BOB DYLAN: SPRINGTIME IN NEW YORK: THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 16 1980-1985 (Columbia/Legacy)

(A somewhat different version of this review appeared in WORLD magazine....)

What makes the five-disc Springtime in New York: The Bootleg Series Vol. 16 1980-1985 the most arbitrary of Columbia/Legacy’s Bob Dylan Bootleg Series installments to date is that what Dylan was doing in 1980 and ’81 had little to do with what he was doing in ’83, ’84, and ’85. 

Making it more arbitrary yet is that, having exhausted his ability or desire to write and sing exclusively about Jesus, he ended up writing and singing about practically everything else, leaving fans with a pile of recordings never meant to endure public scrutiny through which to sift in search of inexplicably discarded gems.

And, Dylan’s being Dylan, they’ll find some.

 

How many they’ll find on Disc One depends on how much they enjoy Self Portrait. Like that odds-and-ends collection, these dozen tour-rehearsal recordings plus one Shot of Love outtake find Dylan revisiting songs from his own catalogue and debuting the impressive forbidden-love original “Let’s Keep It Between Us” while trying on traditional numbers and other people’s hits for size. 

 

Some fit better than others. “To Ramona” blooms in a full-band context, “Mary of the Wild Moor” would’ve been at home on Good As I Been to You, and “Jesus Met the Woman at the Well” throws elbows. The songs originally made famous by Neil Diamond, Dion, Dave Mason, Little Willie John, and Michael Johnson, however, don’t fit at all.  

 

The highlight of Disc Two’s Shot of Love outtakes isn’t an outtake at all but an alternate mix of “Lenny Bruce,” raising the question of why more such mixes, which have long been known to exist, weren’t included. (Maybe Sony’s saving them for a copyright-extending 50^th-anniversary Shot of Love bundle in 2031.) 

 

Also not bad: the “Willie and the Hand Jive” re-write “Price of Love,” the “Heart of Mine” B-side “Let It Be Me,” “Don’t Ever Take Yourself Away,” “Borrowed Time,” and “Is It Worth It?” (which probably got axed because of its resemblance to “Dead Man, Dead Man”—and because Dylan cracks up mid-song).

 

The pickings get slimmer on the last three discs as most of what they contain ended up on 1983’s Infidels and 1985’s Empire Burlesque with less arbitrary (that word again) lyrics, better production, or both. Even the Shadows in the Night-anticipating cover of Frank Sinatra’s’ “This Was My Love” suffers from Dylan’s not yet having learned to sing such material with the necessary sensitivity. 

 

In fact, knowing how to sing even his own material had by 1985 become an issue. Four years shy of the evocative lower register that he’d unveil on Oh Mercy, he often defaulted to the kind of braying that ruins both Disc Five takes of “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky.”

 

But sometimes he made the braying work. (See “Straight A’s in Love.”) And sometimes he reined it in. On both the alternate “Blind Willie McTell” and the full-length “Death Is Not the End,” his voice and harmonica generate a calm in the face of doom that truly passes understanding.

Bob Dylan's Top-Five Songs Beginning with "K"

1. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (from Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, 1973). Well, this was bound to happen eventually: Dylan hasn’t recorded five songs starting with K. Chances are, though, even if he had, that this amazingly resilient classic would’ve topped the K chart. In a sense, it barely exists. Not only do its two verses, two refrains, and essentially only seven lines make it seem over before it begins, but its ghostly sound descends with all the incorporeality of a long black cloud beyond which there may be nothing and is all the more moving for doing so. (Albeit not nearly as moving as the version Warren Zevon would cast to The Wind exactly thirty years later.)

2. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (from Bob Dylan Is the One, 1981). I’m not cheating by treating this version as a different song: Except for (most of) the lyrics, it is a different song. And the (few) different lyrics make a difference. By changing the last line of each refrain to “just like so many times before,” he linked being the property of Jesus to the rest of the chain he’d forged over the course of his then forty-year life. But it was by extending the music into an upbeat reggae jam in a major key with gospel background singers maing joyful noises that he really distanced this version from its namesakes.

3. “Sitting on a Barbed-Wire Fence” (1966). Yeah, I know this song’s title starts with S, but before it made its official debut on Disc Two of the first Bootleg box, it was a.k.a. “Barbed Wire Fence” or “Killing Me Alive.” And since I’m already through with the B’s and like five other S songs better, I thought I’d deal with this song here. As music it’s the funkiest wild mercury blues ever captured while it was rolling, Bob. As words it’s simply four (more) disconnected glimpses into the smoke rings of Dylan’s mind--disconnected, that is, unless what Dylan’s woman is killing him alive with in Verse Three ex[lains why he has to get a shot from an Arabian doctor in Verse Two. P.S.: The changes he made in the lyrics before he officially published them make for inferior reading, but, lucky us, those aren't the ones he recorded (or else this song's alternate title would be "Thrilling Me with Her Drive" and I'd have to wait until the T songs and bump "Things Have Changed" or "This Dream of You" to write about it).

