Ithaca, New York, USA (15-Nov-99)

I hadn't watched a Dylan DVD in months, if not longer. But my young daughter had a sleepless night of teething and around 4 AM, I slipped this disc in the player.

I remembered quickly why I love this hobby. "Song to Woody" is superb, "Tommorrow is a Long Time" might be the best version of the song since the '60s, "Money Honey" and "Man of Peace" are nice surprises. I could go on. I did fall asleep during "Cats in the Well", but that probably had more to do with it being about 5:45 in the morning than with anything else.

The video is quite good. Close, but not so close as to be grainy, focusing on Dylan, but showing lots of the band, this is an excellent document of a superb show.

I'm also saddened to see that nobody has reviewed this disc (or actually, one person did review the two disc version). I love Dylan video trading. I remember getting into trading old, horrible VHS tapes with sound so bad that no sound might have been better. I remember some guy who called himself Jack Jack claiming to have pretty much all Dylan shows on video-- didn't trade with him.

I remember getting a few DVDs and thinking that the same old material did look a lot better. I remember watching a yassou video and thinking that syncing good sound and fixing patchy spots on videos suddenly made them THAT much better.

It saddens me now to see sniping taking over discussion. Frankly, there are about two dozen people in the world who really deeply care about Dylan videos, and there's probably another couple hundred who fall where I do-- we enjoy it, we don't see all the videos, we don't even see them regularly, but we stop by, check in, and like to keep up to speed.

It takes a lot of time, creativity and love to create a site like this. And to maintain it. And to create videos as fine as this one. And to thoughtfully review those videos. I just wish everybody could realize we're all part of the same team here, and that the entire community would benefit greatly if we could leave the pissing contests at the door, respect each other, and just enjoy the music.

It's enough, you know. This show is really quite outstanding. If you've got it, watch it again... at least a song or two. If not, get it and enjoy it. And let's talk about it. And about the shows you love that I might have overlooked.