From February 20 to March 4, 1978, with a three-night stand in Osaka in the middle, Bob Dylan and his band played eight performances at the Nippon Budokan Hall in Tokyo, at the beginning of a world tour that spanned over a hundred nights.

As Edna Gundersen puts it in her elegant liner essay for The Complete Budokan 1978, “[t]he 1978 tour, a blockbuster that drew 2 million fans to 114 shows, was a crucial turning point. It not only enhanced Dylan’s commercial standing, but it cemented his status as a leading figure in rock music and youth culture, impervious to shifting trends.”

Gundersen has long been a favourite music critic, her writing a thoughtful, thought-provoking pleasure to read. Her 1995 interview with Dylan for Unplugged (which concludes with Dylan’s advice for programming one’s brain “not to think too much”: “Go out with the bird dogs”) and their 1997 interview in Santa Monica, in which she nailed his person, personality and Time Out of Mind, are two of the best conversations ever had in person with a celebratedly resistant interviewee. What a fine thing that Gundersen, a woman who has been talking to and writing about Dylan for many decades, was asked to do the liner essay for Budokan.

Gundersen doesn’t have so much as a touch of the self-referential “what Dylan means to me” that too many writers, and I include myself here, often have in writing about the man and his music (that school of criticism should be called “I me mine,” and we all ought to avoid it). From her wry first line, “Bob Dylan at Budokan could be considered a late bloomer,” Gundersen packs all she needs into economical, skilfully turned phrases.

Here, she encompasses not just fans’ initial reaction to the album, which was mixed and then grew more and more rapturous, but the new cover portrait of Bob and his guitar looking like a Caravaggio boy with a lute, backed by lush branches of cherry blossom in full bloom. She’s a whiz with alliterations and artistic turns, noting Budokan’s “adventurous arrangements,” “provocative performances,” and “restless reinvention.”

As I read her concise, clear notes to this new box set, I kept thinking of Dylan in concert today, and his new arrangements of songs themselves still new. That restless reinvention continues unabated; Gundersen has given the perfect phrase not just to the Budokan concerts, but to Dylan’s stage performances up to the present day. She knows essential things about his musicianship and “nomadic creative process,” and illuminates them elegantly and in appropriately few words: “And his brazen overhauls of familiar tunes? Just an early indication of Dylan’s tendency to confound expectations and deconstruct his myth. Don’t look back remained a guiding principle as he forged new paths motivated solely by an impetuous muse.”

The double album Bob Dylan At Budokan, which featured performances from the nights of February 28 and March 1, was released in 1978 in Japan, and worldwide in 1979. For the purpose of this review, I’ll refer to the 28th as the first night, and the 1st as the second. The Complete Budokan draws from only those two shows, every track meticulously re-mastered and cleaned up by Akihito Yoshikawa, Yuta Yoneyama, and Tom Suzuki. That this album was created from analog tapes stored and forgotten until 2007, and “sticky with moisture,” in Gundersen’s words, is almost miraculous.

1977 had not been a kind year to Dylan. He and his wife Sara were divorcing, and Dylan had spent much of the year locked down, working on Renaldo & Clara and writing the songs for Street-Legal (1978).

Back on the road for the first time since the Rolling Thunder Revue dropped its curtain for the final time, on Complete Budokan, Dylan himself is bright and downright cheerful, revelling in playing a long list of his greatest hits that spanned, at that point, just a sixteen-year recording career. He and the band perform songs from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) up to the soon-to-be-released Street-Legal, most of them among his best-known.

Each night, he adds a cover. The first night, it’s ‘Reposession Blues’, by Memphis legend Roland Janes, which Dylan and the band had used to loosen up during rehearsals at Rundown Studios in Santa Monica the year before. The second, it’s ‘Love Her With A Feeling’, by the great Chicago bluesman Tampa Red, whose ‘She’s Love Crazy’ Dylan would do regularly on the road in 1978.

Dylan’s band introductions are genial and humorous, just as they are today – after some years of taciturnity – on his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour. It’s not a band; he rightly calls the assembled musicians bearing violins, dobro, mandolin, saxophone, flute and various guitars “the orchestra.” As to the backup singers, he cracks first that he met them “at a disc jockey convention,” and introduces them as “my fiancée, Helena Springs. On the right that’s my ex-wife Debi Dye, and in the middle is a young woman who’s going to go very far in this business, Joann Harris.” The next night he introduces them as “three young beautiful ladies…I first heard…singing in a department store.”

It is an orchestra, you swiftly realise, and the orchestrations are what Dylan wants to emphasise in these songs: not him and his voice and one instrument, but the rich, deep, and varied instrumentals available on stage. He removes whole verses, his verses, and lets the instrumentals carry the day. That’s a beautifully generous thing about Complete Budokan that you only realise as the album spins along; the musicians, every one of them, are top-flight and Dylan lets that shine.

