FOUND SOUNDS
Yet another side of another side of Bob Dylan comes to light on the tenth volume of the official 'Bootleg Series'
by Matt Ashare |
Published September 4, 2013
This summer marked the 50th anniversary of Bob Dylan's emergence as the voice of a generation. That's right, it's been a full half a century since "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" arrived, with its candid cover shot of a shy looking Dylan walking down the hallowed streets of the West Village with girlfriend Suze Rotolo clutching his left arm, and a list of songs that included "Blowin' In the Wind," "Don't Think Twice It's All Right," and "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," not to mention "Masters of War" and "Girl From the North Country." It was in August of 1963, not long after the recently commemorated March on Washington, that the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary scored a hit with their harmony-dressed rendition of "Blowin' In the Wind," paving the way for Dylan's own commercial ascent.
And, still, Dylan's out there doing his thing, soldiering on with a never-ending tour that picks up again in Scandinavia this October, before moving on to Germany, Switzerland, France, and the British Isles, where he's got a three night stand in late November at London's Royal Albert Hall. And, still, the legend grows, as legions of fans, archivists, and chroniclers dig through the work, delving into the back catalogue, re-parsing old interviews, sifting through primary, secondary, and tertiary sources for overlooked clues into the meaning of it all, as if there were an "all" that it could actually mean.
At times, it can seem be a bit too much — like every time the guy so much as coughs, there might just be a hidden subtext that could very well lead to a valuable insight the nature of the universe. But, to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a cough is just a cough. And, sometimes a song is just a song. Then again, in the hands of certain artists, songs can, and often do, become a whole lot more, something akin to vessels, overflowing with elusive emotions, alluring allusions, personal associations, and, of course, indelible melodies that strike a universal chord.
The expansive nature of the song has become integral to the Dylan story, as he wrestles with his legacy on stages around the world, restlessly retooling decades of material with a passion that suggests there's still a whole lot more to be wrung from those old songs before they're hung out to dry. It's a story that's been developing in a parallel world since the early ’90s, when Columbia, in concert with Dylan, began assembling "The Bootleg Series," an ongoing collection of demos, alternate takes, live recordings, and other rarities from the vaults that present something of an alternate or at least complementary history of the artist and the man.
The new "Bootleg Series" installment is volume 10 — official title, "Another Self Portrait (1969-1971): The Bootleg Series Vol. 10" — a two-disc box that zeroes in on one of the more controversial, or perhaps simply misunderstood, periods in Dylan's career. As central as Dylan and his songs were and continue to be perceived to the protest movement of the ’60s, he was actually largely AWOL for the second half of the decade. A motorcycle accident in the summer of ’66, which is often cited as a crucial turning point in Dylan's career, laid him up for a few months at his retreat in rural Woodstock. He was up and working soon enough with a new group of collaborators, a blues-schooled band known as the Hawks who were in the process of reinventing themselves as the Band, knocking out new material in freewheelin' fashion on what quickly became known as "The Basement Tapes."
Those sessions didn't even begin to see the light of day officially until 1975, when Columbia released a small portion on them as "The Basement Tapes." Instead, Dylan embarked on a confounding course that blithely defied expectations — a course, as legend has it, that mystified fans and critics alike, and had some postulating that the motorcycle accident had left him seriously impaired. In stark contrast to the psychedelic excursions that had begun to dominate in the mid-’60s, Dylan eschewed rock conventions on 1967's contemplative, Biblically inspired "John Wesley Harding." And, again backed by seasoned Nashville session players in 1969, he took a stab at trad country crooning on "Nashville Skyline." As if that weren't enough, he'd stopped touring, and had begun distancing himself from the anti-war protests. When he was asked to perform at Woodstock in 1969, he declined, accepting an offer to play with the Band at the Isle of Wight Festival in England. (A "deluxe" four-disc edition of "Bootleg Series, Vol. 10 includes the remastered recordings from the entire Isle of Wight set.)
And then, in June of ’70s, came something really strange: The songwriting savant of the ’60s, the veritable poet laureate of his generation, released a 24-track double album, titled "Self Portrait," on which only eight of the songs were his, and three of them — "She Belongs to Me," "Like a Rolling Stone," and "The Mighty Quinn (Quinn the Eskimo)" — weren't even new. (One of the new tracks, "Wigwam," didn't even have lyrics.) Instead, "Self Portrait," offered a hodgepodge of obscurities from the folk cannon, tradition tunes from the public domain like the colorful miner's tale "Days of 49," the Leadbelly field-working blues "Alberta" (two versions), and the Celtic-by-way-of-Appalachia murder ballad "Sadie" (also in two forms), as well as covers of Gordon Lightfoot's "Early Morning Rain" and Paul Simon's "The Boxer."
