Cat Power has devoted a large portion of her career to reinterpreting other artists’ material, with three full albums and two EPs of cover songs, from artists as wide ranging as Billie Holiday, Nick Cave, and The Rolling Stones. She’s also covered Bob Dylan on those releases, largely sticking to early outtakes like “Kingsport Town” and “Paths of Victory,” or “I Believe in You” from Slow Train Coming.
Compared to those, her latest project more resembled a hugely ambitious performance art piece—reproducing an entire Dylan concert, one of his most notorious, song for song, from the very stage it was purported to have been performed. Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert replicates the concert that was actually recorded at the Manchester Free Trade Hall but widely bootlegged as being from London’s Royal Albert Hall—and is so much associated with that hall so that Dylan’s eventual official bootleg release of it in 1998 retained that title in quotation marks: Bob Dylan Live 1966: The ‘Royal Albert Hall’ Concert.
No need to do that when Cat Power, also known as Chan Marshall, recorded her show at the Royal Albert Hall to further extend the legend by bringing it to the place where it had never been. Manchester was the famous stop amid Dylan’s contentious English tour when UK folk audiences were reacting to the electric presentation of songs in the second half of the show—catcalling, slow-clapping and with someone ultimately yelling “Judas!” before the final number.
Someone, either as a joke or stirred by history, yelled the same thing when Marshall booked the Royal Albert Hall in November 2022 and recorded her version of the songs in order. Released a year later, the live album is being promoted on the current tour—for an entirely more positive audience response.
At a sold out show in DC’s Lincoln Theatre Tuesday, the atmosphere was almost solemn as she took the stage to begin the set as Dylan had—acoustically with the charming “She Belongs to Me,” a tune that could have been written about someone much like her—“She’s got everything she needs, she’s an artist, she don’t look back… She can take the dark out of the nighttime and paint the daytime black.” Unlike Dylan, she relegated the other solo duties to others—Henry Munson, looking like a young Tom Verlaine on acoustic guitar; Aaron Emery played harmonica.
She borrowed a lighting tactic from 21st century Dylan tours, though, arranging the stage darkly, backlit with a half dozen large, dim klieg lights pointing out to the audience. Marshall still has reservations about live perfomances. For a while, she didn’t do it at all; later she projected whole movies on herself to obscure herself (using Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc during one tour; a harbinger of the surprisingly short haircut the singer now sports). On recent tours, with fog machines and lights, she was hardly discernible on stage. Perhaps that’s something she admires about Dylan, or understands about him: He doesn’t particularly crave the spotlight.
Marshall’s interpretations of the songs were more straightforward than many of the songs she’s previously covered, at least musically. Within the vocals she tries many daring things, swooping and dipping into blue notes, singing a kind of harmony to the Dylan original she hears in her head (as does the audience). She snaps her fingers and rotates an arm to indicate an interior rhythm she’s found in many songs.
There’s a big book of lyrics on a music stand nearby that she almost never consults. Instead, the rich, complex lyrics are seared into her memory. And oh, what a rich array of songs that unfold before us. After a breezy reading of the underrated “Fourth Time Around,” pairing the deep “Visions of Johanna” with the warning of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” is almost too much to take in back to back. And the next song? No less than “Desolation Row.”
All of these, mind you, in the acoustic half of the show, where the audience is all but holding its breath, rapt in the sublime performance. If Marshall speaks at all, it’s during the explosion of applause at the end of each song. She takes tea and coughs a bit between songs, indicating the winter tour might be taking a toll on her.
Part of the power of the concert is the set list originally devised by Dylan; three of its acoustic set were from the January 1965 Bringing It All Back Home; there was one from Highway 61 Revisited, and the rest were all from Blonde on Blonde—still yet to be released at that point in the UK (Imagine hearing “Just Like a Woman” for the first time).
There was a momentary break—instead of an intermission—when Marshall turned the page on her lyric book and turned it around for the audience to see the one word indicating the concluding half: ELECTRIC. With a six-piece band behind her (and guitarist Munson taking on an electric), they locked into “Tell Me, Momma,” a rare Dylan song that was only played on the 1966 tour with The Band and never recorded for a studio album (or ever played again for that matter).
The next two songs are among the oldest in the show—“I Don’t Believe You” from Another Side of Bob Dylan and the one folk cover “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” devised by Eric Von Schmidt, the Reverend Gary Davis, and Dave Von Ronk from the debut LP.
Like all the songs in the electric set, they swung and had bite but weren’t built to clobber the audience, as Dylan’s spiteful performance in ’66 might have been. Just ending the show with the accusatory double whammy of “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “Like a Rolling Stone” was enough to get the point across even if they didn’t, as Dylan encouraged his Band to do in Manchester, “play fucking loud.” Nor was anyone heard recreating history by yelling “Judas!” The crowd was too happy to even feign opposition.
Still, there were no encores after the song, just as there wasn’t in England 58 years ago. Everybody should have known just what to expect since even the T-shirts for the show didn’t have the dates and cities listed on the back—they had the indelible setlist.
SETLIST
She Belongs to Me
Fourth Time Around
Visions of Johanna
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
Desolation Row
Just Like a Woman
Mr. Tambourine Man
Tell Me, Momma
I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
Leopard-Skin Pill-Box hat
One Too Many Mornings
Ballad of a Thin Man
Like a Rolling Stone
