Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series

Weird, according to Amazon:

Ships from
Amazon.com

Sold by
Amazon.com

Maybe they "price matched" the seller's listing (now gone)? Anyway, I placed an order - since Amazon is the vendor, worst-case scenario is that they cancel the order.

my order was straight up through amazon, not a third party. i don't see anything about "all time fans."

FWIW, it's now back up to $90 on Amazon. I guess we'll see if it's a mistake and Amazon cancels those orders, but it's possible they were clearing out overstock too.

It was definitely legit - people who placed them with Prime delivery are already receiving their orders.

yes, thanks TSF! a friend I tipped off just texted me a pic of his set. very happy to have it on the way.

i found out about the price drop from a "super deluxe edition" email blast.

Back at $27 again...

That's crazy. Do they have a ton of overstock or something?

holy shit, thanks for the heads up, got mine ordered

jesus, I am so pissed at how much I paid for this now. but good for all of you able to grab it!

i'd already bought a hi-res download of it. at that price though i couldn't resist getting a physical set for the booklet if nothing else.

Are you sure this is the 5-disc version that's $27? It looks like the 2-disc version.

I see the 5-disc version listed for about $27 but its a "Used - Like New" condition.

Oops - not any more. That was a couple of hours ago. Now the cheapest is over $100.

mine arrived today and is the 5cd version. ha, maybe they did get their signals crossed with the pricing of the two versions. it does look like they are out of stock on the 5cd.

yeah even if they were sitting on a ton of stock that's a drastic discount

are they hand signed? :-D

Today, Dylan has announced that Shadow Kingdom will be officially released later this year on June 2. The film will be available for download and rental, and there will be a live album that includes the arrangements of the songs that were featured on the setlist, pulled from throughout Dylan’s career.

Hear the Shadow Kingdom version of “Watching The River Flow” below.

oof that truckin' is terrible

also I think in all honesty that version of watching the river flow really would not float as a release by any other artist

it's a sloppy lil blues number and it sounds great to me

he played it when I saw him last year (maybe he played it at every show?)

it's a fun song for sure, and was fun live but this shadow kingdom version is a disappointment to me

sounds good here

the Shadow Kingdom "Forever Young" is so amazing

I bootlegged it off my computer but will be good to have a real version

“Watching The River Flow” from greatest hits 2 is pretty hard to beat, I agree this suffers a little in comparison but I still dig it. Can't wait to hear the rest of this, I missed out on the stream and don't have the time to chase down bootlegs.

Yeah I missed the stream too so very glad this is getting a release.

08 “What Was It You Wanted”

ooh nice

Bob Dylan closed out a three-city run through Japan on Thursday night with his third and final show at Aichi Prefectural Arts Theater in Nagoya. Dylan kept a trend of Grateful Dead tributes started at the previous stop in Tokyo going during his visit to Nagoya, including a double dose of Dead-related music tonight.

The 81-year-old musician proved the third time’s a charm at the Nagoya opener on Tuesday, when he finally made it through “Brokedown Palace.” Dylan debuted a seemingly impromptu version of the American Beauty classic in Tokyo last Friday, April 14. Bob appeared to surprise his bandmates with the selection as they slowly began accompanying him before Dylan aborted the cover and moved on to “Melancholy Mood.” A more fleshed out version came two nights later at Tokyo Garden Theater. Yet Bob Dylan transitioned into “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” leaving “Brokedown Palace” unfinished.

Bob Dylan’s first full “Brokedown Palace” came in the 16-slot at Nagoya’s Aichi Prefectural Arts Theater on Tuesday. Dylan and his band — multi-instrumentalist Donnie Herron, guitarists Bob Britt and Doug Lancio, drummer Jerry Pentecost and bassist Tony Garnier — nailed the Hunter/Garcia gem.

Stream a recording of Dylan’s third attempt at “Brokedown Palace” below thanks to Ray Padgett

The Nagoya run continued on Wednesday when Bob Dylan trotted out Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” as the 14th song of the 17-tune concert. Dylan previously dusted off “Not Fade Away” in Tokyo on Saturday, April 15 for his first performance of the song originally recorded and released by the Crickets since August 8, 2009. “Not Fade Away” was a staple of the Grateful Dead live repertoire from 1969 through Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995.

Bob Dylan started the trend of honoring the Grateful Dead in Japan back on Wednesday, April 12 when he debuted a cover of “Truckin'” during his second of five concerts at the Tokyo Garden Theater. Dylan gave the song a second go tonight towards the end of his tour-closing show in Nagoya. However, he had another GD-related trick up his sleeve. After following “Truckin'” with “Mother Of Muses,” Bob Dylan and his band unveiled their take on “Only A River.”

Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir wrote “Only A River” in collaboration with Josh Ritter. Weir released the song on his excellent 2016 solo album, Blue Mountain. “Only A River” has been a staple of Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros performances. Dylan, on baby grand piano for the duration of the run through Japan, followed the debut with “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” and “Every Grain Of Sand” to close Thursday’s concert and the Japanese leg of his Rough And Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour.

now we're talking! are they applauding because they recognize the tune or just being polite/enthusiastic?