David Mansfield, who had just turned 19 when Dylan invited him to join the Rolling Thunder Revue in autumn 1975, is the wonder of this album. Now 22, Mansfield had been working hard since the Revue closed, chiefly in The Alpha Band with Burnett and Steven Soles, whose acoustic guitar graces many tracks on Complete Budokan. (He continues to work hard, both performing and producing; you may recently have heard him on tour here with Ireland Professor of Poetry Paul Muldoon).

The kid who was dubbed “The Innocent” in Martin Scorsese’s 2019 The Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story was all grown up, and proficient on anything with strings. He shines on the instrumental opening for both nights: ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’. It’s a skiffly, skippy instrumental with a yowling saxophone and boogie-woogie keyboards, a snarly electric guitar, and then Mansfield’s singing, swinging fiddle-thread, trading places where Dylan’s vocals once were. The song turns into a hoedown by the end, bizarrely jolly for ‘Hard Rain’. And the audience cheers.

Hold onto your hats, the opening number says. You thought you knew Dylan’s greatest hits by heart? Think again. From the first song to the last, he’s rearranged everything you once held dear, and asks you to roll with him, accepting the changed tunes and even new words just as you’ve cherished the originals. What’s original, Dylan seems to be asking, in a Modernist provocation? It’s his, and now he is making it new, just for you.

‘All I Really Wanna Do’ now has a clap-stomp beginning—“Now, don’t get too wild” Dylan cautions the crowd on the first night. This version of the song is no folk-whine carpe diem insisting on just wanting to “baby, be friends with you.” It bounces and hops and sounds for all the world like the H.R. Pufnstuf theme, and then miraculously morphs back into some semblance of itself, with a hard four-beat arrangement straight out of the heart of 1960s rock and roll. Dylan’s voice is a little tentative, as if unsure that all this new is going to fly. He knows it will by the second night; his vocal is harsher and louder and better.

“I ain’t lookin’ to make ya cry
See you fly
Or watch you die….”

“Hey, what’s the name of this?” Dylan calls out at the beginning of ‘All Along the Watchtower’ on the first night. It’s a joke and it isn’t; some of the new arrangements render the beginnings of a song almost unrecognisable, until you carry along into the lyrics. The next night, he identifies the song as coming “from the Mojave Desert.” The voices are lighter, and Dylan’s lead line separates more strongly from the backup singers’ voices. Steve Douglas’s swirly flute soars in the instrumental, as does Mansfield’s fiddle.

I don’t think I’ve heard better vocals on ‘Ballad of A Thin Man’, even though, alas, the verses featuring F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books and “give me some milk or else go home” have been replaced by instrumentals. The saxophone is grand, but I do feel the loss of the words. ‘Blowin In the Wind’ is impossibly slow, steady, rocking like a gentle boat coming home. A wild-ass ‘Don’t Think Twice' has become a reggae bop. Of all the things to reggae-fy, but you know, it works.

Who doesn’t love the Wailers? Bob certainly does. It was only performed on the first night, and I’m grateful we have it. The flute absolutely makes the sound of this song. Dylan’s voice is downright delighted. That “babe” is almost incongruously punched out. And the “issawright” repetitions at the end please the crowd to no end. “Thank you,” says Bob solemnly when the song’s over.

‘Forever Young’ is just lovely, both nights. The horn literally jazzes it up, with the backup singers carrying the repeated refrain into the stratosphere. ‘Girl From the North Country’ bobs and weaves, gently spoken more than sung, the keyboards complementing and following Dylan’s voice. It sounds almost like a glockenspiel in accompaniment, the sort of sound that Garth Hudson still specialises in drawing from keyboards of all kinds.

A shifty, bouncy little ‘I Don’t Believe You / She Acts Like We Never Have Met’ is a toe-tapper, with a gentle, light mandolin line from Mansfield. The delicacy and simplicity of the sound jars against the hard words – think of the way the ooo-waa background vocals and upbeat bop instruments make the awfulness of the lyrics of Warren Zevon’s then just-released ‘Excitable Boy’ all the more awful. It’s a similar kind of equation.

Dylan makes the “wet” of “watery and wet” into about five syllables. The mandolin follows Dylan’s voice devotedly, up and down: Mansfield is excellent at this, and has been for years. ‘I Shall Be Released’ has a terribly 70s lounge-y feel to it that disconcerts at first, but hey, it was the seventies. Gone, thank heavens, is that over-washed, wind-filled sound that marks Dylan’s own 1971 release of the song, and that mars so many slow songs of the early 1970s.

