Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series

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.

New Bootleg Series Vol. 17, "Fragments: The "Time Out Of Mind" Sessions (1996-1997)" will be out in January, 2023. The compilation will include outtakes and live material, as well as a completely remixed version of the album. pic.twitter.com/FC2RmNvYO2

— Definitely Dylan (@DefDylan) October 31, 2022

Speculation on another forum is that the format for the 5CDs will be:

Disc 1 - Remix
Disc 2 - Outtakes and Alternates
Disc 3 - Outtakes and Alternates
Disc 4 - Live (1998-2001)
Disc 5 - Bonus Disc: Previously Released (assumption that this will be stuff from Vol. 8 and other places)

Nice. Get that Lanois sound out of the mix! (just kidding... sort of)

I love the Lanois sound but on reflection, I would like to hear the LP without it.

I'm not 100% sure if the content of that tweet above is genuine. Are others?

Well, the H0ffmanites (lol) are running with it and they've generally been otm with these when the early rumors start to leak. If not the exact details, they've generally always been correct about the focus and general content.

I think Jim Dickinson might have sparked interest in a remix decades ago and it snowballed from there. He openly discussed how he didn't like the released mix and how it could've been a whole lot better, and given that it's Lanois producing, quite a few people have speculated what a remix would sound like. The earlier mixdowns of Oh Mercy songs on Tell Tale Signs definitely benefitted from less tinkering by Lanois, so I can see the same thing happening here.

think it was Auggie Meyers who heard time out of mind and said "that's not the record I played on!"

i like the lanois murk, but yeah, i also like the more open sound of the tell tale signs stuff, so I can see a remix being good. not a replacement for the original but good.

I love the album, can’t stand Lanois, but don’t necessarily dislike his production here. There are moments when it feels extremely self-conscious and overbearing — if he’d dialed back the swampy slapback just a little it would be a major improvement. It’s telling that 30+ years after the launch of the Bootleg Series, this is the only time where Dylan’s all, “oh shit, we gotta remix that.”

I actually substituted three tracks from Time Out of Mind on iTunes, but in those cases, it was either a better song ("Red River Shore" over "Make You Feel My Love") or simply a much better performance and arrangement rather than just a remix ("Can't Wait"'s 'studio demo' on Disc 1 of Tell Tale Signs and "Cold Irons Bounds" from the later recording with Charlie Sexton et al on Masked & Anonymous).

Also, Rob Stoner posted something about Dylan on social media recently - apparently he heard an early version of "Make You Feel My Love" way back in 1978! It was one of Dylan's "B songs" - stuff he didn't want to record himself but tried to give to other artists, and what Stoner heard was Dylan playing it on a piano for Robert Gordon, who passed on it and everything else Dylan offered him because they didn't really fit him.

xp - Also that "graphic design is my passion" looking ass box is totally in line with recent sets.

xp Ha yeah, I saw that. If it's true, that'd be pretty unique for Bob — a few exceptions aside ("Mississippi" for one) he usually leaves old songs behind. It'd be like if he decided to record "Farewell Angelina" for Empire Burlesque.

I think Lanois productions can be pretty misleading. They're often a lot more "natural" and less tinkered with than people think they are. He's not as much of an Eno as his partnership with Eno would have you believe.

As I understand it, on "Time" Dylan (and/or band) would often record in a room with a relatively clean amp sound, or at least with few effects. But then Lanois would also send the signal to a different room, or through a different amp, with different sounds and effects. And then he could pick and choose and mix between the different setups in the final mix. Something like that, which I imagine means a remix could be pretty fruitful.

So, like, Dylan would hear it one way when he played, but it would sound a different way in a different room. Unless I'm confusing it with a different session.

I'm not a Dylan fan, but I've really been enjoying listening to selected Jokermen episodes. And I was struck by how remarkably terrible Lanois' production was on some of those records.

Also I'm looking forward to the book, even though I don't write songs or listen to Bob Dylan.

TOOM was the first one I bought in the store when it came out, so I'm not sure I can be objective. But do think Dylan's own production post-TOOM is far better.

think it was Auggie Meyers who heard time out of mind and said "that's not the record I played on!"

