Bob dylan biography concert toronto
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List of Bobber Dylan distract tours
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Flagging Down the Double E's
Our (very) occasional series Venue Spotlight returns today for its third installment! After entries on Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, St. Louis’s Fabulous Fox, and then a year-plus break, today we tackle another historic room Dylan has played a number of times: Toronto’s Massey Hall.
As of at least (when Brady Leyser published Bob Dylan Live in Canada: A Concert History, which I’ve used a lot for research for this), Dylan had played Massey Hall more times than anywhere else in Canada. That may or may not still be true, but I’d wager the following definitely is: He’s played the venue over a wider time span than anywhere else in Canada. His first show there was His most recent was That’s almost sixty years of Massey Hall shows. I doubt many other rooms could compete with that (the Royal Albert Hall will also reach 59 years of Bob shows this fall).
I’ve never been to Massey Hall myself, so, to explain what seeing a show there is like, let me quote from Rob Bowman’s forward to the book That Night at Massey Hall:
The theatre is actually pretty plain when compared to the rococo and art deco palaces that are the pride of many American cities. The Beacon in New York City, the Fox in St. Louis, the Orpheum in Memphis, the Saenger in New Orleans or
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The first Bob Dylan concert that I ever attended took place on June 11, at Copps Coliseum in Hamilton (a large hockey arena built by the city to attract an NHL hockey team that the Toronto Maple Leafs made certain would never be placed there; its now known as the FirstOntario Centre). Copps was a fairly new building at the time (opened in ), and I recall that its acoustics were superior to those of Maple Leaf Gardens, the venue that Dylan had been regularly playing in Toronto in the s.
I remember that I went with five friends from high school, which had just ended for me a few weeks before. One of those five was the girlfriend who had broken up with me on my eighteenth birthday three weeks earlier, so that was fun. I guess that’s the problem with buying tickets in advance. I know that one of the others was my friend Marc, who was very interested and knowledgeable about music, but not at all a Dylan fan. For some reason I can’t actively remember who the other people there were. Probably friends of the ex-girlfriend. I know that none of them were particularly Dylan fans. I kind of remember that they all thought the show was lousy, but they were happy to see The Jam, who opened the show.
This was a relatively early show on what is now known as the Never-Ending Tour, which