Culturespill

Bob Dylan’s recording career is replete with tragic omissions that might have turned mediocre albums into masterpieces–and sometimes at the least likely points of his career. In a fit of indulgent self-pity amid his now-infamous period of artistic oblivion in the 1980s, Dylan willfully refused to release some of the greatest songs he ever recorded–songs that might have established the 1980s as one of the most peculiarly fertile moments in his creative life. Many Dylan dorks (myself included) know that he kept from the public such sublimities as “Blind Willie McTell and “Foot of Pride,” recorded during the sessions for 1983’s Infidels with Mark Knopfler on guitar. He similarly refused to allow the great “Series of Dreams” to be included on 1989’s Oh Mercy–despite producer Daniel Lanois’s impassioned arguments to the contrary–taking the attitude that one more Bob Dylan song really doesn’t matter much in the scheme of things, a callous indifference that lends credence to one of two possibilities: 1.) artists really aren’t great judges of their own work, or 2.) Dylan struggled mightily to overcome the deliberate destruction of his reputation that he began after becoming disgusted with his fame in the late 1960s, a disgust that produced Self Portrait in 1969, probably the most famous “fuck you” album ever made (right up there with Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and Neil Young’s Everybody’s Rockin’).

It was a disgust that Dylan transformed into a concerted and enduring project of public self-destruction. In Chronicles, Vol. 1, Dylan describes going to such lengths as pouring bottles of liquor over his head and wandering around in public wreaking of alcohol to perpetuate the myth that he was little more than a hopeless and washed-up drunk, an artifact of a dead era to be swept under the unclean rug of American culture. In that fabulously written–if occasionally strange–memoir, we also watch Dylan wince on a car ride with Band guitarist R0obbie Robertson as Robbie asks Dylan where he will “take the whole scene,” never considering for a minute whether Dylan had any interest in being nominated Cultural Czar of the world–he clearly did not; and that, more than anything, is exactly the disdainful reluctance that contributed to so many mediocre albums Dylan produced in the wake of his creative renaissance in the 1960s. The music sucked because he wanted it to suck. He wanted to be left alone, and damaging his own reputation as persistently as he did with garbage like Down in the Groove offered him the most likely path to that desired infamy.

Throughout the book he recalls time and again a feeling that the world really did not need another Bob Dylan song, a conviction that made it rather difficult for him to turn what he called “pieces of songs” into the full-fledged comeback album they became in 1997: the brilliant Time out of Mind. Only when he saw fans thirty years his junior sing along to “Love Sick” and “Cold Irons Bound” did he realize that, yes, the world really did need more Bob Dylan songs. More to the point–the world craved them, helping Dylan rediscover an inspiration he’d left behind so long ago.

Some say that the Oh Mercy and Infidels omissions were ultimately of little consequence, because they were eventually released on the 3-disc Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 in 1991. That, of course, is totally beside the point: not only did the electric version of “Blind Willie” never see the light of day, but the withholding of these tracks kept two decent albums from ranking among his very finest at exactly the moment in his career when the world had damn-near left him for dead (and perhaps with good reason.) You only get one chance to make a masterpiece; many great bands fail to produce even one. But to hold one in your hands and send it down the trash-shoot is both inconceivable and tragic.

Bob Dylan: “Band of the Hand,” Band of the Hand (1986)

But the Infidels and Oh Mercy outtakes are merely the better-known instances of this sad pattern in Dylan’s creative life. Other work is scattered across bootlegs, obscure soundtracks and tribute albums–work which proves that, contrary to popular belief, Dylan was still operating on all cylinders in his creative dark ages from the late 1970s and through the 80s–he just didn’t want anyone to know that. Until Columbia Records decides to avail the world of these performances, a full understanding of why Dylan’s name is engraved in the American consciousness is impossible. Just listen to the work he recorded with the Traveling Wilburys–particularly “Tweeter and the Monkey Man”–and tell me he was washed up in the late 80s. To the contrary, the man remained in full possession of his faculties throughout that period, but he chose instead to take a torch to his reputation and stand by watching while it burned.

“Band of the Hand,” a track recorded for a forgotten movie of the same name from 1986, is a devastating tune produced by Tom Petty that Dylan recorded around his Knocked Out Loaded period–it is, predictably, a million times more powerful than anything that unfortunate album offers, and yet it only saw the light of day on the soundtrack to a film nobody remembers. His early-80s masterpiece, “Caribbean Wind” is, in its original form, quite simply one of the best songs the man ever put to tape. But he murdered it later on with Joan Baez and released that pathetic byproduct on Biograph after trying–and failing–to redo the song long after the fire that produced it had faded.

But perhaps no album more thoroughly illustrates this unfortunate mishandling of Dylan’s most inspired recordings than 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Dozens of tracks were recorded for the album, and while only a fraction made the cut and some of those songs went on to define his legacy (”Masters of War,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” or “Blowin’ in the Wind”) a score of absolutely devastating acoustic blues numbers–tracks that foreshadow an early and growing affinity for rock ‘n roll–was tossed to a scrap heap of genius that would grow over the decades. We’re proud to offer a few glimpses of those gems here. Check out these unreleased cuts from the Freewheelin’ sessions, material that Dylan’s label bafflingly allows to languish in the vaults while releasing one inconsequential live set after another (like the 1964 Halloween concert which, compared to the Freewheelin’ outtakes, is an utter bore.) Sadly, the only way to get your hands on this stuff is if you’re lucky enough to live near an indie record shop somewhere in a large city (like NYC) that carries bootlegs (also remember that ebay is your friend.) Click on any of the titles below to hear for yourself . . .

