The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration

The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration
Live album by
various artists
ReleasedAugust 24, 1993 (1993-08-24)
RecordedOctober 16, 1992
VenueMadison Square Garden, New York City
GenreRock
Length148:24
LabelColumbia
Producer
Various artists chronology
Good as I Been to You
(1992)
The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration
(1993)
World Gone Wrong
(1993)
Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
Allmusic[1]
The Encyclopedia of Popular Music[2]

The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration is a live double-album release in recognition of Bob Dylan's 30 years as a recording artist. Recorded on October 16, 1992, at Madison Square Garden in New York City, it captures most of the concert, which featured many artists performing classic Dylan songs, before ending with three songs from Dylan himself.

The house band for the show were the surviving members of Booker T. & the M.G.'s: Booker T. Jones on organ, Donald "Duck" Dunn on bass, and Steve Cropper on guitar. Joining them was drummer Anton Fig filling in for the late Al Jackson, plus drummer Jim Keltner. Longtime Saturday Night Live bandleader and initial lead guitar player in Dylan's Never Ending Tour G. E. Smith served as the music director of the whole event as well as a sideman on guitar and mandolin for several artists. Background singers were Sheryl Crow and Sue Medley among others.

The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration, which reached No. 40 (in the US and went gold), was released in August 1993 just before Dylan was about to deliver his second folk studio set inside of a year, World Gone Wrong. The concert was dubbed "Bobfest" by Neil Young at the beginning of his "All Along the Watchtower" cover.

A VHS collection of the same name was released on August 25, 1993. On March 4, 2014, the concert was released in Deluxe Edition 2-DVD and Blu-ray sets with bonus performances and behind-the-scenes rehearsal footage, as well as a 2-CD set with two bonus rehearsal tracks.

  1. ^ allmusic
  2. ^ Larkin, Colin (2007). The Encyclopedia of Popular Music (4th ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195313734.