Dry Your Eyes

Album: Beautiful Noise (1976)
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Songfacts®:

  • Diamond wrote this song with Robbie Robertson of The Band, who produced his Beautiful Noise album. In his memoir Testimony, Robertson explained that the song was inspired by "how many people felt after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr."
  • Robbie Robertson played guitar on this track, and Garth Hudson of The Band played Lowry organ. Session drummer Jim Keltner played drums, and Bob Findley played the flugelhorn and bugle.
  • Diamond played this live at The Band's farewell concert on November 25, 1976 in San Francisco. This grand affair featured performances by Bob Dylan, Neil Young and many others; it was filmed by Martin Scorsese and released in 1978 as the documentary The Last Waltz. Diamond played just the one song in his set, and despite going on after the beloved Joni Mitchell, it went over very well.

    He didn't perform it again until his 2017 tour. After the Manchester bombing on May 22 that year, he started dedicating it to the victims.

Comments: 1

  • Mark Bryant from Inverness, FlOn October 17, 2017 - he played it in concert in Birmingham, England - in memory of the 22 who lost their lives in the Manchester bombing in June of 2017.
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