Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series

'Went to See the Gypsy', along with 'Sign on the Window', seems to have been rehearsed / recorded more times than anything else in this period.

'Sign' is a marvellous tune and suggestive lyric. 'Gypsy', I'm not so sure. Wonder if Dylan overrated a bit (I keep reading that he was struggling to write songs), or if he should have rewritten it slightly. The lyric seems to build up to something but - as I know from hearing it about 100 times in the last month - effectively has nothing in the middle. The encounter with the 'Gypsy' is a non-event.

The best I can say about that, I suppose, is that it's a mystery how the Gypsy and his entourage disappears suddenly disappear completely from a hotel room while Dylan is making a telephone call.

Yeah, I don't think New Morning sounds labored or overthought, just the opposite (a big part of its charm).

seems like Kooper was probably frustrated that he worked up some pretty elaborate arrangements for a few of these songs and Dylan ended up going with the more ragged takes. I do really like the full band version of "time passes slowly" on Another Self Portrait.

'Gypsy', I'm not so sure. Wonder if Dylan overrated a bit (I keep reading that he was struggling to write songs), or if he should have rewritten it slightly. The lyric seems to build up to something but - as I know from hearing it about 100 times in the last month - effectively has nothing in the middle. The encounter with the 'Gypsy' is a non-event.

The best I can say about that, I suppose, is that it's a mystery how the Gypsy and his entourage disappears suddenly disappear completely from a hotel room while Dylan is making a telephone call.

This is gypsy slander and should not be tolerated. Went to See the Gypsy is a top 10 Dylan on a summer night with a beer in your hand.

The encounter with the 'Gypsy' is a non-event.

Like, I can't even. This is the entire point of the song!

WENT TO SEE THE GYPSY RULES!!!!!!!!!!!!!

it's great in the jaunty New Morning version and possibly even more affecting on the Another Self Portrait more mournful verison

"'How are you?" he said to me/I said back to him"

It's very human.

Yeah, for the first time he shows himself as the credulous, I Want To Believe seeker and sucker ("He smiled when he saw me coming, said, 'Well well we-ell"), and sticks around even when the advance man unnecessarily hypes: "...He did it in Las Vegas, and he can do it here!" Sounds like he's still disappointed by the non-event. Here and in the desolate-to-desperate "Sign In The Window," and the freaked-out "Day of the Locust," nuthin left to do but the-end-of-the-Sixties cliche, get back to roots--b-but he's already done that on the previous two albums, and still sounds desolate-to-desperate on "Time Passes Slowly" ("when you're lost in a dream!"). But then he does get it together on all the remaining songs (as he did on the LP opener, I think it was, "If Not For You.") Even gets back to his seeker interests on "Three Angels" and "Father of Night"---are these the ones written for a play?

I love NEW MORNING, but unlike you, I don't think 'went to see the gypsy' is as good as it should be.

'The song is all about a non-event', yes, but maybe he could then clarify more about this non-event, what it meant, why he 'went to see the gypsy' in the first place, what he was expecting, why they say so little to each other, why he would depart this important gypsy character to make a telephone call, how he feels when the character mysteriously disappears.

I have read around all that I could on this song and the one standard line seems to be that it's about Elvis Presley. Not that Dylan really saw Presley in Minnesota. Why call Elvis the gypsy? Tell us more.

Dylan would be the last artist I would expect or want to clarify anything. He's been avoiding clarifying things since at least 1964.

The song, imo, is about expectations vs. reality and at the end reaches for a zen contentment like a lot of New Morning songs. It's similar to Sign on the Window (talk about an underdeveloped lyric), though in Sign it seems the narrator is trying to convince themselves while in Gypsy the narrator is convinced.

Maybe Dylan should have done a sequel song (cf Glass Onion) where he explains "The Gypsy was Elvis".

I’m sorry to correct you but “Went to See the Gypsy” is literally as good as it’s possible for a song to be.
The gypsy was Elvis, and wasn’t, and that little Minnesota town was Duluth, and Hibbing, and wasn’t, and the song happened and didn’t and the girl was nowhere to be found, and that’s what happens when you see the gypsy.

Or is it?

I quite like the song, and I've probably heard it more than any other over the last month - probably about 50 times of multiple takes.

But I think it's underdeveloped and could have benefited from another draft.

