East Troy, WI (18-Jun-88)

DISC D498.su
SOUND Full-blooded five star audience tape. (Though watch out for a one minute passage of original camera track that cuts in towards the end of LARS then runs through to the start of Me Babe. Louder than the upgrade audio, it comes, first time around, as quite a shock.)
IMAGE A left-centre balcony film, tired, bleary and blurry, mostly head-to-knees D but with movement to catch plenty of GE too, also pull-backs for the whole band (in comparison to 2007, of course, not a very big band). Troubled by heads in the last two songs only, otherwise unobstructed. Quite a few shaky spells, but not enough to spoil the overall effect, which, though unlikely to win many prizes, is good enough. As for colour, one, perhaps (see screenshots) from Bob's Blue Period?
RUNNING TIME The show runs 90:25 and, with the exception of one 95 second slice (last verse plus most of the play-out) cut from Tangled, is complete. The author has thoughtfully included a full (6:40) audio-only Tangled as bonus.
PERFORMANCE We catch up with the nascent NET just eleven days and eight shows old. And though it doesn't exactly start here, still it's plain from tonight's proceedings that something worthwhile is busy being born. Like all these early shows, this one is fast and un-nuanced, with most everything charged at and dashed off, but it works. The two BOB songs, Mobile and Marie, stand out, for this no nonsense, no prisoners approach seems to capture their spirit perfectly. Big Girl is good, so too Hollis, in its only performance of the year. LARS is custom-made for a night like this (and a guitarist like GE) and shines accordingly. GE also sets Released ablaze with more of his trademark incendiary fretwork. Serve Somebody, on the other hand, is rough romp, crude thrash - a step too far. Finally, it's instructive to contrast Bob's acoustic playing (his two-handers with GE effective here, as ever) with his electric posturings, that, buried in the mix, appear to contribute to the collective soundscape nothing at all.
COMMENT Frankie Lee And Judas Priest - am I missing something? This song has always struck me as (heresy alert) feeble verging on piffle. Okay, but some of his songs - Love Sick, Sugar Baby, Nettie Moore - only come alive on stage. Well, I've heard it a few times from Portsmouth (D236.su - one of my favourite DVDs) and now here it is again (he's performed it live twenty times in all) but I'm not persuaded. In their 20/20 interview of 1985, D told Bob Brown that his best songs are "written very quickly" - and maybe so, but that can apply just as easily to his worst ones too. Frankie Lee makes John Brown seem profound; like Tolstoy, like Chekhov. It's a trite little tale from his most grievously over-rated album. (No, I wouldn't be without the lovely Augustine, but KOL/Brownsville Girl proves that one swallow doesn't make a summer nor one strong song a weak album.) And worse, FL&JP has the nerve to call itself a "ballad". If you look in Lyrics, you'll see that D has written six Ballad Of/For/In ... songs and, by co-incidence, two of them - Frankie Lee and Hollis Brown - are on tonight's set-list. The second is surely worthy of the designation too, but the other? Consider this: on 2 January 1666 (note the date) Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary:

In perfect pleasure I was to hear her [Mrs Knipp, an actress] sing ... her little Scotch song of Barbary Allen.

That would have been in London. Yet here in East Troy, Wisconsin, across that lonesome ocean a small matter of 322 years on, we find Bob, gypsy minstrel, the Mrs Knipp of his day, reprising the same song and, just by singing it, helping to keep it alive, to survive another three centuries and more. That's a ballad. But do you honestly think that FP&JP will still be performed - even listened to - in three hundred years time? There might be an obsessive Culture Studies student or two tempted to retrieve and pore over it (they'll find it under DYLAN, Bob Minor Works and it won't detain them long). But presented by way of individual or group entertainment or (hah!) edification? Do me a favour. Don't tell me about it, I don't want to hear it. (Now there's a line from a good song - a blues, I believe...)
THANKS (as ever) Black Cat
STARS We now have six upgraded shows from 1988's first NET tour, with this (though D065.suu is also a contender) arguably the best. A strong four.