Cat Power‘s live song-by-song recreation of Bob Dylan‘s famed May 17, 1966 concert at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall will be released Nov. 10 through Domino Records. The contemporary performance was recorded Nov. 5, 2022, at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Bootlegs from the late 1960s mistakenly labeled Dylan’s show as having taken place there, and when it was finally officially released in 1998 as the fourth volume of the rock legend’s Bootleg Series, it was subtitled as the “Royal Albert Hall” concert.
Dylan’s 1966 tour was his first performing electric, a move met by criticism from fans and journalists alike. An attendee famously yelled “Judas” at Dylan in Manchester, a sequence finally made available to the public as part of Martin Scorsese’s 2005 Dylan documentary No Direction Home. Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert mimics the structure of those concerts, which began with a solo acoustic set and finished with full band performances backed by the Hawks (who went on to become the Band). As luck would have it, a fan also yelled “Judas” during Cat Power’s version of “Ballad of a Thin Man,” which is out today (Sept. 12) in tandem with “She Belongs to Me.”
“It was something impulsive,” says the artist, whose real name is Chan Marshall. “I wasn’t expecting the audience to recreate their part of the original show as well, but then I wanted to set the record straight – in a way, Dylan is a deity to all of us who write songs.”
As for “She Belongs to Me,” Marshall says when having performed it in the past, she sometimes “turned it into a first-person narrative – ’I am an artist, I don’t look back.’ I really identified with it like that. But for the show at Royal Albert Hall, I, of course, sang it the way it was originally written – with the respect for the composition … and the great composer.”
In celebration of the forthcoming album, Cat Power will perform the Free Trade Hall show at the intimate Troubadour in Los Angeles on Nov. 6–7. Tickets go on sale Friday at 10 a.m. PST.
Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert tracklisting:
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