Odder still, although Dylan tracked "Self Portrait" in stripped-down fashion, mostly with just guitarist David Bromberg and keyboardist Al Kooper backing him, the tapes were then handed off to producer Bob Johnson, who took them to Nashville, where bass, drums, and other embellishments, including strings, were added. The result was a disjointed album that didn't appear to live up to its billing as a self portrait. Critic Greil Marcus, who penned liner notes for "Another Self Portrait," famously opened his review in Rolling Stone with the question, "What is this shit?" But Dylan may have captured the essence of "Self Portrait" best when, as Marcus recounts in the new liner notes, he reflected, "I just threw everything I could think of at the wall and whatever stuck, released it, and then went back and scooped up everything that didn't stick and released that, too."
Actually, if that were really the case then we probably wouldn't have volume 10 of "The Bootleg Series." As has often been the case with Dylan, there were plenty of demos, alternate takes, and unreleased tracks from both "Self Portrait" and the similarly executed "New Morning," a more concise work that came out just three months later, to create a solid foundation for "Another Self Portrait," which also includes a couple of leftover gems from "Nashville Skyline," a stray "Basement Tapes" recording, a two-song taste of the Isle of Wight set, and a number of tracks from "Self Portrait" and "New Morning" stripped of Nashville overdubs. Dylan has essentially gone back in time and created an entirely new, strikingly different self portrait in song, a bit like if a painter were able to wiping clean a decades old canvas and then reapply the brush strokes using only materials that were originally available.
I've always found "Self Portrait" to be a frustratingly diffuse and impenetrable album, largely because the added production — the strings and such — create a haze that tends to obscure the songs. That Dylan decided to mostly scrap the embellishments on all but one of the tracks on "Another Self Portrait" — the lovely "New Morning" ode to domestic bliss "Sign on the Window" — begs the question, what could he possibly have been thinking back when he sent the original tapes to Nashville? There isn't any indication that he was actually pressured by Columbia to spruce up the tracks for public consumption, but he might have believed that that's what the label would have wanted. It's also possible that Dylan lost his nerve, that as much as he apparently believed in the new direction he'd plotted out on the demos, he just wasn't ready to release the unadorned recordings.
Given Dylan's penchant for subterfuge, neither explanation rings particularly true. What strikes me as more likely is that Dylan trusted Johnson, wanted to hear what he'd come up with, and probably liked the results at the time. Whatever the case, the fact that he entrusted the tapes to a third party — that he didn't even to bother to sit in on the overdubbing sessions — does indicate some level of disengagement, or at least a willingness to trust the fates. It's an odd move for an artist who already had a reputation for valuing the spark he could capture in the studio with a first take. But, if Dylan was aiming to upend expectations, he certainly accomplished that.
A little over twenty years later, when "The Bootleg Series" was just getting started, Dylan revisited the idea of recording old folk tunes on two landmark albums that presented a much more coherent vision than the original "Self Portrait" — 1992's "Good As I Been To You" and ’93's "World Gone Wrong." Those albums lend credence to the notion that it takes a bit more living than Dylan had under his belt in 1970 to fully inhabit a storied old folk song, or even one's own material. And, yet, "Another Self Portrait" suggests that Dylan was fully in his element tackling Leadbelly's "Alberta" (a truncated third version, "#3," with full band), A.F. Beddoe's moonshiner's tale "Copper Kettle," and "Little Sadie" back when he was just 29 years old. He just wasn't entirely certain what that element was, which may be the real reason why he wanted Johnson to homogenize the raw tracks in a Nashville studio.
As such, "Another Self Portrait" remains a fractal affair — a true portrait, to borrow from Joyce, of the artist as a young man. There are echoes of the great folk revival throughout the collection, as well as timelessly beautiful balladry (a piano-based version of "If Not for You" with violin), yearning poetry (a 1971 demo of "When I Paint My Masterpiece"), and good dose of rock and roll spirit (the wry "Working on a Guru," with George Harrison sitting in on guitar). But mostly there's Dylan, a perplexing and perhaps perplexed presence who, in retrospect, was simply trying to ground himself in the music he loved.
As the 60s wound down, and the various protest movements that had coalesced in the midst of that turbulent era lost their nascent innocence, Dylan seems to have instinctively understood that if he didn't change his tune in some significant way, he'd risk becoming a caricature, a self-parody, or something worse. "Self Portrait" was his way of working his way out of that bind. With "Another Self Portrait," he seems to have worked out a clearer, crisper, more compelling vision of what he was originally working toward on "Self Portrait."
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