The explanations on here have been fine---there was also the sense that it's a song about the Sixties romance coming to an end, as Ellen Willis wrote about it reflecting a generational experience, especially for people of his and her age: turn 30, wake up and smell the coffee, as Dear Abby would put it, get up and get ready for work, here's spouse and kids and all that comes with them. Although his personal attraction to the esoteric, not only but sometimes giving evidence of including, thee mystical per se, keeps surfacing in later music and off-stage activities. But he had to go through this experience of non-experience and starting over, it seems.

"including thee mystical per se" not meant to have a comma between "including" and "thee"

Manymany xposts: Something that’s never leaked is the complete Masked & Anonymous sessions. That band was straight fire & I want to hear the 17 (!) unreleased songs.

That version of Cold Irons Bound is one of my favourite performances of any song ever.

Absolutely. It's definitive and beats the album version, so much that I made the substitution for my own listening. (FWIW, I also swapped out "Make You Feel My Love" for "Red River Shore" and "Cant Wait" for the officially released studio demo, both from the first disc of Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Volume 8. For the latter track, I had to cut out the talking at the beginning so that it starts on the first piano note, a very simple and easy edit.)

Cool---speaking of making your own Dylan playlists, have yall heard Medicine Sunday, the free download on Albums That Never Were? He's made an album of Dylan with the Band, taking first stabs at trying what became Blonde On Blonde.
Speaking of "Cold Irons Bound," there's a really good live version of it on this really good live BD collection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_1961%E2%80%932000:_Thirty-Nine_Years_of_Great_Concert_Performances Japanese import only, but I found it on Amazon soon after 2001 release,---now on Spotify, I think.

“She’s your lover now” is so great
“And you just sit around asking for ashtrays
Can’t you reach?”

^my favorite Dylan song (and line!)

Haha

xxxp Nice! FWIW, during the lockdown I finally listened to the entire 1965/1966 sessions box set in chronological order. Flies by pretty fast when you're stuck working at home, it took 2 or 3 days to do it without feeling I crammed the whole thing down. I always wondered why the hell Dylan ended up ditching the Hawks in the studio (though not on stage) when he was recording Blonde on Blonde. The handful of releasable cuts I heard - the one-off singles, as calstars mentions the aborted outtake "She's Your Lover Now" - were GREAT. Well, you listen to those sessions, and you hear what went wrong - Dylan was frustrated as hell and poor Richard Manuel got the brunt of it. It's on tape where Dylan's constantly telling them, especially Richard, "NO, I want it like THIS. Like THIS Richard, it's supposed to go like this." So once you hear the stuff that wasn't released before, it makes perfect sense.

Oh yeah---he tells the backstory, and how he chose tracks, how he tweaked them, getting a consistent volume level etc, to make it sound as much as possible like a real album---of whatever quality; see what yall think: http://albumsthatneverwere.blogspot.com/2018/08/bob-dylan-medicine-sunday.html

Oops--links removed, sorry. But and prob because his sources are legit available though TCE Deluxe hella pricey: Sources used:
Bootleg Series Vol 8: No Direction Home (2005)
Bootleg Series Vol 12: The Cutting Edge (2015 Collector’s Edition)
Side Tracks (2013) Mainly what we're missing is his further cobble from those: Medicine Sunday appropriately concludes with the epic that never was, “She’s Your Lover Now”. Using pieces of Takes 15 and 16 on The Cutting Edge, I was able to create a complete performance of the song by editing a proper intro onto take 15 and crossfading into take 16 at the point where the band trails off, hopefully giving the illusion that The Hawks intentionally stopped playing and Dylan finished the song solo. A further edit was made at the outro so that Dylan concludes with the tonic of the song, giving it a resolve and a remorseful vocal improvisation to end the album.

Birdistheword: do you mean THE CUTTING EDGE?

My copy of that is 5CDs, and I took months working my way through it, listening to everything multiple times. Is your version bigger?

I initially thought that you meant the vast 1966 concerts set with 30CDs or whatever. Has anyone actually bought or played that?

I have bought and played the 1966 Live Recordings box, yes.

There's an 18-disc deluxe Cutting Edge set that has basically everything he recorded in the studio 1965-66. The 6-disc version is highlights of that.

I have also bought the 1966 Live Recordings box, it was surprisingly cheap and I had a Barnes & Noble gift card to use up at the time.

