"Some of these bootleggers, they make pretty good stuff"

Give credit where due: While the 22 performances on the Columbia/Legacy release have all been in the hands of collectors for years, never before have they sounded as good. The set cherry-picks songs from four venues where Dylan brought in a professional crew to film performances for "Renaldo and Clara," the unwatchable art-house epic filmed with members of the Revue pressed into service as actors. New details emerge from the songs: We finally get to hear Stoner's muscular bass playing, and notice fresh nuances in Dylan's singing, which was raspy but full-bodied and at times even powerful. Scarlet Rivera, a violinist Dylan spotted in Greenwich Village, here confirms her place with Bruce Langhorne, Mike Bloomfield, Al Kooper and Robbie Robertson as one of Dylan's most distinctive collaborators.

"The Rolling Thunder Revue" shows Dylan infusing new life and anger into a warhorse like "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," and bringing "Isis" into its definitive form. The full-band numbers are superb, but the quieter moments are the ones that stand out. "Sara," for example, sounds like a bit of special pleading on "Desire" -- that line about "Stayin' up for days in the Chelsea Hotel/ Writing 'Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' for you" has never rung true. The version offered here has some lyrics not found on the "Desire" version: "Sleepin' in the woods near a fire in the night/ Where you fought for my soul and went up against the odds/ I was too young to know you were doin' it right/ You did it with strengths that belong to the gods." Those verses are some of Dylan's most nakedly expressive writing -- a glimpse into the unspoken debts and loyalties that underpin any marriage.

Yet collectors have been rather lukewarm about this release. Rather than try to capture the flavor of a typical Revue show -- for all the looseness of the performances, the set lists were pretty rigid -- "The Rolling Thunder Revue" offers a random assortment of gems. It's no surprise that the solo turns from Roger McGuinn and Joni Mitchell didn't make the cut, but Columbia/Legacy needn't have skimped on the duets with Joan Baez that were a highlight of Revue shows. Each disc offers only about 50 minutes of music, hardly more than vinyl -- a bit of corporate stinginess that extends to the bonus DVD, which features only two of the excellent concert sequences from "Renaldo and Clara." The bootleggers, with their penchant for complete warts-and-all concert recordings, are still the source for a true representation of the Rolling Thunder Revue.

That this should be the case goes to the heart of why underground recordings exist, despite the best efforts of the recording industry. Most of the arguments against bootlegging have a way of self-destructing. The recording industry says bootlegs are bad because they cheat the artist and his label of revenue, then says it cannot release the material because it wouldn't sell in sufficient quantity. Columbia has no problem using unreleased tracks as collector bait; witness "Love and Theft," which was originally issued with a two-track "bonus disc" in order to goose sales. If there is no market for this stuff, how can the bootleggers be endangering the industry?

The argument is even weaker with the concert recordings that make up the bulk of underground recordings. The artist was paid for his performance; the audience members paid for their tickets. If no official concert recording was to be released, then how could a bootleg recording be cheating anyone of revenue? The industry's crocodile tears over fans' being sold a "substandard" performance aren't very convincing; if the performance was that bad, perhaps the artist should consider reimbursing everyone who attended the show.

The strongest line of attack remains that of respecting the artist's wishes. If Dylan doesn't want this stuff released, shouldn't his wishes be honored? The argument would carry more force coming from another source. Columbia itself had no qualms about dissing Dylan in 1973, when it punished his brief flirtation with another label by issuing "Dylan," a collection of gangly outtakes from "New Morning" and "Self Portrait," assembled with an eye to causing the maximum amount of embarrassment for the errant artist. And when the man himself shuffles off this mortal coil, does anyone doubt that the formerly solicitous company will waste any time in launching a series of posthumous expensive box sets along the lines of its Miles Davis reissues?

A lot of fans don't want to wait that long, and more power to them. It would be the height of arrogance to suggest that an artist is not the best judge of his own work. Yet to compare the bootleggers' output with the authorized releases put out during the same period, it's hard not to conclude that the shadow labels have done a better job of reminding everyone of what made Bob Dylan's work worth following in the first place. And to conclude that without their efforts, Dylan himself might not loom as high on the landscape of popular music. The official record gives us the listless gospel of "Saved," the empty stadium rock of "Real Live" and the nasal bleating of "Good As I Been to You." The bootleggers show us that beneath the rubble, buried by Dylan's own caprices and occasional bouts of corporate foolishness, there is evidence that Dylan is not just a 1960s-vintage antique. For a man to have helped create his own nemesis is ironic enough. For that man to owe thanks to his self-created nemesis is, well, Dylanesque.

Dylan, characteristically, seems a little conflicted about all this.

During the recording of "Planet Waves" in 1973, Dylan was so afraid of getting bootlegged that he kept the tapes in his van while he went out carousing in Greenwich Village. In the booklet accompanying "Biograph," he offers this amusing rant:

"I mean, they have stuff you do in a phone booth. Like, nobody's around. If you're just sitting and strumming in a motel, you don't think anybody's there, you know ... it's like the phone is tapped ... and then it appears on a bootleg record. With a cover that's got a picture of you that was taken from underneath your bed and it's got a strip-tease type title and it costs $30. Amazing. Then you wonder why most artists feel so paranoid."

Even so, that paranoia didn't keep him from providing an approving blurb for "Invisible Republic" -- a book that might as well have been commissioned to boost sales for the shadow labels. "Sugar Baby," the closing song on "Love and Theft," offers the now-famous couplet: "Some of these bootleggers, they make pretty good stuff/ Plenty of places to hide things here if you wanna hide 'em bad enough."

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