Bob Dylan
6 August 1986 Mid-State Fairground,
Paso Robles, California - soundcheck

18. Brownsville Girl (instrumental)
19. Brownsville Girl
20. I Want You (instrumental)/Maggie's Farm
21. Shake (instrumental)
22. Shake (instrumental)
23. unidentified blues instrumental

Bob Dylan (vocal & guitar), Tom Petty (guitar), Mike Campbell (guitar), Benmont Tench (keyboards), Howie Epstein (bass), Stan Lynch (drums), Carolyn Dennis, Queen Esther Marrow, Madelyn Quebec, Louise Bethune (backing vocals).

Complete circulating soundcheck. Track numbering preserved from the original fileset, which included other material, just in case anybody's ready to join in seeding. The track IDs have been improved from the originals (I hope), but the flacs are unchanged.

This might be the best-sounding soundcheck in my ongoing series of Dylan arcana, nearly as good as quite a few of the 1986 audience concert tapes, and is one of the most interesting (even though "Brownsville Girl" never delivers the goods, or much audible Dylan). No, there may not be much in terms of lead Dylan vocals, but the material is interesting and the performances solid. "Brownsville Girl" is pretty much the same arrangement (repeated chorus only!) used for the song's one-and-only live "performance," at this show. "Maggie's Farm," which Dylan launches into after the band riffs on "I Want You," never turned up in any of the 1986 Dylan/Petty concerts, but it turns up, remarkably enough, as the opening song in their next appearance together, in September 1987 in Tel Aviv. "Shake", like "Maggie's Farm" part of the Dylan/Petty 1985 Farm Aid set, is a little known set of Dylan lyrics that never reached a final form, set to a tune very much like Roy Head's "Treat Her Right"; it had disappeared from the Dylan/Petty playlist after a few airings in Australia earlier in the year. These two songs offer an unexpected preview of the 1987 "Temple In Flames" concerts, looser than most of the "True Confessions" tour and probably more fun as well. If you remember the Rolling Stone article about the early 1986 Dylan/Petty rehearsals and studio sessions that held out so much promise that was never delivered -- this is a little window into what probably was going on then, that we've never had a chance to hear. Nothing revelatory, but Dylan relaxing and just making music is usually more interesting than Dylan forcing himself to deliver. If, as he said in an interview (or was it Chronicles), he'd lost the ability to perform naturally onstage by the mid-1980s, he could still do it when the audience wasn't there.