Hero Blues (includes a false start)

Goin’ Down to New Orleans

Witchita

Baby Please Don’t Go

Quit Your Lowdown Ways

That’s Alright Mama (with full band)

Watcha Gonna Do (includes a false start)

Culturespill memo to Sony: An album is not a “collector’s edition” just because the record company says it is. Too often major labels create pseudo events like this tenth–yes, tenth–Dylan greatest hits package to rake in the dough. Sony markets this 3-disc set as a “collector’s edition” as if it contained something even “Dylanologists” would prize, when in fact there turns out to be “no there there.” Enough! It’s time to call these bastards out when they lie to our face after they’ve got our 20-dollar bill in their hands.

It may be true that reality is increasingly manufactured in slogans and catchphrases such as “Operation Enduring Freedom” (protest that one, smartass!) but the fact remains that “Collectors” are people who prowled the streets for those vinyl copies of Neil Young’s The Beach or Reactor (I’m raising my hand) before he finally re-released them on CD. Easily two of his most fascinating projects, Young dangled both albums before his fans at the end of a string that he withdrew the second they reached for it, offering instead ephemeral promises to release them “someday.” Given that the release of his alleged “Archives” boxed set was again delayed this year for the 1,857,906^th time–with the stunning news that it will be comprised of DVDs and not CDs–it’s clear that when Young resorts to words like “someday,” you can expect it to hit the shelves of a store near you around the time we’ve terraformed Saturn’s thirteenth moon.

And that’s exactly the point: A “Collector’s Edition” is valuable to “collectors” because it allows them access to prized moments in an artist’s career that they could not have procured on their own—only Neil had the authority to make those great LPs widely available in CD-quality sound. That’s why fans frothed at the mouth when Tom Waits released that embarrassment of riches, Orphans, 3 discs-worth of ass-whoopin’ outtakes that rival any fine moment you care to recall. And it’s why they sniff around in underground record shops for volumes of the storied “Genuine Bootleg Series”.

Far from a “collector’s” edition, Sony’s haughtily-titled Dylan (questions, anyone?) is a shamelessly cheap marketing stunt that contributes absolutely nothing to Dylan’s legacy, as a bonafide “collector’s edition” ought to by definition, and the only way to NOT see that is to consciously delude ourselves. While so many other compilations serve as platforms to release new material that sometimes rivals the “hits” (Petty’s “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” and “Something in the Air,” or Springsteen’s “Murder Inc.”) Dylan offers not a single track that you can’t get on any of the man’s 32 studio albums. And as with Sony’s 9 previous attempts at compressing a career of five decades into a track list that seems chosen by the all-reliable “catch a tiger by the toe method,” this one is more remarkable for its omissions than for its contents: For the love of Christ, a Dylan “greatest hits” without “Visions of Johanna,” “Idiot Wind,” “Desolation Blues”!? It’s catastrophes like these that reveal the genius of bands like Devo or Jefferson Airplane, with their “Greatest Misses” or “The Worst of Jefferson Airplane” retrospectives, as in, “will someone please remind us again how it is that we consented to this vulgarity?”

Once again, Sony peddles recycled glories while those that languish under a film of dust in vaults remain unheard. Dylan is notorious for withholding his greatest songs or superior renditions of released material off of nearly every album–often using the excuse of feeling “too close” to them or sighing that “the world doesn’t need anymore Bob Dylan songs” in moments of dire self-pity, infuriating the very producers who helped reinvent him (as in Daniel Lanois, who pled desperately for Dylan to allow the sublime “Series of Dreams” to take its rightful place on an album it would have made a masterpiece, 1989’s Oh Mercy.) While Sony deigned to release “Blind Willie McTell” and “Series of Dreams” along with earlier outtakes from the Freewheelin’ and Times Are-A-Changin’ days like “Seven Curses,” they continue to withhold a firing line of ferocious (and widely bootlegged) blues numbers from the Freewheelin’ sessions, including electrifying tunes like “Watcha Gonna Do,” “Witchita,” “Solid Road,” “Emmet Till” and a vastly superior alternate version of “Hollis Brown.” The most powerful version of Dylan’s brilliant “Carribean Wind” of 1980 remains withheld, as does the lauded electric version of “Blind Willie McTell.” A truckload of outtakes and alternate versions — from Blood on the Tracks, Shot of Love, Oh Mercy, you name it, ranging in quality from interesting to explosive, continues to gather dust in some New York City safe. Instead we get these “collector’s editions” that “collect” only what we’ve heard a thousand times before.

Dylan doing “Visions of Johanna,” among other things

Columbia’s mishandling of the Bootleg concept began at the onset, when the original 1991 Bootleg Series was planned as a four-disc set and then narrowed down to the three CDs we got, eliminating a wealth of essential material. And Dylan himself has admitted that bootlegged packages of the so-called Royal Albert Hall shows–which feature 8 CDs, posters, postcards and informative notes (I should know: I threw down 200 bones on a copy years ago at a rare disc shop in NYC)–represent Dylan with more competence than his own label, while the renown “Genuine Basement Tapes” series remains by far the most commendable effort at bringing Dylan’s unveiled genius to light.

The point is not that Dylan is some sort of “sell-out” or that Sony should be crucified for cashing in. What can possibly be more boring than the groaning chorus of “punks” and purists everywhere who weigh each band up to the light of their elitist notions of authenticity? Dylan and his label are entitled to make all the money they want—and I wish them all the best in their efforts to do so—but to horde such shining treasure is to rob the American story of many unmined diamonds—an act of cultural burglary if ever there was one.