Duke Robillard said something to the effect that he played guitar on most of the songs, but the only parts that made the record were bits that bled in from other people's mics. He later got Dylan's permission to record a cover of "Love Sick" using the arrangement they'd started with before Lanois started exercising his influence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGc0iAcnJlA

Got the Dylan book today. I like it, but it’s not something I can power through. I think i’ll do a song a day, listening to it first. It’s written in his Theme Time Radio Hour voice, which I appreciate.

apparently he heard an early version of "Make You Feel My Love" way back in 1978! It was one of Dylan's "B songs" -

ha it's def. one of his B (I would even say C) songs

I don't care for the song or most of its covers, but the one Adele album I really like is 19 and "Make You Feel My Love" actually fits pretty well in there. Adele makes something of it and it's probably the only time I really enjoy that song from anyone.

the Uncut pieces on TooM some of the most hilarious and fascinating reads, hope more stories surface, could read a book on these recordings:

I mean, by that point, Jim Keltner is there playing drums, Brian Blade is there playing drums, and Tony Mangurian is there playing drums – three drummers going on at the same time, five guitar players, pedal steel, organ, piano, all these people. Dan had put together a band, and then Dylan had put out the call for these guys like Jim Dickinson, Augie Meyers, Duke Robillard, Cindy Cashdollar. Dylan brought in all these Nashvile people, and I think that made Dan a little mental having all these Nashville strummers strumming, it was a bit too much. As I’m sure Jim Dickinson has said, there were a lot of ingredients in there that you don’t actually hear on the record, because things were filtered down so we could take a cleaner path on some of them.

https://www.uncut.co.uk/features/bob-dylan-tell-tale-signs-special-mark-howard-37964/

Time Out of Mind set officially confirmed for release on January 27th.

Impressive set:

https://www.bobdylan.com/news/fragments-time-out-of-mind-sessions-1996-1997-to-be-released-on-january-27/

Am I correct that a lot of the outtakes already appeared on Vol 8? Or is the version numbering off - for instance on Red River Shore?

Go through the link I posted - all of the Vol. 8 stuff is included, but it's all isolated on Disc Five. Except for one live cut that was used as a B-side, everything else is newly released content.

I did, I just misread the dates of some of the versions and thought they were the same version on the same date. Not sure why they are using version instead of take here (maybe because it's not really a live take with all the protools being used).

Yeah, the "version" tracking is really nebulous. It becomes really confusing with these follow-up releases that cover the same ground.

Turns out that tweet and the speculation about the contents was pretty much dead on.

Jesus, $140 for the 5CD version!

I think that's pretty standard? That's what the 5CD Infidels set cost, which I bought (*checks old email*) around a year ago... tho I had Amoeba credit, and only paid $23.50 out of pocket.

Maybe it is, but I thought I paid just around $100 for it, could be wrong. I usually tried to time these Dylan boxes with coupons at like Barnes & Noble or whatever. $140 even on Amazon just seemed high at first blush, particularly when one of the five is all previously released.

Unless you want vinyl, I would wait. All of his super deluxe sets eventually come down quite a bit on the secondary market, usually as much as half.

I'm not familiar with the Australian "Highlands" performance that they included. The live version in general beats the album version.

Here's one that name-checks Annie Lennox instead of Neil Young:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm4ItXeKRvA

I’m pretty excited for the remix; Lanois’ mix is definitive but I’ve often wanted to push aside the murk. Such a pillar of his catalogue.

xp exception to the rule:
https://www.discogs.com/release/2808192-Bob-Dylan-Tell-Tale-Signs-Rare-And-Unreleased-1989-2006

look forward to (more) alternate versions of Mississippi, Cold Irons Bound, Highlands

price will come down, I'm sure. Looks good! And that "Love Sick" sounds sick! was revisiting Tell Tale Signs this week and it was definitely getting me fired up for more.

Sort of optimistic about the live disc maybe opening the floodgates for more curated neverending tour kinda things. Maybe it won't happen, but it would be cool!

I hope so too but there's a Rolling Stone interview from September 2017 that suggested such a release may not be worth it because the bootlegs out there may sound better:

NEVER-ENDING TOUR: Future chapters of the Bootleg Series might chronicle [...] some sort of examination of the Never Ending Tour. The latter is a particularly challenging project since it involves over 2,800 concerts between 1988 and the present day. Dylan's road crew has been recording shows dating back to the beginning of the Never Ending Tour, but the quality of them up until the mid-2000's is less than stellar. "Some of them are recorded on DAT or other formats of the moment," says the source. "Who knew they wouldn't last? For a lot of years during the 1990s, there were these two fans and they would go and each would wear recording equipment in their hats and they'd sit in different sections so that the stuff would be stereo. Those tapes sound better than our board tapes." (September 2017)

On Tell Tale Signs, the stuff recorded after Charlie Sexton left in 2002 sounds GREAT, but it's telling that "Lonesome Day Blues" sounds like an audience recording with some additional processing.

for me Tell Tale Signs is the most revelatory and allround enjoyable bootleg series release since 1-3 (honourable mentions vol. 4 aka The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert and Another Self Portrait)

Love Sick version 2 perhaps a bit dragging but great sound! (not a big fan of the song itself hehe)

That Love Sick is fun.

