“I Found It Deeply Moving.”

The Casper Collection Series - Part 3 | The Performance That Changed How Carol Heard “John Brown” Forever.

Oct 06, 2025

We’re excited to release the third installment of our Casper Collection Series today — a powerful rendition of “John Brown” from Toronto 2001. Like the previous two parts, this release comes with a compelling background story from Carol, which you’ll find below.

You can check out the previously released parts below.

Part 1: Positively 4th Street - Boston 1995
Part 2: Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues - New York 1998

Coming Tomorrow: Exclusive Interview with Carol Casper
Tomorrow, we’ll publish an in-depth interview which will be available exclusively to our paid subscribers. If that sounds interesting to you, now’s the perfect time to join:
As part of our 50for50 special, you can get an annual subscription for just €50 instead of €60 — but only until tomorrow!

Carol’s Story:

“I saw 13 shows during Dylan’s US Fall 2001 tour and came away with video from all but one of them - October 31 in Madison, WI, which we attended with cousins of my husband so I took the night off. It was the longest extended series of concerts following one of Dylan’s tours I ever undertook, and my most successful run videotaping ever. This was especially nice, because these concerts were, in my opinion, some of Dylan’s best ever on tour. With two fine guitarists - Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell - powering the band, handily assisted by drummer George Ricelli and Dylan’s long-time right-hand man bassist Tony Garnier - Bob was clearly relishing the platform this line-up provided, delivering not only some of his finest, but also some of his longest performances ever, with many concerts stretching well over two hours in length. It made for a lot of material to capture.
Some nights videotaping was more challenging than others. This evening, November 8, 2001, in Toronto, ON, was one of them. It didn’t help that we got to the venue a little late - a very rare occurrence - so that Dylan was already into the first song when we got to our seats. In my defense, we were traveling that fall with our two and a half year old son and staying that night with a long-distance co-worker friend of my husband’s and his wife who were babysitting for the evening. We had to get Ben comfortably settled in with these new strangers before we left for the show, which made getting out take longer.
I rarely captured much if any of the opening song from shows anyway because I had to wait until the lights went down to take my camera out of my bag and and get it positioned on top of it, place the external monitor in a snug spot easily visible to me but not others, and plug in my external microphones. Or if I’d managed to connect them in advance, make sure the mic and monitor cables hadn’t gotten tangled. Then I had to start the camera running and find my shot.
Getting to our seats late didn’t help. I missed the entire second song, too, and was just beginning to search for a clear shot as Dylan was starting his third song. It turned out to be “Desolation Row,” which was a real drag to miss the beginning of. I managed to get settled not too long into it, but alas, that’s when the “fun” began. The Toronto crowd in the cavernous Air Canada Centre was a generally raucous one. Too many Molsons or Labatts for some, perhaps? People were constantly on the move, getting in and out of their seats and crossing back and forth in front of me. Lots of talking, people leaning their heads together to chat nearly non-stop through entire songs, swaying their heads and shoulders and arms back and forth to the music, getting up out of their seats and dancing in front of me.
Unfortunately, you can’t tell the people between you and the stage how to behave just because you’re trying to videotape, but boy, wouldn’t that be nice? Instead you have to make do the best you can with what you’re handed. That night in Toronto, it meant a checkerboard of results: a couple of good, watchable captures followed by two or three that are so interrupted they’re barely watchable, followed by another handful of nice ones, then another couple of numbers with the view blocked for too long to be any good at all. Out of 22 songs Dylan played, I only managed to catch really watchable versions of about a dozen, and just seven or eight that I’d actually term solid, quality captures.
Luckily, this powerful rendition of “John Brown” was one of them, the third of three good catches in a row. When I first heard this song years prior in the early 1970s on a bootleg album featuring some Witmark Demos, I didn’t like it very much. It struck me as sort of simplistic and sophomoric, especially the long description of the war-torn warrior’s injuries which I thought egregiously grotesque. Hearing it years later in concert, including this night in Toronto, however, I found it deeply moving. I don’t think it’s because I was older, or that the song got better on paper. Dylan didn’t change the words significantly. I think the real difference was Dylan’s performance. There was plenty of emotion in both the old and the new. But whereas the original was marked more by his attempts at strident outrage, this latter version is full of the world-weary, knowing sadness that comes with wisdom, the wisdom of age. It adds more nuanced contours to same old lyrics, giving them a different, softer, yet more compelling ring.”