Sunday, May 11, 2008
Bob Dylan's debt to the hidden industry that he (unwittingly) helped create.
Jan 7, 2003 | Bob Dylan must be the first musician in history whose unreleased songs are as well known, and in many cases better, than his officially issued work. Certainly no other artist has been so bedeviled by underground recordings. The 40 or so albums that make up the official Dylan canon are all but lost in a sea of bootlegs so vast that collectors have organized them into subcategories, any one of which contains enough entries for months, even years of study.
After decades of failing to stop the bootleggers with complaints and litigation, Dylan and his record company decided to beat them at their own game by launching "The Bootleg Series" in 1991. The most recent installment, "Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue" (Columbia/Legacy), contains superb music, but it illustrates two uncomfortable facts. First, that for well over half his career, Dylan's art has been better served by the bootleggers than by his own label -- or, indeed, by Dylan himself. And second, that underground releases must get a good share of credit for sustaining interest in Dylan as a continuing creative force. The official Columbia releases are fine for charting the first incandescent phase of Dylan's career. But from the mid-1970s onward -- decades marked by long silences, artistic fumbling and a parade of bungled albums -- the real story of Dylan's artistry comes not from Columbia, but from bootleg labels with names like TMOQ, Swingin' Pig, Dandelion, Q, Crystal Cat, Rattlesnake, Wild Wolf and Scorpio.
Considering the twists and turns that have marked Dylan's career, it's only fitting that the man himself can be credited with sparking the subindustry that so irritates and benefits him. It all started when word got out that Dylan was refusing to release a batch of songs recorded in 1967 with the musicians who would become the Band. And so, in the summer of 1969, some enterprising souls issued a vinyl album of several Basement recordings, mingled with Dylan performances from the early folkie period, under the title "Great White Wonder." (Clinton Heylin's "Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry," is the indispensable record of how this happened.)
And yea verily, "Great White Wonder" did beget "Troubled Troubador," which did beget "Waters of Oblivion," which begat "Little White Wonder," after which Columbia stepped in with the much-doctored and woefully incomplete 1975 release of "The Basement Tapes." (When the album became a hit, Dylan is supposed to have said, "I don't believe it! I thought everybody had 'em already.") Fresh batches of Basement recordings -- mostly covers of folk and traditional songs, the bulk of them of interest only to cultists -- leaked out in 1986 and 1990, begetting the five-CD "Genuine Basement Tapes" set, which in 2001 begat a four-CD upgrade called "A Tree With Roots." These officially unreleased recordings are so popular that Greil Marcus could write about them in his 1997 book "Invisible Republic" (since retitled "The Old Weird America") with the expectation that anyone who didn't already have the source material could track it down without much difficulty.
And that's only the beginning. The Dylan bootleg catalog is wide and deep. Its best entries include "New York Sessions," the original version of "Blood on the Tracks," which Dylan pulled back at the last minute so he could drastically revise the five key songs, and "Rough Cuts," which proves that Dylan had enough quality material to make "Infidels" a masterpiece, rather than a precursor to such career-killers as "Empire Burlesque," "Knocked Out Loaded" and "Down in the Groove." A popular set of outtakes from "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" shows the young folkie experimenting with electric backup years before he stood the Newport Folk Festival on its ear. Every phase of his concert career, from the blowhard 1974 comeback shows to the Never-Ending Tour that continues to this date, has generated a slew of bootlegs, most of them superior to Dylan's official live releases.
Some underground labels even use their releases to mock the Columbia/Legacy offerings. "Biograph," a 1985 54-song retrospective of greatest hits and unreleased songs, sparked "Ten of Swords," a 10-album vinyl set that earned an approving mention in Rolling Stone. The initial three-CD issue of Columbia's "Bootleg Series" was savagely criticized by many fans, and prompted Scorpio to issue "The Genuine Bootleg Series," a trio of three-disc sets that are consistently more enjoyable and comprehensive than their legit cousin. The next official "Bootleg Series" installment, released in 1998, documented the Manchester Free Trade Hall show from 1966 (often mislabeled the "Royal Albert Hall Concert"), the show where some meatball called Dylan a Judas for playing rock 'n' roll. Two years later, Scorpio one-upped Columbia with "Genuine Live 1966," a 10-CD set that gathers several concerts into one opulent package. To show just how far the completist impulse can go, a competing label called Vigotone has issued a 26-disc box set that collates every known bootleg from the chaotic 1966 tour.
Sometimes the mockery extends to Dylan himself. By general agreement, the rock bottom of Dylan's concert career took place at a 1991 show in Stuttgart, Germany. Dylan opened with a train-wreck version of "New Morning," then staggered through a series of barely coherent performances that left fans uncertain as to which songs they'd actually heard. Some wag took a recording, chose the dorkiest possible photo of Dylan for the cover, and issued it as a bootleg under the title "Name That Tune."
If there is no underground rejoinder to this latest "Bootleg Series" release, that's only because the Rolling Thunder Revue has already been extensively documented by such gold-standard bootlegs as "Cowboy Angel Blues" (Q), "Mapleleaf Gardens 1975" (Heartbreakers), "A Dark Night on the Spanish Stairs" (Rattlesnake) and "Knight of the Hurricane" (Razor's Edge). The attention is completely warranted. The 40-or-so shows on this autumn swing through New England generated some of the finest performances of Dylan's career, and the Revue itself -- an unlikely blend that included comrades like Joan Baez and Ramblin' Jack Elliott, glitter rocker Mick Ronson, ex-Byrd Roger McGuinn and rockabilly bassist Rob Stoner -- was probably the most sympathetic and listenable backup band Dylan ever assembled. Dylan tried to revive the Rolling Thunder spirit in 1976, but the tour quickly turned rancorous as his tottering marriage finally collapsed. The only official record until now has been "Hard Rain," captured at the bitter end of the 1976 jaunt. It is little short of scandalous that the magical 1975 shows have gone unreleased for over a quarter-century.
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