Review: Cat Power offers Bob Dylan's home-state fans a visionary tribute in St. Paul

It's known as "The 1966 Royal Albert Hall" concert, even though it didn't actually didn't take place at Royal Albert Hall. It's revered as one of rock's greatest live recordings of all time, even though the singer was loudly booed and heckled.

Considering all the odd footnotes to Bob Dylan's transformative "going electric" performance with musicians who would become the Band in 1966, having modern Dylan acolyte Cat Power recreate the live recording song-for-song at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul on Friday night seemed to make perfect sense.

It was a near-perfect rendering of the fabled show, too.

An artful indie-rock bellower from Georgia who's been making her own shadowy records for more than two decades, Chan Marshall — aka Cat Power — first staged her live re-creation of Dylan's "Royal Albert Hall" concert at the real Royal Albert Hall in London in 2022 (Bob's version had been taped in nearby Manchester but misidentified on bootlegs for decades). Her show based on another show went so well, she released it on record and then took it on the road, finally pulling into Dylan's home state halfway through her tour.

"Thank you, Bob Dylan, for bringing us together tonight," Marshall reverentially noted near the end of the sold-out, 90-minute performance.

As was the case in the original concert, the first half of Friday's set was all-acoustic. This was the part of the show the British fans adored in 1966, and a thousand Twin Cities fans ate it up, too.

You could've heard a guitar pick drop in the theater as Marshall launched into "She Belongs to Me" under low stage lights accompanied very synchronically by guitarist Henry Munson and harmonica blower Aaron Embry (who also played piano later).

"She never stumbles, she's got no place to fall / She's nobody's child, the law can't touch her at all," Marshall sang with aloof flair.

That was the first of many times she added a dramatic tinge — and maybe a touch of irony — channeling Dylan lyrics that at once seemed worshipful and fearful of women. Another such case came two songs later with "Visions of Johanna," whose epic, 9-minute narrative scroll Marshall pulled off with understandable help from a lyric sheet.

Fans stayed silent and mesmerized up until "Just Like a Woman" and "Mr. Tambourine Man," when many couldn't help but sing along quietly. As the latter song wrapped, a change to just slightly brighter lighting marked the arrival of the rest of Cat Power's six-piece band. And away we went.

Starting with "Tell Me, Momma," the electric set featured a divergent approach by Marshall's band to Marshall herself.

The band adhered closely and impressively to the powerfully rhythmic and at times defiantly exuberant arrangements heard on the 1966 recording. Organist Jordan Summers — who has also played with Bob's son Jakob Dylan in the Wallflowers — dueled with pianist Embry during "I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)" in moving tribute to the o.g.'s Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel. And the whole band grooved tightly and thrillingly in "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat."

Marshall, by contrast, played loose with her vocals. She reinterpreted the melodies here and there and added a discernible tenderness, especially in "One Too Many Mornings." It was a revisionist approach that so many singers have successfully taken over the decades with Dylan's tunes (including Bob himself to this day).

Marshall even had the perhaps sacrilege gumption to change the lyrics in "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues."

"I'm going back to St. Paul, I do believe I've had enough," she inserted.

Unlike when Dylan shocked folk purists this same electrifying material in 1966, nobody in St. Paul complained about any of the alterations Friday.