CAT POWER SINGS DYLAN: 1966 Royal Albert Concert
Doors: 7:00PM | Show: 8:00PM
Get ready for a concert like no other! Cat Power Sings Dylan under the stars at the historic Kalamazoo State Theatre on September 17.
Last November in London, Cat Power took the stage at Royal Albert Hall and delivered a song-for-song recreation of one of the most fabled and transformative live sets of all time. Held at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in May 1966—but long known as the “Royal Albert Hall Concert” due to a mislabeled bootleg—the original performance saw Bob Dylan switching from acoustic to electric midway through the show, drawing ire from an audience of folk purists and forever altering the course of rock-and-roll. In her own rendition of that historic night, the artist otherwise known as Chan Marshall inhabited each song with equal parts conviction and grace and a palpable sense of protectiveness, ultimately transposing the anarchic tension of Dylan’s set with a warm and luminous joy. Now captured on the live album Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert, Marshall’s spellbinding performance both lovingly honors her hero’s imprint on history and brings a stunning new vitality to many of his most revered songs.
A singularly gifted song interpreter whose catalog includes three acclaimed covers albums (2000’s The Covers Record, 2008’s Jukebox, 2022’s Covers), Marshall holds an especially strong affinity for the songwriter-poet. “More than the work of any other songwriter, Dylan’s songs have spoken to me, and inspired me since I first began hearing them at 5 years old,” said Marshall. Like the original concert (and all of Dylan’s 1966 world tour), Marshall kept the first half of her set entirely acoustic, then went electric for the second half with the help of a full band: guitarist Arsun Sorrenti, bassist Erik Paparozzi, multi-instrumentalists Aaron Embry (harmonica, piano) and Jordan Summers (organ, Wurlitzer), and drummer Josh Adams. “I knew that when representing a performance that changed the rock-and-roll landscape forever, I needed to be very serious about it,” she says. “Although ‘serious’ feels like a small word for how deeply immersed I felt.”
As she prepared to recreate Dylan’s epochal concert—a 15-song set featuring classics like “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” as well as “Just Like A Woman,” and several other cuts from his seminal album Blonde on Blonde, released just the day before – Marshall deliberately avoided rehearsing her vocal parts. “Since I started making music, I’ve had this superstition about doing something more than one time, because I feel like the soul is so linked to the moment,” she explains. Along with relying on her preternatural instincts as a vocalist, Marshall drew from her extraordinary familiarity with the songs at hand. “I remember being nine years old and knowing all the lyrics to ‘Desolation Row,’ because it was on one of the many albums my young parents were listening to all the time,” she says. “I was always singing along to his songs; I’d harmonize and do my own background vocals. And the way I sang the songs back then is the same way I sing them now.”