I apologise for the lack of new posts lately; I fell seriously ill in January and have only recently left hospital.
It's nice to see that in my absence there has been quite a lot of activity on the His-Bobness front. Not content with preparing to release a new album, Bob has kicked off a new tour by including that rarity nowadays, a live debut of an old song... And what a left-field choice it is too -- Billy, from the 1973 soundtrack to Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (to be precise, Billy 4).
Unlike a lot of Bob's one-off (and who's to say this is a one-off?) choices, which often amount to no more than gestures, Bob really puts some effort into this. When I heard that he'd performed the song, I thought we'd just get a couple of desultory verses with a few half-remembered lines, but no! We get the whole damn song, every single verse, quite engagingly performed, and with a bit of harp too!
Typical of the old man with a new album in the can -- to treat us instead to a blast from the past! If past form is anything to go by, we will have to wait until the next tour to here live performances from the new album.
Here's the mp3, kindly uploaded to The Watchtower by the user named appleberry. I've taken the liberty of re-uploading it to sendspace, which I think is easily the best of these public upload sites.
Billy 4 -- Stockholm, Sweden 22nd March, 2009
If you download, I would appreciate it if you would take a second or two to click on one of the Google ads -- thanks.
2 comments:
ragged, great to see you posting again and I think I can say without your taking offense that I will pray for your health. Thanks for the link. I get the shivers imagining what it must have been like to hear this in person.
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