30 Oct - 8 Dec 1975
Les Kokay´s Introduction:
As it is 25 years since Renaldo & Clara screened, I thought it might be nice to give the stereo soundrack a wider circulation (I hinted about it here, a while back). Also since Dylan is on his way to NZ soon it would be appropriate to offer a rare gem back to the rest of the world.
The Renaldo and Clara s/t has been available on a couple of bootlegs for some time.
1. Renaldo & Clara (Norriaa) - a single CD from the film s/t (stereo), but very poor quality and misses out some important tracks.
2. Renaldo & Clara (reference recording) 2CD - actually a 2CDR, sourced from a video of the TV broadcast, so mono and also poor quality. A good selection of tracks.
These have both been re-bootlegged under different labels & covers.
I've recently remastered my own tape of the stereo film soundtrack to a 2CDR myself, and the result is significantly better quality than any of the bootlegs (IMHO). I had some difficulty about which tracks not to include. I eventally decided not to include any of the dialogue of the film (2) above included a couple of the David Blue monologues. I didn't include any of the non-dylan background music (moonlight sonata, the chopin waltz the roadie plays etc) and I missed out any music that I simply don't like listening to repeatedly (for example: In the Morning, Kaddish, God and Mama, Willkomen). For technical reasons I missed out Suzanne (Baez) and South Coast (Elliot) as these sounded very poor beside the other tracks. Hurricane I've edited to remove most of the dialogue, but still keep the flow of the song. BTW this Hurricane is actually the out-take with the 'robbing the bodies' line, and not a concert performance. All the other music is included in the order of the film. It is all nice wide stereo except for the opening track which for some reason is almost mono. The sound quality is not perfect, but it is much better than anything that has circulated before.
Les Kokay