Bob Dylan at Massey Hall, 1964-2023

"Tell 'em all they can meet me over at Massey Hall"

Photo via @mkyeg

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 2005 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 1964. His most recent was 2023. 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 the Warfield in San Francisco are all much more impressive. 

There were a lot of things about Massey Hall that one could find fault with. The seats were never very comfortable, its lobby was way too shallow to comfortably socialize in, its washrooms were inconveniently located in the basement and, to make matters worse, they were way too small for the 2700-plus concert goers that routinely filled the hall. Yet, I have a love affair with Massey Hall that surpasses any other concert venue, and I have been fortunate enough to spend time in a significant number of the world’s greatest concert halls. 

So, I come back again to: what makes this hall so damn special? Perhaps front and centre is the inarguable fact that Massey Hall has wonderful acoustics, much better than many modern purpose-built music theatres. There is also a certain charm to its Moorish arches, vaulted ceiling, wood paneling and spartan Mormon decor. The three red doors at the front of the building, the iconic lit sign that hangs above those doors and even the font of the letters spelling Massey Hall embedded in the front of the building above those doors, all convey for me a sense of specialness, an aura of promise and a history that has a depth that is truly hard to fathom. 

A who’s-who of stars have performed there since it was built in 1894. In the past month alone as I write this, Feist, Ron Sexsmith, Mitski, and Jon Batiste have graced its stage. Everyone from Neil Young to Tears for Fears, Herbie Hancock to Rush have recorded live albums at Massey Hall; Japandroids titled theirs with the appropriate enthusiasm Massey Fucking Hall. Gordon Lightfoot beat them all though, singing on the Massey Hall stage a record 171 times.

But we’re not talking about their shows. Here are all the times Bob Dylan has played Massey Hall.

1964

Photo by Kate O’Hara

In 1964, Dylan made his Toronto debut—twice. His first appearance, in February, wasn’t a concert. It was a taping of the CBC TV show Quest. Which maybe I’ll write about at some point, but it wasn’t taped at Massey Hall, so we move ahead to Dylan’s proper Toronto concert debut: November 13, 1964.

Bad news first: There are no recordings from this show, or the next year’s either. So we have to piece together what we can from written reports. 

First up, these songs were on the setlist. This is likely not all of them, or the right order, but it’s what folks have pieced together from news reports. The closest full setlist we have from around the time is the famous Halloween show two weeks prior, and that was 19 songs, so I’d imagine he played a handful more songs than these ten.

• The Times, They Are A-Changin'

• The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll

• Talking World War III Blues

• It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

• With God On Our Side

• Gates Of Eden

• Don't Think Twice, It's All Right

• If You Gotta Go, Go Now

• To Ramona

• All I Really Want To Do

(Canadian singer-songwriter Murray McLauchlan recalls him playing “Mr. Tambourine Man” too, introducing it as something he’d just written. He played it elsewhere on that tour, so I imagine that’s right.)

Leyser’s Bob Dylan Live in Canada book reports that this is the only time he played two particular songs in Toronto: “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” and, more surprisingly, “With God on Our Side.” He hasn’t played either since that book was published, so if it was true then, it’s true now. 

Needless to say, local reviewers were out in force for Dylan’s Massey Hall debut. Antony Ferry at the Toronto Daily Star wrote:

As an audience, they showed Style. They were of a type: the women with Juliette Greco dangling hair and heavily made-up eyes — sporting the kind of female fashion you expect mainly of the girls in Montreal — and young men escorting them who seemed to have even longer hair and who dressed according to fashions that might have been dictated by “The Panic Button.”…

Dylan was not up to the same form as his audience. His harmonica holder broke down and the sound system failed him in the second half of the concert. Technical bugs, both. But he also forgot a few lyrics from songs he had written himself, which is less forgivable. And one of his strongest protest songs, about the murder of Hattie Carroll, was done with so much vocal embroidery that it lost most of its punch. 

And another bit to set the scene, from Brucie Hale at the Toronto Telegram:

A good percentage of Dylan’s audience is 20 or younger, often a good deal younger. Across the border they have been known to react to him the way less innocent innocents respond to the Beatles, but at Massey Hall last night they were quiet as churchmice during every number, thunderous in their approval of each song, quick to quiet when Dylan prepared to deliver another. To depart from the gospel analogy, it was rather like a political convention when the party’s choice is a foregone conclusion and everyone there thinks that’s fine. 

Almost six decades later, attendee Jay Teitel added a bit of color in an essay titled “Saving Robert Zimmerman.” The saving in questions concerns a moment at this show when Bob forgets the words:

Dylan sang the first verse [of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”] and then strummed a bit while everyone waited for the second. But he kept on strumming—longer, I thought, than he should have.

