It’s generally known as “The 1966 Royal Albert Hall” live performance, regardless that it did not really did not take place at Royal Albert Hall. It’s revered as certainly one of rock’s biggest dwell recordings of all time, regardless that the singer was loudly booed and heckled.
Considering all of the odd footnotes to Bob Dylan’s transformative “going electrical” efficiency with musicians who would change into the Band in 1966, having fashionable Dylan acolyte Cat Power recreate the dwell recording song-for-song on the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul on Friday evening appeared to make excellent sense.
It was a near-perfect rendering of the fabled present, too.
An suave indie-rock bellower from Georgia who’s been making her personal shadowy information for greater than twenty years, Chan Marshall — aka Cat Power — first staged her dwell re-creation of Dylan’s “Royal Albert Hall” live performance at the true Royal Albert Hall in London in 2022 (Bob’s model had been taped in close by Manchester however misidentified on bootlegs for many years). Her present based mostly on one other present went so nicely, she launched it on file after which took it on the street, lastly pulling into Dylan’s home state midway by way of her tour.
“Thank you, Bob Dylan, for bringing us collectively tonight,” Marshall reverentially famous close to the top of the sold-out, 90-minute efficiency.
As was the case within the unique live performance, the primary half of Friday’s set was all-acoustic. This was the a part of the present the British followers adored in 1966, and a thousand Twin Cities followers ate it up, too.
You might’ve heard a guitar choose drop within the theater as Marshall launched into “She Belongs to Me” below low stage lights accompanied very synchronically by guitarist Henry Munson and harmonica blower Aaron Embry (who additionally performed piano later).
“She by no means stumbles, she’s acquired no place to fall / She’s no person’s little one, the regulation cannot contact her in any respect,” Marshall sang with aloof aptitude.
That was the primary of many occasions she added a dramatic tinge — and possibly a contact of irony — channeling Dylan lyrics that without delay appeared worshipful and fearful of girls. Another such case got here two songs later with “Visions of Johanna,” whose epic, 9-minute narrative scroll Marshall pulled off with comprehensible assist from a lyric sheet.
Fans stayed silent and mesmerized up till “Just Like a Woman” and “Mr. Tambourine Man,” when many could not assist however sing alongside quietly. As the latter tune wrapped, a change to simply barely brighter lighting marked the arrival of the remainder of Cat Power’s six-piece band. And away we went.
Starting with “Tell Me, Momma,” the electrical set featured a divergent strategy by Marshall’s band to Marshall herself.
The band adhered intently and impressively to the powerfully rhythmic and at occasions defiantly exuberant preparations heard on the 1966 recording. Organist Jordan Summers — who has additionally performed with Bob’s son Jakob Dylan within the Wallflowers — dueled with pianist Embry throughout “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)” in shifting tribute to the o.g.’s Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel. And the entire band grooved tightly and thrillingly in “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.”
Marshall, in contrast, performed unfastened along with her vocals. She reinterpreted the melodies right here and there and added a discernible tenderness, particularly in “One Too Many Mornings.” It was a revisionist strategy that so many singers have efficiently taken over the a long time with Dylan’s tunes (together with Bob himself to today).
Marshall even had the maybe sacrilege gumption to vary the lyrics in “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.”
“I’m going again to St. Paul, I do imagine I’ve had sufficient,” she inserted.
Unlike when Dylan shocked people purists this identical electrifying materials in 1966, no person in St. Paul complained about any of the alterations Friday.
