For Bob Dylan devotees, there is something near magic in “Bob Dylan Live 1966: The ‘Royal Albert Hall’ Concert.”
The electric side is stellar, infamous for its “Judas!” shout from the crowd, followed by Dylan’s rebel-cry response: “I don’t believe you. You’re a liar,” and to his band: “Play it [expletive] loud!,” before launching into “Like a Rolling Stone.”
But between the set, the lyrics, the room acoustics, the haunted close-to-the-mic recording sound, the acoustic side of the album can induce goosebumps, a stare-out-the-window-and-just-listen trance.
So when Chan Marshall, a.k.a. Cat Power, announced she would release her own cover version of that beloved 15-song album, Dylan diehards might have thought: Why touch that?
The answer, you realize, comes when you hear Marshall’s re-creations. Just listen to her fiery rendition of “Like a Rolling Stone” on “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” from a few months back.
On “Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert,” she delivers the acoustic covers just as evocatively and true, with just enough of her own spin, inflection, and flavor. In fact, on “Ballad of a Thin Man,” an audience member calls out: “Judas!” Marshall responds, without missing a beat: “Jesus.”
“I call him God Dylan,” she tells me in a recent phone interview ahead of her show Saturday at the Chevalier Theatre in Medford. “I’m sure he resents that. [But] he is a scholar of humanity.”
For Marshall, “1966″ is the “ultimate” album to cover from the artist who she says sits atop the “Mount Everest of American songwriting.”
When I finally reach Marshall at home in Miami, she apologizes for missing my first calls. Her son is home sick. She asks him to leave the room before we talk. (“Sorry. He’s mad at me because he wants to be with me. He doesn’t want to be alone.”)
She multi-tasks throughout: At one point, she gets a text from a film director, who wants to cast her opposite Julia Fox for a role, Marshall says, as a “washed-up rock musician in LA with a kid [who] rents out her guest house to a porn star.”
Her son wanders in and out, wanting some attention. Can he buy this app? (He can’t.) Can he stay in the room if he doesn’t talk? (Sorry, no.)
At 52, she’s embraced motherhood. Her son, Boaz, has made her “more powerful, stronger.” Being a mom, though, can lead to some memory lapses, so you might see her with a Dylan lyric book at her Medford show.
“They call it mommy brain,” she says. Even “songs you know so well — ‘threw the bums a dime in your prime’ — once you get two minutes in, you might need to remember which verse is coming up. I’m a human.”
Robert Zimmerman was a rock in Charlyn Marie Marshall’s tumultuous childhood.
“I’ve always loved [Dylan]. Growing up with a lot of different music in my childhood — my parents were in bands; my grandmother raised me till I was 5. I met my mom and stepdad and father [at] 5. I lived in a lot of different households. … But Dylan always came back,” she says.
She recalls her stepdad cranking up the volume on a cassette of “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits” when she was 6. “He told me to listen. After that, I took more notice when Bob Dylan would come on.”
Always the new kid at school, sometimes three times a year, “music was a friend.”
And with Dylan, “there was always something to discover,” she says. “I would hear something and be like, ‘Oh, I’ve never heard this one.’ Every Dylan fan has that experience because of the quantity and stages of his songwriting.”
She recalls her first Dylan concert at 16, “screaming in the nosebleeds in the grass in Atlanta. He finally came out for the third encore [and] played “Tangled up in Blue.’ That’s what I’d been screaming.”
When she first went to London in her early 20s, she’d walk to the park near Royal Albert Hall “and imagine that Bob came out for a cigarette, that I would say, ‘Hey, man, can I listen to soundcheck?’ or I would just imagine being a part of his life back in the ‘60s.”
“I once asked Patti Smith about meeting him, and she was like [she imitates Smith], ‘Well, you gotta understand that, you know, Baab was like my boyfriend in my miiind.’ And that’s the perfect way to say it for the women. Someone who’s got your back; that sexy, cool factor; super brilliant. A badass rebel.”
So when Marshall got a call from her manager in 2022 saying there was a chance to play Royal Albert Hall, “I was like, [expletive] yeah. I thought it was a perfect end for the [’Cat Power Covers’] tour, to do the ultimate cover.”
Of course, in classic Dylan lore-fashion, the “Royal Albert Hall” show was actually recorded at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in May 1966, and got its name from a mislabeled bootleg. Even so.
Marshall re-created and recorded that iconic 1966 set, and the result was her 2023 live album and current tour. (After playing the Chevalier Saturday, she has a date Sunday at the Music Hall in Portsmouth, N.H.)
“Everyone does post-death [cover] records, but Bob’s around, and why not revel?” she says.
It was Bob’s son, Sam Dylan, who first encouraged Marshall to cover his dad, sometime around 2005.
“I was like, ‘You should do a Bob Dylan museum.’ This is before [the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa]. He laughed and said, ‘Well, you should cover ‘I Believe In You.’ ”
She met son Jakob Dylan in Malibu at a neighbor’s Christmas party. “Beck was my neighbor.” (Because of course he was.) She and Jakob “got along instantly. He’s hilarious. Very dry. Very quick. Very self-deprecating.”
She met Dylan himself in 2007. While recording in Miami, “I got an email from a friend in Paris saying, ‘You could be on the cover of this [magazine] this weekend — Bob Dylan’s playing Friday, the night you’d land.’ I said, ‘Only if I can meet Bob.’ ”
Marshall immediately sat down and wrote “Song to Bobby” — her callback to Dylan’s ode to his hero, “Song to Woody.” (She later sent it to a Dylan manager who told her “Bob loved the song and is very flattered.”)
Marshall did indeed meet her hero after his concert that night.
“He turns to me, looks at me from my feet up, gets to my eyes. He says: ‘So we finally meet. I got all your calls.’ I’d been asking to open up for him probably two times a year since I was 22,” she says.
“We talked for maybe an hour. He’s like, ‘You got the same name as Charlie Parker’s wife.’ He just seemed like one of the guys. Normal. Taller than I thought. Broad shoulders, big hands. I was like, ‘Damn. I thought you were short.’ ”
CAT POWER SINGS DYLAN: THE 1966 ROYAL ALBERT HALL CONCERT
At the Chevalier Theatre, Medford. Feb. 17 at 8 p.m. $55-$95. 781-391-7469, chevaliertheatre.com
Lauren Daley can be reached at ldaley33@gmail.com. Follow her @laurendaley1.