Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series

“I didn’t like any of the takes from that one,” said the source. “My pipes were shot. The band couldn’t follow my lead. We gave it a few more weeks, then I thought I’d be better off doing this myself. That’s how Jack Frost was born.”

I've always liked this one —

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTtcDE9-4oM

I'd just dive back into one of the bootlegs, there are some great vocals and some bonkers arrangements.

Ok, this Not Dark Yet (Version 1) is as good as the released version in some ways.

feel like this is a digestible comp of some of the best stuff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LxDipG0i1c

Real heads are waiting for the de-Jack Frosted L&T.

thx for that tyler, enjoyable

why did they tape rehearsals? bob doesn't strike me as a person to listen to tapes of his own recordings, much less rehearsals

"The Bootleg Series, that's like a runaway train", said the source. "Calling at Tupelo, Indianapolis, Jackson and Dee-troit. It's a journey into a hog fire at an old cowboy camp". Indicating that further releases were unlikely, the source added: "The brakeman's waving his red flag and the lines have been crossed. The pistons are wheezing and you're on the way down. The smokestack's powering on sending those black clouds into the Western sky, but you know it's coming to an end at the next railhead. There's whisky in the next saloon and you can't wait".

Loool!

Hahaha you've got a gift

those early 60s gigs mentioned (I suppose the source might have in mind The Gaslight Tapes etc) are reminding me of backstory mentions re Omnivore's excellent previously unreleased Mountain City Four 60s folkie assemblage:

Originally members of The Pharisees, Jack Nissenson and Peter Weldon recruited Kate and Annd McGarrigle to become the Mountain City Four...In 1962, Nissenson recorded a Bob Dylan show at Montreal’s Finjan Club on reel-to-reel. It remains one of the most sought-after early Dylan recordings.

(Beyond or aside from Rolling Bootlegs, I'd like expanded reissues of the early studio albums, up through Bringing It All Back Home. seems like RB has the 60s-early 70s after that pretty well covered, alt and outtake-wise---although an expanded Planet Waves might be good.)

As for the 78 tour, I saw a lot of footage played on a VCR across the aisle from my own table at a record show in the late-ish 90s: it was being hyped as a series of shows, or from a series, though I noticed he was always dressed in seemingly the same scruffy matador or Cisco Kid outfit as tge Birmingham Al show I'd attended on that tour.
B'ham had were about 20 musos onstage most of the time (only exception I recall: a duet "Blowin' In The Wind," with flute player he introduced as saxist on some 60s hit, title of which I've forgotten). Otherwise, he might have them all playing, on a very fast "Masters of War," for inst, but more often it was subsets, incl. recombinant combos formed for the moment from platoon A, sqaud 2 and so on (would also beckon others from the wings). Female chorus featured in various ways, like all vocals on "Rainy Day Women," while maestro accompanied with guitar and the usual tennis shoe toe-tap.
Hope they've got a good tape of that one.

formed for the moment by individuals or sub-subset duos, trios etc. from the ranks of platoon A and squad B etc, who would then go back to previous placement---we might later hear from all of platoon A etc. as such--or not. Overall seemed tighter than expected, though they'd been touring quite a bit that year, and some of them were recognizable Rolling Thunder veterans.

"expanded reissues of the early studio albums, up through Bringing It All Back Home"

Surely this last is covered on THE CUTTING EDGE?

I seem to recall that a release of outtakes from ANOTHER SIDE also occurred though I've never seen it.

you could definitely do a great expanded Freewheelin set. It's all come out as part of those copyright dumps, but that's not really doing it justice — there's a lot of terrific stuff.

Didn't realize The Cutting Edge went back that far, thanks---though I can't afford the 18-disc version of that, and want more than the 2-CD, but with an emphasis on previously unreleased songs, from the sessions for each albums, rather than alternate versions---so yes, expanded releases of all original studio albums from s/t to Bringing, at least.
Despite previous releases on comps, this kind of contextualization would help me wrap my brain a little more around a long and winding body of work (hopefully).
Here's a good discussion of the debut, with description of an link to contemporaneous xpost The Minnesota Hotel Tapes, and a link to entry on Freewheelin---this goes on to detail an import expansion of Bob Dylan:

Because its copyright expired in Europe in 2012, several editions have appeared in the EU from competing oldies labels. One edition, from Hoodoo Records, includes 12 bonus tracks (1 single and 11 live radio recordings from 1961 to 1962) and a 16-page booklet.

14. "Mixed-Up Confusion" (single) Dylan 2:30
15. "Roll On John" (live) Traditional, arranged by Dylan 3:16
16. "Hard Times in New York" (live) Dylan 2:32
17. "Smokestack Lightning" (live) Chester Burnett 3:03
18. "Stealin' Stealin'" (live) G. Gannon 3:24
19. "Baby, Please Don't Go" (live) Joe Williams 2:19
20. "The Death of Emmett Till" (live) Dylan 5:11
21. "Man on the Street" (live) Dylan 2:25
22. "Omie Wise" (live) Traditional 4:02
23. "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" (live) Dylan 3:21
24. "The Girl I Left Behind" (live) Traditional, arranged by Dylan 5:39
25. "Blowin' in the Wind" (live) Dylan 2:29

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Dylan_(album)

Dow: the CUTTING EDGE that I know is 5 CDs. The first disc, I think, is BRINGING. It's absolutely marvellous. I think it would give you what you need - unless there is yet more important material that I haven't heard (eg on these 18CDs which I have never seen).

Has anyone heard DYLAN & THE DEAD? Is it any, and I do mean any, good?

every person who did died of blood poisoning

xpost - As a fan of both, no. It's baffling to hear what versions they chose when there were much better performances to pull from.

Dylan & The Dead isn’t horrible, it’s just nothing special and it’s disappointing in relation to What Could Have Been. The only official Dylan release that strikes me as truly awful is Budokan.

it's bad but it's not *that* bad. i think it's a shame that Garcia didn't just do a tour with Dylan — apparently there was some talk of that happening right before Jerry died.

Yeah, I wouldn't say it's "horrible", but it's also not very good if you've heard other shows from that tour. There were just better performances of those songs.

Sounds like there could be a DYLAN & THE DEAD Bootleg Series LP then?

(I do not know The Grateful Dead.)

i think it's pretty unlikely — but who knows? It's never been mentioned by the powers that be as a future possibility. Seems like an early 60s set, a 1978 set of some kind and maybe an Oh Mercy sessions box are the most likely Bootleg Series releases in the coming years.

Reading the "Truckin'" entry in The Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob LOVES the Dead, and is more effusive in his praise for them than for pretty much any other artist in the book. He stops just short of saying he wished he'd been in that band. I can see how his shows with the Dead were frustrating, though: they have their own internal language, Bob has his, and and they just kind of butt up against each other. And you can't really blame either of them: what artist has actually sounded great doing a guest spot with the Dead? (partly meant rhetorically, but also I'm genuinely curious in case I missed something)

yeah i think the Dead were a bizarre musical eco-system — not easy to just slip in there and start jammin'.

Dylan closed a few California shows covering "Friend of the Devil" last year.

According to the Heylin book, Dylan kept asking guests to his home, after he'd pop a shittily recorded tape of the Dylan/Dead mix in a player, "What do you think? I think it needs more bass."

yes I saw him cover that last year!! xp

(in Oregon$

what artist has actually sounded great doing a guest spot with the Dead? (partly meant rhetorically, but also I'm genuinely curious in case I missed something)

I'd vote Branford Marsalis

I've mentioned this before, but when I interviewed Marsalis he talked about how the other two saxophonists who guested with the Dead, David Murray and Ornette Coleman, didn't actually listen to the Dead in his opinion — they just walked onstage and did their thing, treating the band as a backdrop, and he went out of his way to listen and to work his way into their music. Now part of that is just him tugging himself, I mean, David Murray recorded an entire album of Dead songs, but I can kind of hear what he means, I mean, Ornette was gonna Ornette no matter the circumstance.

Yeah Branford was great, hard to argue with that. I feel like the easiest way to meld into the Dead was by either being another guitar player to swirl in the mix (John Cipollina, Santana, etc.) or percussion (Airto Moreira).

But hey, I also like the Ken Nordine drop-in, so what do I know?

iirc, Murray had been a Dead head since the '70s. In the bits I've heard, he struck me as more effective with the Dead than Marsalis, largely because he knew exactly where to poke and prod, while Marsalis was more of a follower. Ornette saw them at least once, and brought Cecil Taylor with him, and based on the recordings I've heard, that was the extent of his pre-guest-spot Dead listening. Like unperson said, Ornette's gonna do his thing, and while he might not be ignoring the context, he's also not necessarily going to meet it halfway if he doesn't feel like it.

garcia plays on that ornette album.

Re: the Dylan/Dead album, I think the surviving members of the Grateful Dead have talked about this, but IIRC Dylan seemed to have more pull (or maybe even final say) when it came to selecting the tracks, and they thought he picked what were probably the ones they would have avoided. It was a weird anecdote - I think they already knew what they wanted, or at least hoped to release, and then they got called over to Dylan's home where he's clearly been drinking and then Dylan proceeds to play them the takes he wants on the album, NONE of which they like but they can't do anything about it.

Allegedly there's a good boot that captures the best of those shows.

Here's one!

http://albumsthatneverwere.blogspot.com/2018/05/dylan-dead-jerry-garcias-original-mix.html

Also I found this elsewhere:

“It was as if we'd never practiced,” said the Dead's Bob Weir of the first show on the '87 tour.

Repeatedly Dylan would forget the words to his songs, play in the wrong key, have drunk too much . . .

When it came to cobbling together an album from live recordings there wasn't much worth considering but – against the wishes of the Dead – Dylan willfully insisted on some songs from very inferior shows.

Repeatedly Dylan would forget the words to his songs, play in the wrong key, have drunk too much . . .

To be fair, Bob's bands up to that point (and after that point) had to be ready for anything. If Bob played a song in a different key from the previous night, his band was expected to (and did) pick up on that and follow immediately (not that no one panicked -- see Ian McLagan's autobiography All The Rage). When he played with Petty and the Heartbreakers, he knew their scene was one that required rehearsals -- they don't really do off-the-cuff. With the Dead, he seems like he built them up in his imagination as a band that could follow anyone anywhere at any moment, and thought throwing curveballs like key changes were surely no big deal to this seasoned band of improvisers. And/or he was just hammered.

It's been a long time since I've read Chronicles; but isn't there a whole chapter about how nothing was working for him when he was playing with the Dead, he just couldn't perform, etc.; and then he somehow stumbled on a whole new approach to guitar playing? I forget the details...

YES - cut and paste from another article online:

In his 2004 memoir, Dylan wrote about how the Dead pushed him to play songs he hadn’t done in decades.

“If I had known this to begin with, I might not have taken the dates,” he wrote. “I had no feelings for any of these songs and didn’t know how I could sing them with any intent. A lot of them might have only been sung once anyway, the time they’d been recorded. There were so many that I couldn’t tell which was which — I might even get the words mixed up with others. I needed sets of lyrics to understand what they were talking about, and when I saw the lyrics, especially to the older, more obscure songs, I couldn’t see how I could get this stuff off emotionally.”

He eventually wandered out of the rehearsal hall, at least according to his telling in Chronicles, and stumbled into a bar where an old man was singing jazz standards like “Time on My Hands” and “Gloomy Sunday.” “Suddenly and without warning, it was like the guy had an open window to my soul,” Dylan wrote. “It was like he was saying, ‘You should do it this way.’”

When Dylan returned to the rehearsal space with the Dead, he felt ready to tackle any song they threw at him. “Maybe they just dropped something in my drink, I can’t say,” Dylan wrote. “But anything they wanted to do was fine with me. I had that old jazz singer to thank.”

Dylan is a notoriously unreliable narrator of his own life, and it’s likely this story is at least partially fictionalized, but the Dylan and the Dead tour did indeed feature songs like “Chimes of Freedom” and “John Brown” that he hadn’t touched since his folkie days in the early Sixties.

Also, this was in one of the Double E substacks, but Dylan was drinking way too much in the '80s. He finally quit drinking in the '90s (maybe after his second divorce?), and I think that has made a huge difference. Now that he's selling his own whiskey, I imagine that's a sign he's indulging a little bit again, but probably not too much.

Dylan also credited that xpost bar epiphany to being reminded (while hearing the guy that birdistheword mentions, I think) of something he'd once been told/advised by Lonnie Johnson---so much advice in Chronicles, it could be titled Meetings With Remarkable Men, incl. Bono and The Croz---Johnson being a bluesman who jammed with Charlie Parker, for inst---I showed Dyl's description of his new approach to several guitarists, some of whom said it made sense and some who didn't---but hey, he took it to what became the Neverending Tour.
Didn't know about 5-CD Cutting Edge w Freelwheelin, thanks

I got that Jerry Garcia-assembled tape (reportedly rejected by label), now linked to xpost Albums That Never Were, from a site that quoted Garcia as declaring that Dylan could be great in the middle, but performances had to have great or good endings and beginnings as well (so Dylan was not really a musician).

The drinking habits of aging musicians fascinate me. I'd imagine Dylan never quit, just moderated his intake. Mick Fleetwood still drinks. Jagger's been photographed with aperl spritzers and bers.

grain of salt, but Dylan denied having a drinking problem or having stopped drinking in a Rolling Stone interview circa 2006-7. I don't know if I ever heard of him just quitting in the 90s? Maybe he cut back.

Every grain of salt.

Found a source - longtime road manager Victor Maymudes, who died in 2001 but left behind hours of interview tapes:

Dylan quit drinking in 1994.

“He just stopped on a dime,” Maymudes says. “He didn’t talk as much once he stopped and he didn’t laugh as loud either. It was a really big deal for him and really showed his commitment to changing his behavior. He was capable of dealing with a broader range of personalities when he was drinking and after stopping, his tolerance for certain types of behavior diminished. Bob lost a bit of self-esteem when he sobered up, became little more introverted and a little less social."

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/6-things-we-learned-from-the-new-bob-dylan-tell-all-79529/

Yeah---one thing that's tricky about stopping is, you might get a clearer view of the stuff you were trying to drink away, or around---and clearer or not, you'll notice. But overall it's worth it, I find, and re his tolerance for certain types of behavior diminished, that can def be on the plus side, if not as much fun or sometimes perversely exciting.

The drinking habits of aging musicians fascinate me.

I’m told that Los Lobos — all in their late ‘60s/early ‘70s — routinely drink musicians less than 1/3rd their age under the table.

On a darker note, in some of the new interviews I was reading with Robert Forster, it's mentioned that Grant never gave up his vices like drinking and lived like he was still in his 20s. It likely contributed to his heart attack.

His favorite drink until he died was the Long Island iced tea, which was like a jackhammer in my heart when I learned about it in Forster's memoir. This is what college guys drink to wash down Jägermeister shots (I would know).