I haven't played through every disc yet, but probably nearly 2/3rds of it. Definitely something to work through slowly.

I have a copy of that 18 disc edition, I got it [REDACTED] DVDr

Oh, and that 1966 box set, I got on a really stupidly cheap deal..

I've only just realised that this 1966 edition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1966_Live_Recordings

was not part of The Bootleg Series but part of the same copyright series that gave us *1970*.

So has anyone played the whole of the 36CD set and is it interesting?

I felt that my CUTTING EDGE was inclusive but now I learn that it's only 1/3 of other people's.

I've played the whole 1966 live recordings set and it is awesome! the handful of audience recordings are rough going, but the australian / european / UK shows are unbelievable.

pinefox, yes, Cutting Edge, and as Tyler mentioned, it's the big 18 disc one I listened to. I also have the live set, which can usually be found for much less than $100 new - it never became a collector's item like the 18-disc Cutting Edge.

I haven't played the entire 1966 set though - FWIW, my favorites are the Liverpool (mono only) and Sheffield (stereo) discs, particularly Liverpool for the electric set. The real Royal Albert Hall show and the famous Manchester show are also great and to be fair have better sound since they were multi-track recordings.

To build on the discussion above – looks like Sony just bought all his recordings: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/24/bob-dylan-sells-recorded-music-catalog-to-sony-music-entertainment.html

More relevant details from Variety:

Bob Dylan and SME will continue to collaborate on a range of future catalog reissues in the artist’s renowned and top-selling Bootleg Series, which began in 1991 and includes 14 releases through last year’s lauded “Springtime In New York: The Bootleg Series Vol. 16 (1980-1985).” The agreement also provides the opportunity for SME to partner with Dylan on additional projects.

Track list floating around Twitter, goes w some recent talk of next in series:

disc 1

1. "Love Sick" (acoustic demo, 1997)
2. "Not Dark Yet" (alternate take, Time Out Of Mind, 1997)
3. "Shake Sugaree" (studio rehearsal, 1994)
4. "Polly Vaughan" (unreleased, 1992)
5. "Long Time Man" (rehearsal at Shrine Auditorium, 1995)
6. "Million Miles" (studio rehearsal, 1997)
7. "Mississippi" (acoustic demo, 1996)
8. "Cold lrons Bound" (alternate take, Time Out Of Mind, 1997)
9. "Ring Of Fire" (Feeling Minnesota soundtrack, 1996)
10. "lnterfere" (studio rehearsal, 1996)
11 . "Red River Shore" (acoustic demo, 1996)
12. "Cocaine Blues" (rehearsal, George Mason University,1998)
13. "Standing ln The Doorway" (alternate take,Time Out Of Mind,1997)

disc 2

1. "All I Ever Loved ls You" (acoustic demo,1996)
2. "Dreamin' Of You" (acoustic demo,1996)
3. "Hello Stranger" (unreleased, World Gone Wrong,1993)
4. "Sugar Girl" (studio rehearsal,1997)
5. "Doin' Alright" (acoustic demo,1994)
6. "Can't Wait" (studio rehearsal,1996)
7. "Not Dark Yet" (acoustic demo,1996)
8. "You Belong To Me" (Natural Born Killers soundtrack, 1992)
9. "Million Miles" (alternate take,Time Out Of Mind,1997)
10. "Make You Feel My Love" (alternate take Time Out Of Mind 1997
11. "Red River Shore" (unreleased, Time Out Of Mind,1997)
12."That Was Right" (studio rehearsal,1998)
13. "Marchin' To The City" (studio rehearsal,1996)
14. "Tryin' To Get To Heaven" (studio rehearsal,1996)

disc 3

1.“Love Sick” (Live at Grammys 1998)
2.“Shake Sugaree” (studio rehearsal, 1997)
3.“The Lady Came From Baltimore” (unreleased, 1992)
4.“99 Silly Hats” (rehearsal at Sony Music Studios, 16 Nov 1994)
5.“Til I Fell In Love With You” (alternate take,Time Out Of Mind, 1997)
6.“Can’t Wait” (Acoustic Demo, 1996)
7.“Catskills Serenade” (unreleased, 1992)
8.“Make You Feel My Love” (Live at Pauley Pavilion UCLA, Los Angeles CA, 21 May 1998)
9.“Standing In The Doorway” (studio rehearsal, 1997)
10.“Not Dark Yet” (studio rehearsal, 1997)
11.“Tryin’ To Get To Heaven” (alternate take, Time Out Of Mind, 1997)
12.“Sugar Girl” (demo, 1995)
13.“All I Ever Loved Is You” (unreleased, Time Out Of Mind, 1997)

If you paste this, will prob revert to errors in orig. "translation" from Twitter image (Not Dork Yet, alternate toke etc.)

