| 1. | When I Paint My Masterpiece (0:00/4:31/0:03) (incomplete recording) | 751031 Plymouth, Massachusetts |
| 2. | Isis (0:00/3:56/0:11) (incomplete recording) | 751204 Montreal, Quebec |
| 3. | Ballad in Plain D (1:38) (incomplete recording) | 7511 |
| 4. | A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall (4:50) (incomplete recording) | 751204 Montreal, Quebec |
| 5. | People Get Ready (2:22) (incomplete recording) | 7511 |
| 6. | It Ain't Me Babe (0:00/4:50/0:07) (incomplete recording) | 751120 Cambridge, Massachusetts |
| 7. | She Belongs To Me (3:30) (incomplete recording) | 7511 |
| 8. | It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry (2:48) (incomplete recording) | 751121 Boston, Massachusetts (evening) |
| 9. | If You See Her, Say Hello (2:43) (incomplete recording) | 7511 |
| 10. | Romance In Durango (4:23) (incomplete recording) | 751204 Montreal, Quebec |
| 11. | One Too Many Mornings (5:18) (incomplete recording serving as background music to film dialogue) | 7511 |
| 12. | House Of The Rising Sun (0:40) (incomplete recording) | 7511 |
| 13. | One More Cup Of Coffee (3:54) | 751204 Montreal, Quebec |
| 14. | Sara (0:00/3:09/0:26) (incomplete recording) | 751204 Montreal, Quebec |
| 15. | The Water Is Wide (4:28) (incomplete recording with film talk) | 751111 Waterbury, Connecticut |
| Patty's Gone To Laredo (3:13) (incomplete recording serving as background music to film talk) | 7511 | |
| 16. | Never Let Me Go (0:00/1:47/0:03) (incomplete recording) | 751204 Montreal, Quebec |
| 17. | Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands (2:21) (incomplete recording interspersed with film talk) | 7511 |
| 18. | Tangled Up In Blue (4:17) (incomplete recording) | 751121 Boston, Massachusetts (evening) |
| 19. | Just Like A Woman (2:44) (incomplete recording) | 751104 Providence, Rhode Island (evening) |
| 20. | Knockin' On Heaven's Door (0:03/3:59/0:00) (incomplete recording, but very, very near to being complete) | 751104 Providence, Rhode Island (evening) |
Something like (a:aa/b:bb/c:cc) in the track list means that b:bb is the duration of the actual song. a:aa and c:cc indicate how much time of the track is due to introductions, tunings etc.
Review by Lonesome Sparrow
I have never seen the film "Renaldo & Clara", but apparently it contains some live footage from the Rolling Thunder Revue tour of 1975 and a bunch of non-concert performances. It has long been presumed that the non-concert performances came from rehearsals held in October 1975 at Studio Instrumental Rentals in New York, but now it seems that they come from jam sessions held in November 1975 at various places. In the film most of the non-concert performances serve as background music, while most of the concert performances are on-screen if that's the right way to say this, otherwise you should know what I mean.
This CD is a would-be soundtrack album of this film. Would-be, for for a real soundtrack album the source is not the film, but pure recordings. Listening to this CD, it is clear that the makers have copied the tracks from the film, for some of the tracks have talk and other noise from the film through them and only one of the performances appears completely on the CD. The makers could have made it more like a real soundtrack album by using other sources. Two of the performances, "Isis" and "Romance In Durango", can be found completely on the official album "Biograph". "Isis" is also, together with 3 more performances that are used in the film, on the promotional disc "4 Songs From Renaldo And Clara", released in 1978. Soundboard recordings of some of the live footage used in the film are circulating. So the makers could have used these sources to replace some of the incomplete recordings from the film by complete performances in better sound quality.
The CD is in stereo, which is strange according to the following quote from a Usenet message:
>From: alan.fraser@mcmail.com (Alan Fraser) >Newsgroups: rec.music.dylan >Subject: Re: Renaldo and Clara CD >Date: Fri, 13 Feb 1998 11:18:41 GMT >Message-ID: <34e52b4d.1510547@news.is.chbs> >AFAIK >all circulating video copies of the film come from the UK Channel 4 >mid-80s screening, which was in mono. This leads one to wonder how the >Japanese CD makers got hold of a good stereo copy of R&C, of course.
Some people have said that the sound quality of this CD is excellent, but I think that is an exaggeration. If you compare for instance the sound quality of "Isis" on this CD with the one on "Biograph", the difference is enormous. The overall quality is reasonable. It's not the same on all tracks.
On the back cover of the CD is a track list, which just gives the titles of the song, without any mention of dates and venues. One performance is missing in this list.
Here follow some details of each performance on this CD.
"When I Paint My Masterpiece" fades in in the middle of the intro.
"Isis" starts in the middle of the intro. This is the same performance that's on "Biograph".
"Ballad In Plain D" starts with the line "Of the two sisters, I loved the young" and ends after the line "will be fully aware of how precious she is", at which point the performance seems to end too.
"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" starts in the middle of the intro.
Beginning and end of "People Get Ready" are missing. This performance is on the promotional disc "4 Songs From Renaldo And Clara". Except for the first 15 seconds, the sound quality of this track is considerably better than the overall sound quality of the CD.
The intro of "It Ain't Me Babe" is missing, it starts at the beginning of the first verse. This performance is on the promotional disc "4 Songs From Renaldo And Clara".
"She Belongs To Me" starts at the beginning, but not very neatly. It fades out not long, I suspect, before the end of the performance.
"It Takes A Lot To Laugh" fades in with the intro and breaks off just when the band gives the final beat.
"If You See Her, Say Hello" starts in the middle of a verse. After this verse follow two more verses and the end of the performance.
"Romance In Durango" starts in the middle of the intro. This is the same performance that's on "Biograph".
Track 12 is a film dialogue with "One Too Many Mornings" playing in the background. The dialogue ends during the last verse and then the volume level of the music is turned up. Presumably short before the end of the performance the recording breaks off.
"House Of The Rising Sun" starts at the beginning of the last verse.
"One More Cup Of Coffee" seems to start at the beginning, where it briefly has some sound from the film not belonging to the performance.
"Sara" starts in the middle of one of the refrains, I guess the second one. This track is not listed in the CD's track list. On this track I hear a light buzz.
"The Water Is Wide" starts with the second line of the first verse. This track has talk and other film sounds that don't belong to the performance. The index mark for this track comes 4 seconds too early. A soundboard recording of this performance circulates.
"The Water Is Wide" is followed, without a track division, by talk from the film with "Patty's Gone To Laredo" playing through it.
"Never Let Me Go" starts at the beginning of the second verse. This performance is on the promotional disc "4 Songs From Renaldo And Clara".
"Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands" is just a fragment, beginning and ending in the middle, and it's interspersed with film talk, at which moments it becomes background music.
"Tangled Up In Blue" starts in the middle of the intro. It breaks off near the end of the second verse. The track picks it up in between the second and third verse.
"Just Like A Woman" starts just after the beginning of the second verse.
"Knockin' On Heaven's Door" is from the same concert as "Just Like A Woman" and in that concert it was played immediately after "Just Like A Woman". Track 20 starts a fraction before the point at which track 19 ends, instead of that both songs appear as one continuous recording. Track 20 contains the last bit of violin from "Just Like A Woman". "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" breaks off just as the band is finishing it.
Some people think this is an excellent CD. I'm not one of them. After buying it you might find you disagree with me, but then again, you might not. So my advice is to listen before buying.