4. “Kingsport Town” (1962). I don’t know how many songwriters were coming up with interracial Romeo-and-Juliet scenarios in 1962 and setting them in the almost completely white town of Kingsport, Tennessee, but I’m sure there were more people writing such songs than singing them. Decent young white men--or at least those who didn’t go looking for reasons to be chased out of town by the high sheriff--just didn’t do things like falling for a girl with dark eyes, curly coal-black hair, and sandy-colored skin. Surely, the subject matter is the main reason the song became an early-Dylan outtake; it couldn’t have been the performance or Dylan’s singing, both of which are among the sweetest and most tender in his long and impressive catalogue of gotta-travel-on songs addressed to women he forgot to remember to forget.

5. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (from Real Live Outtakes, 1984). I’m cheating a little by treating this version as a different song. Except for the musicians, the absence of gospel women, and the age of the singer’s voice (and maybe some lyrics--the last verse is hard to make out), it successfully recreates the sunny buoyancy of the version on Bob Dylan Is the One. But the age of the singer’s voice matters. In ’81, when Dylan still had at least one foot in pulpit-pounder territory, he sang like someone who fully believed that if he knocked, the door would be opened unto him. By ’84 he was singing as if he’d been so much older in '81 and was younger than that now. (By ’97, he was simply trying to get to the door before it closed.)

(Bob Dylan's Top-Five Songs Beginning with "J": http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2010/08/bob-dylans-top-five-songs-beginning_06.html)

Bob Dylan: Tell Tale Signs (2008)

A version of this review appeared in WORLD magazine in November 2008. This version is better.

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Two different portraits of Bob Dylan have emerged from the series of Dylan “bootleg” recordings released by Columbia Records during the last seventeen years. One is a confident live performer for whom the stage is the ideal setting for raising his incendiary blend of folk, blues, and rock and roll to a fever pitch. The other is the man behind the curtain, a studio-ensconced singer-songwriter who frequently struggles to capture on tape what he hears in his head.

It’s the latter Dylan who emerges from the twenty-seven tracks comprising the just-released Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8, Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006. Consisting mainly of trial-run versions of songs intended for the albums Oh Mercy, World Gone Wrong, Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, and Modern Times, Tell Tale Signs calls to mind something that Dylan himself once sang: “What looks large from a distance / close up ain’t never that big.”

He has, in other words, gotten by with a little--and in some cases a lot--of help from his friends. The skeletal versions of “Most of the Time,” “Dignity,” “Can’t Wait,” “Everything Is Broken,” and “Series of Dreams” included on Tell Tale Signs’ standard two-disc edition reveal how large a role the producer Daniel Lanois played in turning those songs into haunting and powerful highlights of Dylan’s latter-day canon. And Don and David Was, whom many (Dylan included) have disparaged for their production on Under the Red Sky, would seem to deserve praise as well. Both “Born in Time” and “God Knows” sounded richer after the Wases got through with them. Then there are the filmmakers whose requests for a soundtrack song have spurred Dylan to creativity. Curtis Hanson, Ronald F. Maxwell, and Niki Caro elicited from him “Huck’s Tune” (Lucky You), “’Cross the Green Mountain” (Gods and Generals), and “Tell Ol’ Bill” (North Country) respectively, each of which Tell Tale Signs includes in its original or alternate rendition.

Perhaps foreshadowing future Bootleg Series volumes, there is one song apiece--“Miss the Missippi” and a live “Ring Them Bells”--from two completed but never-released Dylan projects: an album of standards recorded with the producer David Bromberg in 1992 and a series of concerts taped at New York’s Supper Club in 1993. Ironically, the “finished” quality of these songs points up both the unfinished quality of many of the others herein and the extent to which Tell Tale Signs’ appeal will probably be limited to hardcore, arcana-mongering Dylan enthusiasts.

At least one Time Out of Mind outtake, however, “Red River Shore,” seems as finished as any of that album’s intakes. A moving, country-folk recollection of lost love, it was probably disqualified because at nearly eight minutes it wouldn’t have fit on what was already a seventy-three-minute album. Then again, maybe the faith and hope implicit in its last verse simply seemed out of place among what Dylan has called the “skepticism” and concern with “dread realities” conjured by the other songs. “Now, I’ve heard of a guy who lived a long time ago,” he sings, “a man full of sorrow and strife. Then if someone around him died and was dead, / he knew how to bring ’em back to life.”

For a songwriter whose “gospel phase” had supposedly ended over a decade earlier, those lines may be the most tell-tale sign of all.

