Another Big Name (arguably – and I’d certainly agree – the biggest name) to catch up on, Bob Dylan is probably at least marginally someone that most readers of the site have at least a slight inkling of. Maybe you’ve heard Adele’s cover of one of his songs? Maybe you recall him as sometime lead singer for The Band and The Grateful Dead? We’re playing with ya’, we know you’ve listened to every note and mused over every syllable of every word of his lyrics – just what did he mean by “wiggle-wiggle-wiggle like a bowl of soup“? We may never know – but that doesn’t really matter right now.
So, why this song right now? is it something to do with the upcoming Tour dates across the UK? Hardly, it’s a wonder for us but for Dylan it’s another leg of the tour – not that he won’t certainly be wonderful but, you know, we aren’t that special. Sorry to break that. No – this unreleased live song is taken from the upcoming ‘Bob Dylan – The 1974 Live Recordings‘ which one could think of as the expanded ‘Before The Flood‘, only in this case we’re looking at a 27CD box set with 431 songs, 417 of them previously unreleased. if that sounds like a lot of Dylan (it really doesn’t, but let’s hypothesise an if for the sake of debate) then there is a 3 LP highlight release of only previously unreleased tracks.
So, ‘Forever Young‘ a song that takes on new meanings with time. Of course it is Dylan singing to his child, but fifty years on there is a tendency to project the song back onto Dylan, particularly in that live communion, as a wish that the greatest singer-songwriter should remain eternally young and eternally touring. And naturally there’s also a reflection back onto the audience, as we momentarily recapture our own youth through recollected hopes and dreams. We’re such narcissists.
It’s also worth reflecting that here in this recording we have Dylan and The Band getting the full acceptance they had been denied in 1966 – there’s a celebratory vibe to the music as they let the audience know that they had been right eight years earlier.
