed to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. For his next shows Dylan needed new lieutenants, starting with a smart and hard-working Canadian guitarist introduced to him by his A&R, John Hammond.

Robbie Robertson signed up for two gigs, at the Forest Hills Stadium in New York (August 28) and the Hollywood Bowl (September 3), bringing along the more sceptical drummer from his band The Hawks, Levon Helm. You can hear this putative version of Dylan’s most famous group ripping through Maggie’s Farm at the Hollywood show. It’s a fractionally less wild take than the song’s runaway outing at Newport: if Bloomfield was the most prominent player there, this time it’s Al Kooper on organ who’s foregrounded (Kooper was also in the Newport line-up but didn’t actually play on that night’s Maggie’s Farm). Helm’s drive is metronomically intense, Robertson a more measured presence than Bloomfield.

Here, though, is the foundation of The Hawks’ relationship with Dylan: as visceral, flexible rock’n’roll facilitators with an energy and virtuosity that could supercharge their leader but not distract from him. By the end of the month, Dylan had flown to Toronto, seen the rest of The Hawks – Rick Danko, Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel – in action, and set off with them on the most storied of tours.

Bob Dylan

Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?

Charlie Steiner, Highway 67/Getty Images

(Columbia single, 1965)

Long years of road service with Ronnie Hawkins meant The Hawks didn’t exactly need toughening up when they joined the Dylan tour.

Nevertheless, a provisional relationship at the end of September 1965 rapidly consolidated, so that Dylan and The Hawks were in the studio early in October. Several songs were attempted, including a prototype Visions Of Johanna called Freeze Out. The one completed, though, was a holdover from the summer’s Highway 61Revisited sessions titled Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?; a couple of those previous takes featuring Bloomfield are on the Deluxe Edition of The Bootleg Series Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965–1966.

If the July versions were elegant, albeit pointed, folk rock, Dylan’s rapid evolution was explicit in the way he and The Hawks attacked Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?. It’s a band in perpetual rickety flux, close to collapse but telepathic in their interplay: check how Manuel’s piano and Hudson’s organ lines intertwine, and compare with the more reserved manoeuvres of Kooper (celeste) and Paul Griffin (piano) on the July cuts. The single was not, though, a success, failing to crack the US Top 50 in December.