"Positively Fourth Street" - Against All Odds

The Casper Collection Series- Part 1: From obstructed views to a brush with Dylan's head of security!

Hi everyone,

I’m thrilled to kick off our collaboration with Carol Casper today by sharing a very special treat with you: the first, previously unreleased video!

It’s a performance of “Positively Fourth Street” from Bob Dylan’s 1995 show at The Orpheum Theatre in Boston.

A huge thank you to Carol for making this possible and for giving the Daily Dylan community access to such a gem!

For now, this video will be available exclusively to Daily Dylan newsletter subscribers for the next couple of weeks. After that, it will be released publicly on YouTube.

So, enjoy the video, and don’t miss Carol’s fascinating story about this unique recording which is posted below!

You can find Carol’s YouTube channel here!

---

Carol’s Story:

“This is a video that could easily not have existed, and recalls one of my least favorite memories of videotaping. I’d very successfully captured a truly great show by Bob the night before in Worcester, MA, and was psyched to do the same the next two nights at The Orpheum Theatre in Boston - at least I hoped. A combination of zeal, bad luck, and cockiness, however, produced a different result.

My seat that night was in the orchestra, between a third to halfway back from the stage - not an easy place to videotape from as all too often people’s heads get in the way. I started out lucky. There were a couple of empty seats in the second row in front of me, so after getting settled during the first song, I was able to capture the next three successfully, especially the third and fourth songs with the camera’s sightline just clearing the shoulders of the two people in front of me. “Positively Fourth Street” was that fourth song.

After that, people arrived to fill those vacant seats two rows in front of me, destroying the camera’s view. Determined to keep going, I turned the little duffle on my lap which the camcorder was propped up on from horizontal to vertical, to get it high enough to clear the new obstacles. It made the camcorder too high and therefore too visible, though. Less than two minutes into the next song - “Pledging My Time” - Dylan’s head of security Barron appeared in the aisle a few seats from me and motioned me to come with him. He led me out of the theater onto a fire escape and asked me to hand over the camera. Chances are he would have simply removed the tape and let me go back in, but I didn’t know that at the time. I’d heard stories of security smashing people’s cameras and wasn’t about to let that happen, so I refused to hand it over.

Barron then led me back through the theater lobby out to the vestibule, where he intimidated me into handing him my driver’s license and made a big deal of having someone at the theater office make a copy of it. Then he left me there to listen to the show as best as I could from nearly outside, sitting on the floor of the vestibule while contemplating what had happened and feeling like an idiot.

I felt a little less like an idiot when it occurred to me at some point that I still actually had the tape. He never asked for it.

Unfortunately, the next night was the first show were Dylan and Patti Smith sang “Dark Eyes” as a duet. I would have dearly loved the opportunity to capture it, but after having been thrown out of the show by Dylan’s head of security the night before, there was no way I could chance bringing in the camcorder and trying to videotape again the next night.

At least, from that unfortunate evening I retained one slightly choppy “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You” and high quality recordings of “All Along the Watchtower” and “Positively 4th Street” - the latter of which is definitely the highlight of the short tape and not just an excellent rendition of the song, but probably the best of all the times I’ve heard or captured Dylan performing it live.”