TOOM was the first Dylan album to be released after I had become a superfan, so it made a big impact. I still didn't know his post-Desire stuff that well and the story was he had just nearly died from the heart infection, so I had pretty low expectations. Love Sick seemed like such a surprise gut-punch way to start the album - all menace, murk, and croak. I still remember where I was when my friend played it for me. I turned to him 30 seconds in and said, "who is this guy, Lazarus?"

His voice had been getting thinner and drier in ways which led everyone to write him off as a spent force, and then I heard this album and realised oh shit, this is a whole new kind of power. So many songs are all time favourites, “Not Dark Yet”, “Highlands”, “Can’t Wait”, “Dirt Road Blues”, “Cold Irons Bound”. And then the absolute turd in the soup, “To Make You Feel My Love“.

Lanois may deserve some of the credit, I know at minimum he used the exact same mic he used for Oh Mercy, but it really helps that Oh Mercy was the first "quiet" album Dylan had done in a while where the songs are hushed and he isn't singing over a band that's completely rocking out. (It's more impressive with Time Out of Mind because they had so many people playing at once.)

I really like his voice on these two tracks from that third disc on the deluxe Tell Tale Signs that cost way too much money - a lighter mix of "Most of the Time" that I would've preferred for the final album and the same take of "Ring Them Bells" without the shimmering overdubs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdKup-Z4obQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHWp_xxnGgY

"Some of them are recorded on DAT or other formats of the moment," says the source. "Who knew they wouldn't last?

My experience may be unique and/or super lucky, but I have DATs from 1995-2006 that I recently backed up, and out of 100+ tapes there were maybe 4-5 brief (less then a second) dropouts.

Playing MORE BLOOD, MORE TRACKS, the 1CD version (all I have).

I can't really tell the difference between these versions and some others eg the Bootleg vol 3 'tangled up in blue', the original LP 'simple twist of fate'.

The different track order, presumably once intended, inevitably does make a slightly different impression.

The acoustic 'you're a big girl now' is more of a difference from the LP one I know.

'Lily, Rosemary' has always been a blur to me; today I think I heard the lyric properly, start to finish, for the first time, and understood it. Rosemary doesn't seem to get her just deserts. I note Dylan's interest in the Western genre, also arguably in 'Idiot Wind' (listened properly to that lyric also), 'New Danville Girl' (which I believe is also 'Brownsville Girl' (extraordinary lines about Gregory Peck - for the first time in my life this week I've properly listened to and appreciated that song).

I've never liked 'Idiot Wind' very much but the fact that he expands at the end to 'we're idiots' is significant, and makes the song less mean that it would otherwise be.

But my main reflection is that Dylan with this LP wrote in a way that he never did before or since. He had c.12 years of world music stardom behind him, and came up with this approach involving a different tuning (different tunings are never fathomable to me but I think I can hear it), different guitar playing (especially lots of songs that involve guitar figures sliding around, finger shapes going quickly up and down the neck), a different lyrical mood (seeming more open and vulnerable perhaps, while also very detailed and sometimes wildly fictional - 'a parrot that talks'), perhaps different kinds of tunes (tending towards these soaring vocal moments - the 'blind man at the GATE', etc) ...

and then ... he never did it again, in 50 years.

extraordinary lines about Gregory Peck

indeed hillariously excellent, sometimes he can pull off anything

p sure a few of those tracks are identical to the vol 1-3 boots?

the revelation for me was the lazy groove of the band version of ygmmlwyg:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slmCQP75PEo

a beauty

I've never liked 'Idiot Wind' very much but the fact that he expands at the end to 'we're idiots' is significant, and makes the song less mean that it would otherwise be.

I love Idiot Wind, and a lot of what I love about it is that turn at the end and how he leads up to it - the way the initial venomous anger gives way to the sheer pain of "I can't even touch the books you've read," and you see that behind the anger is someone who goes through life flinching away from ordinary things, and behind this monster he's singing to is a real person with a stack of books by her bed. I think of it as a song about the stages of grief & the way we can take refuge in grandiose anger, betrayal, revenge fantasies etc. to avoid facing the reality of loss. And how coming to terms with that loss also means recognizing that the loss and the grief are mutual.

'New Danville Girl' (which I believe is also 'Brownsville Girl' (extraordinary lines about Gregory Peck - for the first time in my life this week I've properly listened to and appreciated that song).

I also overlooked that song until a couple years ago, and it became one of my pandemic listens. I think partly because "surreal and fragmented memories of a long-ago time when I stood in line to watch a movie" seemed very relevant to the moment.

My favorite thing about Brownsville Girl/New Danville Girl is the way it flattens the distinction between real life and fiction, so that it all exists together as part of the same surreal jumble of life experience - driving through the desert and having this relationship and visiting Ruby and standing in line to see a movie and watching the movie are all somehow equivalent, just as there's no real difference between watching the movie and being in the movie, and there's no real difference between Gregory Peck and the character he's playing - it's all equally a part of the narrator's past as he experiences it now.