Bob Dylan at the Masonic Auditorium in 1964

My 13-year-old sister---I was 21---talked me into going to this concert. I'm an old man now, so my memory is hazy about whether I had even heard anything Dylan had done, though I at least had heard of him. My sister probably had one of his early "vinyl" alburms.

It was interesting to note that most of the audience in the Masonic Auditorium was also young girls. That was true too of the advent of the Beatles. All of those screaming audiences on TV, like their Ed Sullivan appearance, made it hard to really hear the music and understand what all the fuss was about. Like Dylan, they were so good I soon came around to liking the Beatles.

At the Masonic, only Dylan was on stage in front of a microphone with a guitar and that harmonica rig. Joan Baez joined him at the end of his set to do a duet, which isn't on this recording. (Later: Wrong! I didn't listen to the whole thing. She's on the last cut.)

Baez also joined a sparsely attended anti-war demonstration in front of the federal building in San Francisco, as the Johnson administration was signaling an escalation of the US attack on/invasion of Vietnam.