Dec. 26, 1996

Bob Dylan and the Hawks
"Guitars Kissing & the Contemporary Fix" (various bootleg labels)

By MARK BROWN
The Orange County Register

RATING: 5 CHECKS

It's a concept that should work a lot more often than it does: a live album recorded when an artist is at the peak of his creative abilities.

Sometimes it comes together. "Live At Leeds" captured The Who's live feel, as did the Talking Heads' "Stop Making Sense."

But too often live albums fall short, as illustrated by the Rolling Stones' "Get Yer Ya Yas Out," Bruce Springsteen's "Live 1975-85" and Nirvana's "Unplugged in New York City" -- good-enough albums, but ones that miss the mark.

No misses here. "Guitars Kissing & the Contemporary Fix" finds a young Bob Dylan blowing through an epic two-hour set in May 1966, half acoustic, half with the Hawks -- later renamed The Band. It's perhaps the best two hours of his career, distilling everything tender, raging, touching and rocking in his work into one potent show.

Reviews of this performance appeared as early as 1971 in Rolling Stone, when the music was 5 years old and popping up on vinyl bootlegs in L.A. record shops. Now more than 30 years have passed, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a more real, vital performance.

Dylan's people know it; the version of "Visions of Johanna" from this disc is on Dylan's "Biograph" box set, as is "I Don't Believe You" from the same tour. "Guitars Kissing," in fact, is reportedly taken from Columbia's digital-audiotape mix of the show planned for a future box set.

The sound makes you believe. The performance has been available for years in collectors' circles in muddy mono. But this two-CD set is in glorious stereo, clean enough to sound great yet low-tech enough to sound authentic.

Dylan has long felt that studio versions were just a snapshot of a song at a particular moment; they always change and evolve. Here, "Desolation Row" and a sublime "Just Like a Woman" are completely transformed in their acoustic incarnations, and "Visions of Johanna" is the definitive plaintive version. He's far inside every word, every moment; the acoustic disc is mesmerizing as Dylan pulls the audience deeper in with each song, ending with "Mr. Tambourine Man" -- a song you'd think you'd never want to hear again till you hear this version.

The electric set is just as revealing, with Robbie Robertson's sharp guitar punctuating Dylan's words. It ends with one of rock music's great moments, where an audience member yells "Judas!" at Dylan for going electric, and Dylan replies with a screaming, angry "Like a Rolling Stone."

Impeccable. Perhaps the perfect concert performance.

"Guitars Kissing" is technically a bootleg, legal in some countries overseas, but a copyright violation in the United States. It's hard to track down but worth the search; it's been re-pressed by six labels overseas, and copies are popping up all over. A good place to start your search is on the Internet -- fans of the disc have started their own Web site tribute to it at http://www.win.net/~flintcreek/kissfix.htm. For the computer-impaired, check out the ads in record-collecting magazines such as Goldmine, ICE or Discoveries.

But it's one of those discs where the rights and wrongs of copyright law become obscured by the purity, importance and force of the performance. This is an indispensable performance -- one of the few truly great lost albums of rock 'n' roll and easily one of Dylan's best.

You might enjoy if you like: "Blonde on Blonde," "Highway 61 Revisited."