On the relatively new ‘Going, Going, Gone’ (1974) Dylan jokes, even after he’s already sung the first line, and then switches up the lyrics right away: “Well I just reached a place…this is one you might know better, hahaha… where the willow don’t break….”

He likes changing towns in his songs – he’s traveled to so many of them, after all. “Now from Memphis to Norfolk/ Is a 36 hour ride/ And I’ve got ta be leavin’ ya, honey / Cause I’m so dissatisfied.” The blast of horns on ‘Gotta Follow Your Heart’ shakes the song out of its marching-step matter-of-fact departure, presaging an intermission, something Dylan no longer has in his shows. “Now I’m leavin here quick/ and I’m tellin you soon/ you can find me baby/ by the light in your moon.” Indeed they are leaving. Dylan still likes a thematic departure; on the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour, a song whose title and refrains begin with the word ‘Goodbye’ conclude the set, before a throwback closing number. “We’ll be back in about ten minutes,” Bob says, over the chorus at the end of the song.

Dylan and the orchestra played a generous 28 songs both nights, so they needed that little break in the middle. He never falters or fails as bandleader, and as to his vocals, they’ve never sounded better. Gundersen puts it perfectly: “He sings with brio and urgency, his voice clear and melodic and his phrasing impeccable as ever.”

At a concert in San Diego in November 1978, Dylan saw a small silver cross thrown onto the front of the stage. He picked it up and put it in his pocket. Members of his touring band as well as his then-girlfriend Mary Alice Artes were members of the charismatic Christian Vineyard Fellowship, as was his good friend T Bone Burnett. The Gospel Tour was brewing. Many of the musicians in the Budokan orchestra would roll along with Dylan when it began, through 1979 and 1980.

The seeds for what was coming can be heard in the full Budokan album. Dylan’s ‘gospel period’ didn’t begin then, though, and nor did it end in the early 80s. From his days of listening, amazed, to Odetta and Mavis Staples, to his friendships in Woodstock in the late 1960s with men like Happy Traum and Levon Helm, who knew every old hymn, to the spirituals he has written himself over the years and still performs in concert today – whether ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ or ‘Mother of Muses’ – Dylan remains in his gospel time.

Whenever I went to Helm’s Midnight Rambles in his Woodstock home, it was like being in church. On stage at Budokan, Dylan had an ecumenical but sometimes evangelical, sometimes benedictory, manner and mode. He’s talking to you, singing for you, wanting more than he ever had to date, to connect with an audience and bring them into what he was feeling and trying to share in his performances. That’s what I felt and didn’t know, or have the words for, when I played the original Budokan record to tatters as a kid.

Feel it now, on every song, both nights, and never complain that Dylan only made up his mind to give himself to you in 2020. He’s been doing it since those chilly evenings in Japan forty-five years ago.

February 28

1. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
2. Repossession Blues (Roland Janes)
3. Mr. Tambourine Man
4. I Threw It All Away
5. Shelter From The Storm
6. Love Minus Zero/No Limit
7. Girl From The North Country
8. Ballad Of A Thin Man
9. Maggie's Farm
10. To Ramona
11. Like A Rolling Stone
12. I Shall Be Released
13. Is Your Love In Vain?
14. Going, Going, Gone

15. One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later)
16. Blowin’ In The Wind
17. Just Like A Woman
18. Oh, Sister (Bob Dylan–Jacques Levy/Bob Dylan)
19. Simple Twist Of Fate
20. You’re A Big Girl Now
21. All Along The Watchtower
22. I Want You
23. All I Really Want To Do
24. Tomorrow Is A Long Time
25. Don't Think Twice, It's All Right
26. It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
27. Forever Young
28. The Times They Are A-Changin’

March 1

1. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
2. Love Her With A Feeling (Tampa Red)
3. Mr. Tambourine Man
4. I Threw It All Away
5. Love Minus Zero/No Limit
6. Shelter From The Storm
7. Girl From The North Country
8. Ballad Of A Thin Man
9. Maggie’s Farm
10. One More Cup Of Coffee (Valley Below)
11. Like A Rolling Stone
12. I Shall Be Released
13. Is Your Love In Vain?
14. Going, Going, Gone
15. One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later)
16. Blowin’ In The Wind
17. Just Like A Woman
18. Oh, Sister (Bob Dylan–Jacques Levy/Bob Dylan)
19. I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
20. You’re A Big Girl Now
21. All Along The Watchtower
22. I Want You
23. All I Really Want To Do
24. Knockin’ On Heaven's Door
25. The Man In Me
26. It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)
27. Forever Young
28. The Times They Are A-Changin’