On a flight, I read this book by a recording engineer named Mark Howard, who worked on Oh Mercy & TOOM (among many other, non-Dylan records). The Dylan stories in the book are great (and this guy has some frank assessments of what it was like to work for Daniel Lanois, which he did for a long time).

Anyway, this bit from the Oh Mercy session reminded me of the “leaves cast their stadows on the stones” thing discussed above:

Dylan had a piano song called “Ring Them Bells” that had a lyric that went “the fighting was strong,” but every time we listened back, it sounded like “the farting was strong.” We laughed every time we heard it and Dylan would ask, “Why you always laughing?”

Here’s a Lanois story from TOOM (precipitated by Howard accidentally erasing a few seconds from the beginning of a “Not Dark Yet” take):

“WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO, HOWARD?” Dan’s face went red and he spun like the Tasmanian Devil. He grabbed a metal stool and threw it toward me, and it hit the wall behind me, smashing all the dimmers for the lights in the control room. All the lights in the room flashed on and off like photo flashbulbs, and he lunged toward the console and kicked it as hard as he could with his big motorcycle boots, denting the bottom.
“You fucker!” he seethed.
Dylan was sitting beside me the entire time and leaned toward me and asked quietly, “Does this guy have a mental problem?”

Dylan in CHRONICLES writes about Lanois smashing a dobro or something on the floor of the studio, so frustrated was he with the sessions.

Hilarious!

xp LMAO

Along with Chronicles, those Uncut interviews that were done for the upcoming release of The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs painted a pretty good picture of how strained and unhappy all of the Lanois sessions could be, for both Oh Mercy and Time Out of Mind. I don't recall one anecdote that showed anyone being particularly excited or happy about Lanois himself, though I'm sure players were appreciative of getting a gig, working with Dylan, appearing on a good album, etc. but it sounded pretty tense. Howard's story kind of suggests that you really had to be there to know the full extent of it - that's the first I've heard of that particular incident and I get the impression there must've been a lot of them, they just haven't been laid out like a laundry list of shit Lanois did on each day.

Howard writes that Lanois is generally a tense and uptight guy (even when he’s not throwing things), which doesn’t put artists at ease… odd temperament for a producer.

Did anyone go to Tulsa for the Dylan conference?

lol at Bob's reaction to Lanois's tantrum

Shadow Kingdom soundtrack out on CD and LP, movie can be bought or rented, though only on Apple now (forever?). This links to trailer and video (but only for "Forever Young"): https://view.fans.legacyrecordings.com/?qs=7daa208fd0e6dd5a4dca1ddf515fe364d371434feaad8070f09281bc9e6ddb1401f58e4f64e34c2fd3a1ef7c8158d9cc05284bc602f996d4d185b6f49fad84a5b10246fabb2205ab2f6d7a4c586f2f00

I suspect it's better with the visuals---true?

Some of the re-imaginings on the set work better than others, but Dylan is in astonishingly fine voice here, and when it works, it is stunning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whlhEPT2wrc

Howard writes that Lanois is generally a tense and uptight guy (even when he’s not throwing things), which doesn’t put artists at ease… odd temperament for a producer.

this is not even remotely an odd temperament for a producer

xpost "Forever Young" off Shadow Kingdom is so beautiful

Dylan is in astonishingly fine voice here

wow you weren't fuckin kidding, this is stunning stuff

I particularly dig the instrumental at the end... (this is not meant as a slight, btw)

I haven't gone back to his Sinatra albums much, but his singing here reminds me of those; there's an intimacy and command of the material that's different from his past rearrangements, as if it's been so long since he wrote these songs that he can now perform them as standards

Wow, QJA is so sweet and elegiac, the original such a scalpel.

A little too tasteful for me (like most of post TOOM-Dylan; I'm a weird outlier)

It's a little jarring to consider that the 34-year-old "What Was It You Wanted" is indeed part of Dylan's early years from a 2023 perspective.

If you split the span in half, World Gone Wrong is the end of the early years. Which makes sense really - that and GAIBTY are a kind of ground zero for the later period. Back to basics, one guy in a garage with his guitar and the old folksongs.

Are there a bigger batch of songs that tgise albums were culled from? You Belong To Me from the Natural Born Killers strck was from those sessions if I remember right.

I got that CD in high school before I was very aware of Dylan. It was an early experience of enjoying a performance with WTF singing.

My understanding was that it was pretty much home recordings with Dylan producing himself - there was a period when those two albums and The Bootleg Series Vol 1-3 came out and it was kind of a reckoning with his past and turning to the roots for renewal. I think maybe the performance epiphany he talks about having in Switzerland in Chronicles Vol 1 was around the same time. The "before" period ended with Oh Mercy and the after period began with Time Out of Mind which seems like a real shift to me - same producer but very different vibe.