Nick Cave's Favorite Bob Dylan Show

1991-08-21, Imperator, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Flagging Down the Double E’s is an email newsletter exploring Bob Dylan concerts throughout history. Some installments are free, some are for paid subscribers only. Sign up here:

Backstage at Glastonbury, 1998, via The Red Hand Files

Earlier this year I was reading Nick Cave’s book Faith, Hope, and Carnage, which is a series of conversations with Irish journalist Sean O’Hagan. At one point, he talks about the best concerts he’s ever seen. Well, because he’s Nick Cave he expresses it more artistically, talking about the musician and audience “experienc[ing] a communal sense of awe,” but that’s the idea: Best concerts he’s seen. He says this:

Maybe you could tell me about some of the times you’ve experienced that yourself – as an audience member rather than a performer.

With Nina Simone, of course, and The Saints, many times. Neubauten in their prime. The Dirty Three. I experienced it the first time I saw Crime and the City Solution in some shithole in Sydney in the late seventies – a kind of crucial beauty. Swans. The Cramps. Johnny Cash. Emmylou Harris singing at a Hal Willner event, Led Zeppelin in Kooyong Park in Melbourne back in the mid-seventies, Bryan Ferry singing ‘The Butcher Boy’ alone at the piano, Bob Dylan in a tiny club in Rio.

Bob Dylan in a tiny club in Rio? You know I had to figure out what show that was! Luckily Dylan hasn’t played Rio de Janeiro much, so it was pretty easy. We can eliminate the time he opened for the Rolling Stones in 1998; I wrote about that tour and know it certainly wasn’t in tiny clubs. Ditto the two subsequent performances, in 2008 at Rio Arena or 2012 at Citibank Hall. Clearly not “tiny clubs.”

That leaves two Rio shows, in 1990 and 1991. Nick Cave lived in São Paulo for a few years in the early '90s, so the timing fits. Here’s the program for the 1990 one:

No, a bill with Dylan, Bon Jovi, Tears for Fears, and a bunch more acts is clearly not in a tiny club (it was in fact at the same stadium he played with the Stones in 1998). Which leaves us with August 21, 1991, 34 years ago today, at a venue called the Imperator—with, apparently, a fairly young Nick Cave in the audience.

When the Imperator opened in 1954, it was the largest movie theater in Latin America. In the 1990s it was converted to hosting concerts, much as many of the old “movie palaces” Dylan plays here in the States have been, though it closed in 1996 (it’s since been reopened again). It’s not quite as tiny as Cave makes it out—according to a newspaper review, it held about two thousand people—but, in a standing-room-only situation, that no doubt felt pretty intimate. Here’s what it looked like a few years before Dylan arrived, in its last days as a movie theater.

Photo via Rio Memorias

What made this show so magical, something where the artist and audience experienced that “communal sense of awe”? I turned to the tape, wanting to hear what Nick Cave heard. Alas, the recording quality is pretty near unlistenable—and I have a high tolerance for these things. It’s downloadable below for any true completists (or masochists), but I can’t recommend it. It’s more like a communal sense of ow.

Too bad, as this show featured the final-ever performance of the Down in the Groove cover “When Did You Leave Heaven?” plus a wild three pack of “Shelter From the Storm” -> “Gotta Serve Somebody” -> “Wiggle Wiggle.” When Nick Cave talked about experiencing that communal sense of awe, I’m going to assume he meant “Wiggle Wiggle.”

I did, however, find a local newspaper review in Jornal do Brasil. I do not, sadly, speak Brazilian Portuguese, but here is the rough Google Translate attempt at part of it:

Not even Johnny Rotten…would spit on his own repertoire in such a punk way. Between grimaces, grimaces and mannerisms in series (he tames the rebellious curls of his hair; he adjusts the metal platform of his crotch around his neck), Dylan autopsies old hits and recent recordings. He acts as if he wanted to rescue them from the clutches of the inevitable public domain. With the exception of the audience's front line (Seven days please, begged the poster improvised by a spectator on a sheet of paper) it is unlikely that the audience that filled the Imperator (musicians: Evandro Mesquita, Pericles Cavalcanti, Tony Bellotto, Frejat, Dadi, Guto Goffi and De, among others) understood anything.

I guess the reviewer was not as enraptured as Nick Cave was, though I do like the extremely mistranslated phrase “the metal platform of his crotch around his neck.” I assume that’s the harmonica rack. Does Portuguese use the same word for “harmonica” and “crotch”?

Also I think the writer missed a key name in that list of musician attendees! If anyone out there does speak Portuguese, here’s the full thing, let us know if there’s anything else interesting:

Another newspaper though, Globo, reacted more positively. Again, this is the Google Translate version, and of a later article recapping their original review:

The musician transformed the Imperator, in Méier, in the North Zone of Rio, into “a smoky Chicago bar, a Nashville saloon, a New York Village club”, according to a report in the newspaper. Not without setbacks. The sound system and guitar amplifiers broke down during the first song, “New Morning”, but Bob Dylan, who seemed indifferent, warmed up the Imperator throughout the show. Long guitar solos by John Jackson drew applause from the audience, while drummer Ian [Wallace] “swept” the drums and Tony Garnier took over on bass, according to a review by Luiz Henrique Romanholli.

Thirty-plus years later, Bob Dylan returned the favor and attended a Nick Cave show. Here’s his Twitter report:

Come to think of it, “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy” might be exactly why Bob wrote “Wiggle Wiggle.”

1991-08-21, Imperator, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil