Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series

Yeah, I was shocked at how great Another Self Portrait was...although, I haven't played the actual Self Portrait disc more than once.

also tell-tale signs had a lot of gems on it and held together

in a way i almost prefer the ones from less "classic" eras because they tend to reframe his career in interesting ways

yeah tell tale signs and ASP are definitely the most interesting Bootleg Series releases -- even moreso since there was a ton of stuff on each that had never been bootlegged.

those and the first bootleg release

One spin of the original Self-Portrait is about right, although I wouldn't mind hearing "Days of '49" again.

another self portrait is probably the dylan thing i've listened to the most in the past 4-5 years ... so great.

If The Complete Basement Tapes counts re the regular Bootleg Series, it's def one of the best therein (even if you've got A Tree With Roots, cause there's even more songs and also for inst a longer "Bourbon Street" and better sound)
Also Vol. 1-3, if that's the one subtitled Series of Dreams.

But yeah wow what I've heard of Another S-P (gotta get the version w Isle of Wight, right?)

i mean, they're all great, let's be real.

Also---seems like I've seen this listed as part of the Bootleg Series, although it was Japan-only (nevertheless, some good prices for second-hand online). Seems like it should be in there, with lots of OOP and prev. unreleased, plus cherrypicks from legit oldies (sure wish they'd incl. more from the OOP Tribute To Woody Guthrie, like the scorched earth "I Ain't Got No Home" and cathartic "Dear Mrs. Roosevelt", electric as hell):
https://www.discogs.com/Bob-Dylan-Live-1961-2000-Thirty-Nine-Years-Of-Great-Concert-Performances/release/2582881

yeah that one is pretty haphazard, but has plenty of good stuff on it. the "tryin to get to heaven" is fantastic. and anyone skeptical about a gospel era bootleg series should check the "dead man" and "slow train" included.

(durr, not tryin to get to heaven, cold irons bound)

that heavy, excellent performance of "Cold Irons Bound" was floating around the US as a promo-only (?) single, around the time of the album's Japan-only release.

Light blue label, y'all may remember it...

this one?

https://www.discogs.com/Bob-Dylan-Love-Sick/master/363988

i think a lot of that 1961-200 comp was drawn from a brief late 90s/early 00s period when Dylan's web people were putting up a ton of real audio rarities from the vaults.

Yeah. Hi Sleeve, there were several CD singles & EPs with some or all of the tracks in your link; the only version I've still got is this: https://www.discogs.com/Bob-Dylan-Million-Miles-Live-Recordings-1997-1999/release/2884949

Still dying for the complete Masked & Anonymous sessions. Whotta band!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hO-83CIVKM
^^if there's more of this I'm all in, must've seen that clip a thousand times

niels I just went down a Bob Dylan YouTube rabbithole and it was v v rewarding - thank you

so happy to hear that!

Goddamn if Bob doesn't deliver that sublime song with the cold dead sneer I had always pictured. And that band clicks like a detonator.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fqi9BNl1OhA
^^this is a decent jam, how come it's not on the vols 1-3 release? is it on any official release?

I just finished listening to the 6CD set of VOL 12: THE CUTTING EDGE.

It took me 10 months, on and off, and with playing songs and discs over and over again.
Finally reached 'sad eyed lady of the lowlands' and don't need to hear it more than once -- a peculiarly unappealing song to me, almost uniquely in this Dylan era.

But the whole box set (leaving aside the longer version which is probably too much even for me) seems like the best music reissue I've ever heard, and unparalleled for sheer history-making studio excitement.

Just realizing for the first time that 'Visions of Johanna' used to be fast R&B was a typical revelation, though true deep Dylan fans will have known it for 40 years.

I haven't read or heard any discussion of it at all - I will now look for some on this thread.

'66 world tour box out today; Times has a thing on the recent promotional film w prev. unreleased footage, and interview w the guy who recorded all the shows (also some audio for Eat The Document etc) http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/arts/music/bob-dylan-1966-live-recordings-video.html?_r=0

xpost - yeah that visions of johanna kinda ruined me on the album version

saw a listing for the "real" albert hall show

that short doc is great -- but it just makes me want to have a full-length doc devoted to the 66 tour (i know there's a lot already on no direction home, but it still seems like they could do a devoted film).
really want that 66 set, but probably will have to wait til xmas.

yeah i mean i've wanted to hear the 2 version of the album (ny and minneapolis) sorted by date in their entirety since forever

― blonde redheads have more fun (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, October 21, 2016 11:47 AM (three weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lolol

???

i meant to hear the new york sessions as a complete album
and the minneapolis sessions as a complete album
because the formal release is a mix of both

Good-sized sampler from '66 box, though I haven't listened yet: http://www.npr.org/2016/11/03/500057219/first-listen-bob-dylan-the-1966-live-recordings

Not too interested in the box yet, since it's 36 versions of the same set list, or pretty close, at least, with no particular room for jams, so not like buying 36 versions of a Dead set---right?

Wesley Stace's WSJ coverage of Robbie Robertson's new Testimony is mostly Dylan-centric; says the book ends with The Last Waltz, which is prob okay with a lot of readers.
Excerpts:
This digital version incl Isle of Wight, except a few more tracks can find if put in bob dylan isle of wight https://www.amazon.com/Another-Self-Portrait-1969-1971-Bootleg/dp/B00EO9ZFGW/ref=dp_olp_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1477005428&sr=1-1%26lt%3B%2Fa%26gt%3B
Used box set, doesn’t have all the Isle of Wight tracks? Has all that are in the digital version listed above, but more expensive but more durable
https://www.amazon.com/Another-Self-Portrait-1969-1971-Bootleg/dp/B00DY951RQ
Re Dylan, noted and quoted (see about Alz affecting speech more than memory, look up)
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/10/24/1960s-pop-singer-bobby-vee-has-died-at-age-73

http://www.wsj.com/articles/on-the-road-with-dylan-1478900285
By
WESLEY STACE
Updated Nov. 11, 2016 6:08 p.m. ET
Robbie Robertson, the lead guitarist and main songwriter of the Band, is in the unenviable position of never having been much of a singer. (He posits asthma as a factor.) Luckily, the Band was blessed with three of the greatest vocalists of the rock era (Rick Danko,Richard Manuel and Levon Helm), who were able to give his beautiful melodies and lyrics their fullest possible emotional expression. In “Testimony,” however, the “voice” is not in question. Robust, wry, gritty and wise to the vicissitudes of a career in rock ’n’ roll, it is just what the reader wants, marred only occasionally by stiff dialogue.
TESTIMONY
By Robbie Robertson
Crown Archetype, 500 pages, $30

...“Testimony” comes 23 years after drummer Levon Helm’s memoir “This Wheel’s on Fire,” notable partly for its extremely negative portrayal of Mr. Robertson. Of that book, Mr. Dylan enthused: “You’ve got to read this!” The blurbs here are by Mr. Scorsese and David Geffen, neatly delineating the great divide in the Band. But after the deaths of Manuel (suicide, 1986), Danko (heart failure, 1999) and Helm (throat cancer, 2012)—which triumvirate he often pits himself against in his memoir—Robertson is one of the two men left standing (along with keyboardist Garth Hudson). His may be the last word.
The haphazardly collaborative nature of the Band’s work, and the natural disinclination of most of the members to deal with business, led to arguments over songwriting credits, a feud that Helm took to the grave. Resentments had long simmered: The film “The Last Waltz” seemed contrived to put Mr. Robertson center-stage, as the genius Mr. Scorsese clearly believed him to be, yet he was the only member of the Band who actually wanted that Waltz to be the Last. His Band-mates were happy to play on, and this was by no means the final Band concert, though it was the last to feature Mr. Robertson. If you saw a later incarnation of the group, you heard precisely what you would have wanted to hear: the singers singing their beloved songbook accompanied by a great rhythm section. If anything, one later felt the lack of Manuel more than of Mr. Robertson.
Half-Jewish, half-Mohawk, Jaime Royal Robertson was brought up on the streets of Toronto and on the Six Nations Indian Reserve, where he was “introduced to serious storytelling. . . . The oral history, the legends, the fables, and the great holy mystery of life.” The reader might suppress a groan, but add to the mix a steel-trap memory and a muddled childhood—featuring two fathers, numerous gangsters, alcoholism and some diamond smuggling—and you have the makings of a Dickensian bildungsroman.
“Testimony” next becomes a bible of road lore, a lurid coming-of-age story that veers wildly between the sweet and the brutal and a how-not-to guide to running a band. The Hawks, formed at the whim of Arkansawyer Ronnie Hawkins, who enjoyed regular residencies in Toronto, take off on the road, and the craziness of these early days is presented in brilliant Technicolor, with Helm cast as blood brother and Hawkins as amoral Virgil. A 16-year-old Mr. Robertson, too young to frequent any of the joints he’s playing, descends into an underworld of torched nightclubs (the arsonists thoughtfully remove Leon Russell’s band’s equipment before they light the match), bitten-off nipples (word to the wise: Don’t “taste her milkshake” while traversing bumpy terrain in the back seat of a car) and a vast choice of artificial stimulation.
As for Mr. Dylan, a key attraction, the book offers a refreshing account all the better for starting no earlier than the recording of “Like a Rolling Stone,” to which Mr. Robertson was escorted by producer John Hammond Jr. in 1965. Here is by far the fullest first-person account of the early electric tours of Mr. Dylan, not to mention an astonishing tale of a “passed out sitting up” Mr. Dylan, “deliriously exhausted” after the final date of the emotionally and physically exhausting 1966 tour, whom Robbie and Mr. Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, try to revive him in a bathtub (returning once to find him submerged) while four Beatles await an audience in the adjacent hotel room. The account of Mr. Dylan’s 1966 motorcycle accident is refreshingly lucid, as is that of the subsequent making of “The Basement Tapes,” as the Band improvises around Bob’s “vibing vocables.”
The Nobel Prize winner himself will probably not opine on Mr. Robertson’s livelier claims, among which is that he clothed Mr. Dylan (the classic ’66 houndstooth tweed: “Bob didn’t seem like much of a suit guy, but Lou [the designer] was on top of his game”); suggested the iconoclastic cover design of “Blonde on Blonde”; gave Mr. Dylan’s song “Obviously Five Believers” its title, adding that witty adverb—both positively (4th Street) and absolutely (Sweet Marie) something Mr. Dylan might have come up with himself; finished the editing of Mr. Dylan’s film “Eat the Document”; taught the neophyte rocker how to stretch guitar strings to keep them in tune; and saved Mr. Dylan from his musical self (by refusing to clutter the sparse perfection of “John Wesley Harding” with the requested overdubs). And of course he is responsible for creating the circumstances, and ambience, that brought the “The Basement Tapes” into existence. I am not suggesting that these claims aren’t true, merely that the abundance of them becomes slightly comical.
Occasionally one has the impression that Mr. Robertson is tiptoeing around awkward issues, always to the detriment of the book: Helm’s 1993 account of the various delegations sent in to get Mr. Dylan onstage at “The Last Waltz” is agonizing (the singer didn’t like it assumed that he had given his consent to being filmed, fearing a conflict with a forthcoming movie of his own, “Renaldo and Clara,” shot the previous year). But Mr. Robertson barely scratches the surface, preferring to deal with the technical problems involved in creating the movie.
Mr. Robertson’s writing about music, either from inside looking out or simply from the point of view of an audience member at a Bo Diddley or Velvet Underground concert, can be beautiful, as when, in the closing pages, he pays full tribute to each Band member and their role within the overall sound, repeating, as if in litany, “God only made one of those.” Here “Testimony” becomes a testimonial, and the effect is redemptive. Generosity suits him, and whatever the truth, “Testimony” is a graceful epitaph.​
—Mr. Stace is an author and musician who has also recorded under the name John Wesley Harding.

Sorry for that stuff in front! Didn't mean to copy and paste the whole file.

No problem. Bought this at lunch and so far have read the first three chapters. Really well done. Who'd have thought?

speaking of xpost The Real Royal Albert Hall 1966 Concert, it's out now. Prices for formats seem okay, vinyl cheaper than most new LPs from Big Names these days, I guess (on Amazon, that is):

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61gGIrtrGzL._SX355_.jpg

Is it good?

Yes, I'm tempted by this

It's on Spotify

"we'd like to dedicate this song to the Taj Mahal"

Isn't that included in the giant set?

Aw, he's so frustrated on this one.

"This is called 'Yes I See You've Got Your-'" *people in crowd start shouting* "oh. oh god."

the "Ballad Of A Thin Man" on this set is amazing iirc

Any significant difference (other than location) from The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert ?

Nobody yells "Judas!"

Ha, exactly. Haven't listened yet but figured that must be the case.

I think I might prefer this version of "Like A Rolling Stone" to the Judas one. He sings it even angrier. He's really spitting out the words at the end.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/10/arts/bob-dylan-skips-nobel-prize-ceremonies.html?_r=0

Or was this on another Dylan thread:

Invoking William Shakespeare, whom Mr. Dylan imagined to have been too consumed with practical matters — “How should this be staged?” “Where am I going to get a human skull?” — to bother with whether what he was doing was literature, Mr. Dylan wrote: “I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life’s mundane matters. ‘Who are the best musicians for these songs?’ ‘Am I recording in the right studio?’ ‘Is this song in the right key?’ Some things never change, even in 400 years.

“Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, ‘Are my songs literature?’” Mr. Dylan, 75, concluded. “So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.”

Any significant difference (other than location) from The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert ?
it's pretty impressive how different both hudson's and robertson's solos are from night to night -- you'd think they'd have just locked in by the end of the tour, having played the same setlist every night for weeks, but they still find new approaches. it's awesome.

Isn't that included in the giant set?

― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, 10 December 2016 20:49 (two days ago)

Yes. But not everyone wants the giant set. Or: it may be nice to buy a few gigs individually.