For decades I thought I couldn’t have picked a worse era in which to see Bob Dylan for the first time. I didn’t know what to make of the 1978 concert at Kansas City’s Kemper Arena.
I accepted the conventional wisdom that Dylan’s tour in support of Street Legal was an artistic debacle. The new four-hour and thirty-minute The Complete Budokan 1978 changed my mind
Forty-five years later, the arrangements rendered by the band still sound more suited to Neil Diamond or Elvis Presley than to Dylan. Yet I now appreciate how much fun Dylan was having. Besides, I like Diamond and Presley.
The cheese doesn’t lend itself to protest material, but readings of love songs like “Is Your Love in Vain?” and "The Man in Me" fill me with the sort of giddy yearning I’ve rarely felt since I was a teen.