Bob Dylan: Live 1966: The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert (The Bootleg Series, Volume 4) (Columbia/Legacy)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer)

Hype something too long and, even if it turns out to be one of the greatest rock-and-roll performances of all time (as this long-awaited Dylan two-disc live set most certainly is), its impact will be diminished. In the thirty-two years since Dylan and the Hawks (later the Band) performed these fifteen songs at Manchester's Free Trade Hall (hence the quotation marks around "Royal Albert Hall" in the title), several--and in some cases many--less legendary but almost-as-good versions of these songs have implanted themselves in the minds of Dylan's fans, rendering these versions only marginally more impressive.

For instance, in the case of the acoustic "Visions of Johanna" and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" and the electric "I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)," nearly identical and contemporaneous versions have been available legitimately on Biograph since 1985 (with bootlegs of the rest available starting at $20 since the Johnson administration). So instead of recommending itself more to hard-core fans than dabblers, as most archival sets by established artists tend to do, this document will probably prove more revelatory to neo-Dylanites than to old-timers.

Or maybe not. The disc containing the electric performances of songs such as "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Ballad of a Thin Man" that drove the folkie purists nuts is wonderful. Dylan's druggy singing and the Hawks' rugged, densely textured swirl provide both a captivating reflection of those ever-a-changin' times and a powerful example of why electricity is man's best friend. As for the notoriously finicky crowd, its main fault wasn't its vociferous disapproval of the plugged-in Dylan but its reverential awe at the feet of the unplugged one. Like, anyone who doesn't laugh at the line in "Visions of Johanna" about the jelly-faced woman with the mustache who sneezed and couldn't find her knees is really uptight, man.

Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 (1991)

(As published in Brian Q. Newcomb's Harvest Rock Syndicate in 1991)

Columbia's 1985 Bob Dylan box, Biograph, emphasized greatest hits and other career high points, with even its outtakes and live versions sounding fine. The Bootleg Series, on the other hand, is less careful, offering both completed, masterly songs that were left off official LPs and tentative, half-finished or half-hearted songs that were never intended for release.

In terms of the trajectory of Dylan's career, therefore, The Bootleg Series tells us mainly what we already know: that he began as an interpreter of folk protest, developed into a writer of the same, went electric (and surreal), went Woodstock, got great songs out of a failing marriage, got saved, and intermittently wandered the wilderness in search of God knows what.

In terms of Dylan the artist, though, Bootleg punctures one very persistent myth: that Dylan (or his record company) has routinely left revelatory masterpieces off his official albums and that only with a thorough familiarity with the "underground Dylan" can we get the naked truth.

It turns out that the truth wears clothes. The early versions of "Tangled Up in Blue," "Idiot Wind," and "If You See Her, Say Hello," for instance, included here from the original (never released) Blood on the Tracks sessions, are notably inferior to their official counterparts in everything from musicianship and execution to imagery and phrasing, and at a combined length of nineteen-and-a-half minutes, they're too much of nothing.

The same goes for the "Tight Connection to My Heart" prototype "Someone's Got a Hold iof My Heart" and the publishing demos or botched takes of such Dylan warhorses as "The Times They Are A-Changin'," "Subterranean Homesick Blues," "Like a Rolling Stone," "When the Ship Comes In," and "Every Grain of Sand," the last of which, if not quite a warhorse, is hardly a new pony (and certainly not a dog, although during it one barks in full digital clarity).

Which still leaves over forty songs known until now only to obscurantists, and many of them do deserve to see the light. "Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues" (1962) and "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" (1963) are funny and, in some ways, still relevant ("Talkin' Don Wildmon Paranoid Blues," anyone?). And "Worried Blues," "No More Auction Block," and "Moonshiner" (1962-'63) are among Dylan's richest interpretations of folk standards. From the classic electric period, we get the magnificent "Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence," a truncated but exuberant "She's Your Lover Now," and the Europe-only single version of "If You Gotta Go, Go Now" (which, it turns out, is not the version that's been circulating semi-legitimately on those cheap Italian White Wonder cassettes for over a decade).

But perhaps the most pleasant surprise is how the dozen-or-so good-to-great performances on Disc Three, covering the Slow Train years to the present, argue persuasively that neither Jesus nor age has taken the edge off Dylan's blade. If "Ye Shall Be Changed" (1979) and "You Changed My Life" (1981) are almost glib in their new-believer zeal, "Need a Woman" (1981), "Lord, Protect My Child," and "Foot of Pride" (both 1983) are raw and tough-minded in their biblical resolve. Furthermore, the much-acclaimed "Blind Willie McTell" is as strong as it's been rumored to be, and the lone Oh Mercy outtake, "Series of Dreams," magnificently updates the apocalyptic imagery of "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" amid Daniel Lanois's maelstrom of echo-laden drums and guitars.

Of course, with chronological order the only organizing factor, it's unlikely that anyone will enjoy these discs all the way through or in their original sequence as much as he would with a finger on the programming button. Or, to put it another way, composed asit is of cutting-room clippings, The Bootleg Series isn't so much a self-portrait as it is a series of long looks behind the curtain of a most beguiling wizard.