Let’s clarify. This disc comes from a filming: film-concert by director Alma Har’el, a show that is not one, but live performances nevertheless, during seven days of 2021 in Santa Monica. The goal: to capture in their own juice the songs created by our Robert in the first decade of his career as an elusive troubadour. In this, less a revisit than an inventory. For Dylan, the official recording, however celebrated, is not a culmination, but a moment. The songs, when they are played on stage, change, evolve, assume their age as they go. Here then, at 80, is the Zimmerman 1er without pedestal, giving the Tombstone Blues, Forever Young and others It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue as they are at the time of filming. Most often stripped of their period varnish, brought back to raw wood, blues, rockabilly. I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight, for example, is no longer bucolic country, but rock’n’roll. Eh yes. And two years after the shooting, the end of the story has not been told.
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