Looney Toons

It is the most supremely elegant piece of rock ‘n’ roll music I’ve ever heard. Seeking after virtuous sounds, constantly on the look-out for the lost chord and its derivants, the music that springs most completely from that place where magic operates most nearly operates as a totality, Bob Dylan and the Hawks Live At Albert Hall, 1966 seems closest to what I’m after. Closer even than all the Rolling Stones Jive bootlegs or even Ya-Yas, perhaps even closer (though in a different way) than the brilliance I found in Live/Dead and Kick Out the Jams when they were released.

The extreme subtlety of the music is so closely interwoven with its majesty that they appear as one and^the same. The first time I heard it, the effect was that of so many -flashbulbs popping in my mind. Then the crusher: as Dylan and the Hawks tune their way into “Ballad of A Thin Man”, a tenson, intangible but definable for anyone who has ever seen great music performed in its live context, accrues, becomes almost unbearable and then is relieved by the most precisely perfect note from the guitar of Robbie Robertson. A swoop of purest finery, not all flash and filligree but something else, something so simple that it treads the thinnest edge of becoming merely mundane. Its B.B. King anteeendents laid bare, it remains the most cosmic rush I’ve ever experienced from mere music, totally unadulterated by chemical... a pristine swoop, up and then down and then back up again, Robertson soaring on that single note to heights the significance of which the average guitarist couldn’t begin to comprehend even if he were capable of playing them.