Unconfirmed, as far as I know

Not Dork Yet, alternate toke

omg/lmao, these are both A+

think this is a clever fake, but who knows? Would be weird for the Bootleg Series to suddenly go completely out of chronological order (though i guess the Springtime in NY played around a little with that).

“Love Sick” (Live at Grammys 1998)

SOY BOMB!

Soy Bomb guy is way more dated than Dylan these days

I’m imagining 99 Silly Hats is Dylan mining The 10,000 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins and won’t be told otherwise.

completely out of chronological order Well, mostly around TOOM time, with little bit of filler fack back as '92---think Series of Dream jumped around more.
So I finally realized: tour-box-wise, we've had '66, Rolling Thunder, Trouble No More---but no '74 comeback tour box; fuckin why? Must have more like Before The Flood.

anyone know what's up with these The Joker vol. 1-5 Early Years? released throug... "Wet Music"? Is it official? Are they releasing everything from 1962 because of some copyright thing?
https://open.spotify.com/album/1oPGtbWK7xGK8vArq2SaRH?si=45D-hD8HQTKdA5A5ntFp1g

Guess this is most appropriate BD thread for some shows mentioned herel which curator says you're never gonna be able to just go to the Center, and pull up in whole...
from Flagging Down The Double E's e-newsletter (which usually has show downloads):

An In-Depth Look at the Bob Dylan Center's Unheard Live Recordings
Talking Supper Club, Salt Lake '76, and more with co-curator Parker Fishel
Ray Padgett
I was lucky enough to spend the past weekend at the grand opening of the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Center is terrific, a museum that, even while it would be accessible to the casual fan, offers plenty for the superfan to salivate over. One example among many: Even after I’d probably spent five or six hours there over two days, I suddenly stumbled upon a never-heard World Gone Wrong outtake, “I’ve Always Been a Rambler,” tucked away on a wall. It sounded amazing (time for an early ‘90s Bootleg Series?), and that sort of revelation is everywhere you look.

But the public-facing Center is only the tip of the iceberg (speaking of icebergs, you can also see handwritten early lyrics for “Tempest”). Everything that’s on display still only represents a tiny fraction of the full Dylan archives in Tulsa. So I wanted to learn what else they have.

Not the untold lyric sheets and studio sessions and photos and ephemera, though I’m curious about that too. Since this newsletter focuses on Dylan in concert, I wanted to get more information about their stash of rare and never-heard audio and video recordings of shows, and how fans can hear it.

So I sat down with Parker Fishel, Archivist and Co-Curator of the Bob Dylan Center, to dive deep. No matter how esoteric and specific my questions — and, fair warning, some of them are pretty esoteric and specific — he was a wealth of knowledge.

Again, I am only focusing on live material here, so if you’re looking for more of a broad overview of the Center and archives, I’d check out recent articles in the New York Times and Vanity Fair.

Okay, here’s my conversation with Parker, slightly edited and condensed.

Great article. Thanks. That 1981 Blowin’ in the Wind footage is incredible.

Nice! Thanks dow!

But most of that (1974) tour was recorded

This is especially great news. Except for certain numbers, I never liked Dylan's singing on the later shows, and for the most part that's where all the circulating soundboards have come from. (They're also the source for the official live album.) The earlier show had better performances from him and some better, more interesting songs too - the highlight would be Dylan's solo "Nobody 'Cept You," and if they have at least a soundboard recording of one of the best takes, that would be incredible.

*earlier shows

Also that's nuts about Supper Club and other "restricted" material - so we can't see the film/video re-issued until Dylan is dead?

Somewhere in the coverage of this opening was a discussion of the "little red books" of early, revealing Blood On The Tracks lyrics: only a rumor at best for most followers, but the Center's got'em.