Cat Power on the World-Changing Spirit of Bob Dylan’s Landmark 1966 Show: ‘It’s Needed Now’

A song doesn’t have to be overtly political in nature to be a protest song. That’s one of the two overarching concepts behind the latest LP from singer-songwriter Chan Marshall, best known as Cat Power.

The other concept is that Bob Dylan is a pretty awesome guy.

This Friday, Marshall is releasing Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert. Recorded last November at London’s Royal Albert Hall, the live album is a song-for-song rendition of Dylan’s May 1966 performance at the Manchester Trade Hall that later became a beloved bootleg (and the fourth installment of Dylan’s Bootleg Series) under the erroneous label of “Royal Albert Hall Concert.”

When the opportunity arose for Marshall to perform at the iconic venue, paying tribute to a seminal moment in popular music history was an obvious and exciting idea.

“This record, I got the offer to play Royal Albert Hall, and I associate it so strongly with Dylan and (the legendary 1967 documentary) Don’t Look Back,” says Marshall. “I thought, ‘I’m 50 years old and I can play Royal Albert Hall on Guy Fawkes Day, fuck yeah I want to do that record.’ It was the moment where he turned people on and turned people off. There was no bigger audience for him to tell people to get with it. He toured for six months and didn’t give up, people were calling him a fuckin’ traitor and saying, ‘What about the movement, Bob?’ And he went, ‘It’s bigger than what you think.’

“The protest was the show. He knew he wasn’t able to change the world with just protest songs, he wasn’t really creating change.” Discussing how Dylan’s stylistic change came at a moment when folk music had a passionate, yet niche, audience and the 1960s counterculture was still gestating, she adds, “Others in the movement needed to be shepherded, to get out of their 1950s boxes. I associate this show with Bob expanding the movement. So I decided, off-the-cuff, I wanted to do this record.”

Dylan’s 1966 tour has become a core part of his legacy. It marks the year he moved away from traditional acoustic folk and, with the assistance of The Hawks (later to become The Band), brought freewheeling electric rock to his sound. The folk purists, as the tale goes, were enraged and believed him to be selling out the folk community’s values. This battle of wills most famously came to a head at the 1966 Manchester Trade Hall show, when a fan called him Judas, prompting Dylan to instruct his band to “play it fucking loud.”

Marshall doesn’t see Dylan’s 1966 run as a mere time capsule. The provocative nature of his half-solo acoustic, half-band electric rock-and-roll set and his willingness to both confront and subvert his audience’s expectations maintains a vitality and relevancy Marshall hopes to have channeled in her own renditions of the 15 songs performed that evening.

“It’s really great to do this while Bob is still walking the earth, to celebrate him. He’s given us this gift that’s expanded the universe. Bob expanded the movement,” she says. “Music is a great unifier, and in this moment, it’s really strategically necessary. It’s needed now. We still don’t have an Equal Rights Amendment, we haven’t addressed climate change, we still don’t have a world run by women.

“I would like to see a socialist woman of color, an Indigenous Black woman, run for office and win and have her song be ‘Ballad of a Thin Man.’ There’s a lot of us who feel this way, who want people to listen. It’s time for people to feel that power,” Marshall adds.

A Natural Thing

To deliver that message, Marshall is relying on something that’s become a core part of her musical persona: the cover song. She’s released three full-length covers albums, the most recent of which was the 2022 LP Covers (ND review).

“When I was little, I was raised by my grandmother from the age of 5, there was always music — Ray Charles, Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, Dean Martin — and when I met my parents, there was music everywhere, all the time. I was constantly moving and receiving a music education. I learned so much at a very young age,” she says.

“As I played music with my friends in Atlanta, covers were the most natural thing. We’d do anything, ‘Radio Free Europe,’ Bad Brains, Pussy Galore, Creedence; we were this fun, psychedelic noise band. It just became part of my character,” Marshall continues. “I just love songs and other people’s music, playing their records. I didn’t always have an instrument or know chords, but I just wanted to sing. I started doing cover records because I was singing the material on tour. I knew it was unconventional and that no one was singing each other’s songs anymore.”

On her prior covers projects, Marshall would tinker with the arrangements and melodies of songs. But when it came to performing songs like “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” she opted to mirror the original arrangements of the 1966 Dylan concert.

“The idea was to play it straightforward, no ego. It had to be raucous like they were; they had to be louder than the people screaming at them,” she explains. “At first, it felt like, I don’t know, it would be more beautiful to have, like the Beijing Symphony. But that was impossible because of the finances of it. But to make it really work, I knew it needed to be with friends who know the material.”

To accomplish that, Marhsall assembled a five-piece band. Featuring members of the group Arsun, players from the Echo in the Canyon soundtrack recording sessions, and a drummer from a Grateful Dead tribute band, she found the right mix of musicianship and vibes necessary to capture the essence of the setlist.

A Sunny Peak

Just as she knew she wanted to play it straight for her own performance, Marshall also knew that the occasion merited recording the performance. In 2018, she performed a 20th anniversary celebration of her acclaimed Moon Pix album at the Sydney Opera House. It was an ambitious performance that utilized a string section, and after the exhilaration of the show was over, she felt despondent that it wasn’t recorded.

Knowing she wanted to preserve the Dylan show for posterity’s sake, combined with the desire to do the songs justice, led to an intense rehearsal process.

“I had to cut in line and tell everyone to slow down, and say, ‘We’re not selling corndogs on Beale Street, covering Dylan at Royal Albert Hall. We’re playing Dylan at Royal Albert Hall as 50-year-olds.”

That commitment paid off, and Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert makes for a vibrant, exciting listen. From a performance standpoint, Marshall couldn’t have felt better about the experience.

Despite feeling “nervewracked” during the opening chords of first song “She Belongs to Me,” by the time “Like a Rolling Stone” brought the evening to a close, she felt exhilarated. Looking back on it a year later, she’s philosophical on the moment.

“We did really well, I was so grateful. The fuckin’ audience and us, we were like 5-year-old kids at summer camp who got to take over the bus and go get ice cream,” Marshall says. “It was an elegant, beautiful night. I didn’t even know until after that the ovation went for three minutes. I was just so happy, like it was a time when people were believing in something again.

“We started at the bottom of the Himalayas, ice pick and shoes, freezing in a blizzard during the first song, hiking to get the warm sun on our faces. By the end, we were all on top of a sunny peak, with Grandpa Bob, celebrating him in this beautiful hall with all these people.”