“I don’t know how to tell you this, man,” he said, laughing a little. “But I forget the words.”

And my sister and her friends rose, as one, to tell him what they were…

“That’s right,” Dylan said, sounding surprised and sheepish and genuinely grateful. “Thanks, man.” He resumed singing while the audience applauded and somebody whistled and my sister and her friends sat back down beside me.

One key component of Teitel’s essay has to do with the frailty of memory. He tries to confirm this story with one of his sister’s friends decades later, and she has no idea what he’s talking about. So grain of salt! It sounds plausible to me though. 

Onward to…

1965

Dylan returned to Massey Hall the next year with a very different sound. He’d commandeered the Toronto bar-band Levon and the Hawks to back him. They were, as anyone reading this surely knows, booed pretty much everywhere they went. But, in most places they played, the backing musicians were anonymous strangers. In Toronto, they were hometown heroes! Surely they would get a warmer reception? “Local boys make it big”?

Nope! From reviews, it sounds like a standard-issue Dylan-goes-electric controversy. “Jeers, Cheers for Dylan” one review was headlined, as it could have been on just about any other stop. Another reviewer christened the reaction “Hate Bob Dylan Week” in Toronto. One fan compared him to Elvis. One reviewer said he was now Tin Pan Alley. Both seemed to intend those descriptions as insults.

I did, however, find one person who was stoked to see the Hawks. It’s musician Jim Chapman, who wrote in the coffee table book That Night at Massey Hall that he went to the show explicitly to see the Hawks, who he’d been following since their days backing Ronnie Hawkins. He wrote, “For years Ronnie Hawkins and his band had been our benchmark for hard-driving hillbilly rock and roll. Every guitar player wanted to be Robbie Robertson, every bass player Rick Danko, and so on through the group.” Needless to say, he wasn’t mad at Dylan’s backing band. He also shared an amusing anecdote from the show:

Some of the more outraged attendees took to tossing coins onto the stage to protest against Dylan’s rock and roll sellout. I thought that was downright ignorant, not to mention disrespectful to some of the world’s top performers, but it led to one of the classiest and most appropriately dismissive things I have ever seen. After one noisy outburst of nickel-flipping between songs, Robbie Robertson calmly walked towards the front of the stage and began casually picking up the coins and putting them into his pocket. 

While we don’t have a recording, we do have setlists. They were the same both nights: 

1. She Belongs To Me [acoustic set start]

2. To Ramona

3. Gates Of Eden

4. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

5. Desolation Row

6. Love Minus Zero/No Limit

7. Mr. Tambourine Man

8. Tombstone Blues [electric set start]

9. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down

10. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues

11. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)

12. It Ain't Me, Babe

13. Ballad Of A Thin Man

14. Positively 4th Street

15. Like A Rolling Stone

You’ll notice that looks fairly similar to the more famous 1966 shows, with one key difference: He hasn’t recorded Blonde on Blonde yet. So no “Visions of Johanna,” “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” etc. In its place you get a few more older acoustic songs, and, in the electric set, “Tombstone Blues” and, previewing the 1974 comeback tour, “It Ain’t Me Babe.”

We also have some photos from the shows, on and offstage.

“the heat pipes just cough…”

1975

Up until a few months ago, the following entry appeared on the Historical Timeline on Massey Hall’s official website: “The Hall is booked for an entire week for the making of a film about Bob Dylan that is never released.”

What is this? Related to Renaldo and Clara? That was a movie being made in 1975 about Bob Dylan, and the tour did come to Toronto, but a) they didn’t play Massey Hall (the shows were at the larger Maple Leaf Gardens) and b) this film was released.

I asked the venue what that referred to. They didn’t know and then, some time after I emailed, took the entire historical timeline off their site (it’s still archived here). Mysterious. If anyone knows anything, let me know. Or maybe just an error.

[Update: See the comments for more info from the person who compiled the website timeline]

1980

The big one. The 1980 gospel tour. And, most importantly, a show that was professionally filmed and circulated for years. It was the final of four nights (the second-to-last show was filmed too, but doesn’t circulate).

Dylan’s idea had been to release a live album and concert film, a la Hard Rain, from these shows titled Solid Rock, but his label rejected it. Thankfully, the video and soundboard of the final show leaked ages ago, and various songs have since been officially released, most notable across two discs of the Trouble No More Bootleg Series.

These Massey Hall shows featured the live debut of three Dylan gospel songs that never made it on an album: “Ain't Gonna Go To Hell For Anybody,” “Cover Down Break Through,” and “I Will Love Him.” They were otherwise performed fairly standard for this tour, but having the high-quality audio and video for decades has exalted them into iconic status. When anyone says “Bob Dylan” and “Massey Hall” in the same sentence, they usually mean these 1980 shows (and really the final show specifically).