"What we were doing, nobody, nobody had quite done that before," Robbie Robertson, who played guitar in Bob Dylan's touring band in 1966, says of that year's remarkable live shows. "It was a different approach to the music. It had a dynamic thing to it, and an explosive thing to it, and a raging thing to it. It had a violent quality along the way to trying to find the beauty."

The remarkable artistic path that Dylan carved for himself, and everyone else in his wake, is on full display within the 23 live shows on the 36 discs included in the outstanding new box set, Bob Dylan: The 1966 Live Recordings, out today.

Just the year before, Dylan had toured the U.K. armed only with an acoustic guitar in the guise of a beatnik troubadour, as chronicled in the documentary Don't Look Back. Now, here he was, decked out in the finest mod-inspired suits and Beatle boots, fronting a loud, loose, full-throttle rock and roll band. The Hawks—who would soon come to be known as the Band—were met with a chorus of boos, night after night. While his supporting musicians were sometimes bowed, Dylan, by all accounts, was undeterred.

"A lot of it was fueled by critical newspaper write ups beforehand, with writers stating that Bob Dylan didn't have any right to go electric," says Dylan's sound engineer, Richard Alderson, who's recently unearthed tapes form the backbone of the massive box set, and who had known Dylan since his earliest days in Greenwich Village and had even recorded his legendary Gaslight Tapes. "It was all this opinion about what Bob should do or shouldn't be doing. But I always felt like it was a logical progression in the very least that Bob would go electric. But as a result of what the critics said, many times after a great performance, members of the audience would boo."

"We were doing something that people highly objected to, and it was quite a feeling to be doing that and really dedicated to it and have it feel like the world didn't believe in it," says Robertson, who recalls those heady days in his new memoir. "I have to take my hat off to Bob for not caving, because a lot of people would have just said, 'Well, the audience isn't really liking this very much, we should change it up.' But he didn't budge, and we stuck with him, and in time it's been proven that the world was wrong and we were right. That's quite a feeling."

He didn't budge, and we stuck with him, and in time it's been proven that the world was wrong and we were right.

Still, Alderson insists that it wasn't as bad as legend would have you believe, which is evidenced on The 1966 Live Recordings and the newly remastered Martin Scorsese documentary of the era, No Direction Home.

"There was never a riotous reaction to Bob's performances, as has sometimes been described," Alderson says. "The enthusiasts didn't seem to be troubled by him going electric. The people that were excited about Bob didn't care. It was more the people who didn't know Bob, or who were deeply invested in the folk music image—in the Woody Guthrie tradition that supposedly Bob was carrying on."

There's a lot of repetition over the course of the 36 discs covering the 1966 tour, as the setlist Dylan and the Hawks played rarely varied. But you can also hear the songs develop—and Dylan's approach as a singer and performer along with them. One night Dylan would crack jokes, another he'd barely talk to the audience. The word-heavy "Visions of Johanna" morphed over the course of the tour, as Dylan tinkers with the emphasis and phrasing, and by the end of the tour "Desolation Row" went from a relatively new song, barely a year old, to a tour de force that formed the backbone of his acoustic set, and one that Dylan fully inhabited.

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"There were some nights when the acoustic set was intense and beautiful, and some nights when it sounded like he was phoning it in, like he just wanted to get to the second half," says Alderson. "But those electric sets were uniformly great. He was delivering honest music, even if the audiences very often didn't accept the rock and roll half, for whatever reason, but probably because they were primed to think otherwise."

"We had our backs against the wall and were just seeing what would stick, because there was nobody to ask, 'How are we doing?'" says Robertson. "There was a purity and simplicity to the lot of traditional folk music, but he was taking things to another place, and it wasn't with that simplicity. It was more complex than that. There was no formula, so we just went for it."

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Still, Robbie Robertson says it didn't feel like history in the making. "We had no idea where any of this was going, what it meant, it just felt like a good idea at the time," he says. "You don't know what's historic and what's going to live on, you're just trying to do the best of what you've got in the moment."

Beyond the raucous crowds, the wildly different conditions from town to town in those early days of rock and roll touring were the biggest challenge, says Alderson, which is evident in the recordings.

"It was louder than what most people were used to hearing, but it was never loud enough, really," he recalls. "Sometimes it was adequate, or better than adequate, in terms of volume in the hall, but most of the places we played sounded terrible acoustically, anyway. Most of them weren't designed for music and they definitely weren't designed for loud rock and roll."

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Things come to a head in Paris. Alderson remembers vividly that it seemed the audience came itching for a fight that night, and it didn't help that they clearly had trouble understanding Dylan's lyrics and grew impatient as he took time to tune his guitar—one that had been damaged during the course of the tour—between songs. When he came out for the electric set in front of the "biggest American flag we could find" as a backdrop, Alderson says, things really got out of control.

"There's a lot of trouble translating Dylan's lyrics into French, or into any other foreign language, because they're uniquely American," says Alderson of the night. "The French were genuinely mystified. They knew he was a phenomenon, they knew that they wanted to be in the theater, but they were frustrated when they got there and they didn't really get what was going on. And the American flag was a provocation. The audience in Paris didn't understand Bob, and they certainly didn't get the fact that he hung the American flag up to be ironic, rather than to be patriotic. Plus, Bob was exhausted. And he had a broken guitar that he couldn't tune, and was trying to tune it for a long period of time in front of the audience, and they assumed that he was being rude. All that happened in Paris. It was a storm of events that made it all go wrong."

The first night at London's Royal Albert Hall, on the other hand, was transcendent. The tour was nearing an end, and with The Beatles and the rest of London's swinging set in the audience, Dylan and company were on fire throughout. While Dylan's earlier concert at Manchester's Free Trade Hall—including the infamous moment when an audience member called him Judas—was long traded amongst collectors as being the Royal Albert Hall show until it was released officially a decade ago, the "real" Albert Hall show is such a highlight of the box set that it's being released on its own next month.

With so much to dig into in The 1966 Live Recordings, where does Alderson recommend Dylan fans should start?

"I always loved Liverpool, and I always loved Belfast and Dublin, too," Alderson says. "Somebody told me recently that they liked the Sheffield recording, and I listened to it and it sounded very clear, but it was also very flat to me. You know, not very exciting. But like I said, even on Bob's worst night on that tour, it was probably some of the greatest rock and roll ever performed. I'm glad it's getting its due."

Jeff Slate Jeff Slate is a New York City-based songwriter and journalist who has contributed music and culture articles to Esquire since 2013.

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