Bob Dylan and Tom Petty before their 1986 True Confessions world tour they brought in a professional camera team to shoot a two-night stand at Sydney, Australia’s Entertainment Centre.
Dylan had caused the error of chronicling a tour too quick in the past (check out 1978’s Live at Budokan), during this time, they caught a pretty excellent night for an HBO concert special.
Dylan opening performance with Petty and the Heartbreakers at the first Farm Aid in 1985. The chemistry was obvious and a tour was soon scheduled. “I’ve heard people say that you can’t play with Bob because he’s too erratic,” Tom Petty said in the 2005 Paul Zollo book Conversations With Tom Petty. “But he wasn’t. He was professional. . . There was never a night when the audiences weren’t incredibly ecstatic about the whole thing.”
In his 2004 autobiography Chronicles, Dylan said that the tour was a low point of his career. “I had no connection to any kind of inspiration,” he wrote. “Whatever there was to begin with had all vanished and shrunk. Tom was at the top of his game and I was at the bottom of mine. . . There was a hollow singing in my heart and I couldn’t wait to retire and fold the tent. One more big payday with Petty and that would be it for me. I was what they called over the hill.”
Like almost every professionally taped Bob Dylan gig, this film is wildly out of print, luckily we have it below.
Keep going for the video below: