Bob Dylan (with Joan Baez) played to 27,000 people at Hughes Stadium in Boulder, Colorado on May 23, 1976. (The a film of the show was later broadcast on NBC in September of that same year.) Since everything, it seems, survives in the archives of YouTube, the professionally filmed and edited concert footage is available to be streamed. It's an interesting concert film with many fine moments and well worth screening.
The concert shows Dylan and a group of, more or less, identical musicians playing in the rain to a sullen-looking mob of young dudes wearing stocking caps or cowboy hats. It must have been cold and the rain chilling because not too many women seem to be in attendance. At the back reaches of the stadium, on a grassy knoll, some folks have spread blankets, a cheerless-looking wet encampment to which, perhaps, the women have retreated. The film evokes it's era. During the first song, a couple of guys on-stage are obviously ignoring the music -- it's a version of "Hard Rain" -- as they joke and light up a joint. These guys are wearing tan cowboy hats, sunglasses despite the afternoon's murk, and have the sort of lustrous moustaches that would today be coded as very gay. Dylan and his band all wear turbans wrapped around their heads; Joan Baez has something similar covering her hair. Both Dylan and Baez are very, very skinny with skeletal legs in their tight jeans. There are a number of big close-ups showing Dylan and Baez singing in close harmony, the camera pulled-up so close to them that we can only see their foreheads and eyes. They are both very beautiful, with unlined smooth skin -- they look like brother and sister angels.
Dylan's versions of his famous songs are perversely re-framed with melodies altered to the point of being unrecognizable. (For Dylan, the essence of a song, apparently, is its structure of words -- he doesn't vary the lyrics much as far as I can determine, but has significantly altered most of the music in performance.) The Boulder version of "Maggie's Farm" features slashing, feral guitar licks that are both efficient and brutal -- it sounds like Chuck Berry. "I pity the poor immigrant", one of the signature songs from Dylan's John Wesley Hardin album is re-cast as a up-tempo calypso number that seems to come to a grandiloquent ending about every 16 bars before weirdly reviving itself for another stanza of lyrics. (Joan Baez plays the maracas and sings harmony; the spirit moves her and so she squats on stage, rattling her maracas -- it's a weird gesture and a bit unbecoming.) One has the sense that Dylan's relationship with Baez was very cool and remote when this concert was recorded: she's banished from the stage, when Dylan sings "Shelter from the Storm", a number that could conceivably be interpreted as a kind of love song. (In fact, Dylan's love affair with Baez was over in 1965 when to everyone's surprise, including Joan Baez, he married Suzie Lowndes.)
Dylan always repays listeners with new revelations, that is, old songs that, suddenly, seem timely once more and, even, incisive commentaries on current events. In this concert, Dylan and Baez sing a song called "Deportee", a bitter protest song that I had forgotten (if I ever knew it). The song comes into harsh focus in the light of Trump's vow to deport millions of undocumented workers and their families from this country. A little research shows me that this song, actually called "Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)" was written by Woody Guthrie in 1948, although the musical setting performed by Dylan and Baez was composed later by another writer (and popularized by Pete Seegar). The song is about a flight transporting undocumented workers (apparently 28 of them) to an INS compound at El Centro in the Imperial Valley near the Mexican border at Mexicali, Baja. The plane carrying the migrant farm workers crashed in Los Gatos Canyon. Early accounts did not identify the Mexican workers who died in the wreck -- they were simply referred to as "deportees" and buried in a mass grave marked "Mexican Nationals". (The dead were later identified and a marker was installed at the mass grave stating the names of the victims -- this was in 2013.) Guthrie's lyrics are scathing: he chronicles generations of farm laborers who "waded across the river" to work in the fruit orchards only to be discarded in nameless graves. The song also invokes the countless immigrants who died in attempts to cross the desert, bodies said to be scattered "like fallen leaves" all over the land. Apparently, little has changed in American immigration policy in the last 77 years and injustices that existed in 1948 are still vexing us to this day -- indeed, even worse, perhaps, due to Trump's proposed and draconian policies (at least as presently threatened.)
The concert is well worth watching and I recommend it.
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