Seventy Dollar Robbery by Bob Dylan (Vinyl record album review)

Record basics

• Album name: Seventy Dollar Robbery
• Artist name: Bob Dylan
• Year: 1973? 1977?
• Number of discs: one
• Label: Contra Band Music
• Collection: Friedman
• Buy it on Ebay: $140.00

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

This appears to be a Bob Dylan bootleg. Some search engining revealed a bit of information about it, but there was some discrepancy on whether it was from 1973 or 1977. Here are the other Bob Dylan records that I’ve reviewed:

• The Freewheelin’ (1963): 5/5
• The Times They Are a-Changin’ (1964): 3/5
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits (1967): 5/5
• John Wesley Harding (1967): 4/5
• Nashville Skyline (1969): 4/5
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Vol. 2 (1971): 4/5
• Planet Waves (1974): 3/5

What I expected

I definitely see some songs that I know and like on here, but I’m not sure what the audio quality will be like and whether it will be a live or studio recording.

What it was actually like

The A side and the B side were mislabeled, but I know how to fix that:

> python3
>>> a, b = b, a

Some of these songs definitely were live recordings (Folsom Prison Blues was, and It Ain’t Me Babe and Wild Mountain Thyme both had some audience clapping, and Wild Mountain Thyme had a lone cough), but I could not tell if the rest were. I have a hunch that this may have been a single concert, though. The audio quality was rough at times, but mostly all right.

I liked East Virginia Blues, the Carter family song, a lot. I heard what sounded like a banjo and a guitar (though it could have been two banjos), but the lead banjo was wildly out of tune^[1]. There was also some vocal harmony towards the end, but I had no idea who the other singer might have been.

His version of Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues had the same pacing as Cash’s, but I really missed the Cash vocal quality that brought so much sadness to the song, and it was interesting that he chose to use an electric guitar. While that one was ok, Ring of Fire was totally transformed into a disjointed, slow and confused rock song that was also electric. It was hard to know what it was, but it definitely wasn’t good.

George Jackson was very similar to the acoustic release version, and John Brown was similar to a couple of versions that I found on youtube. His voice on It Ain’t Me Babe sounded deeper and much less “Dylany” than on the release version.

His version of Wild Mountain Thyme was good, a bit slower than Joan Baez’s version, but it worked really well with him just singing over guitar accompaniment like she did.

Grade

4/5: would listen again