Bob Dylan: "Trouble No More 1979 - 1981" - The Bootleg Series Vol. 13

I’ve created a comprehensive collection of all of Bob’s spoken words in the 1979 concerts using the best available recordings. There are 109 tracks. I posted it on the Expecting Rain forum. Feel free to grab it. Wasn’t sure if posting the link here was allowed.

 

Yes, but can I wait this long?
Oh Santa, I've been such a good boy!

 

I've searched the site but can't find it. Any clues?

 

I thought I was just missing something, too...

 

You have to register first with a user name and so on and then, as if by magic, a number of other forums are revealed to you.

 

Thank you. I registered there years ago but don't visit often enough to have remembered that!

Needless to say, a successful visit.

 

I'm surprised noone else has said it but the Every Grain of Sand version here to me is instantly the definitive version, I always hated the SOL version, too sentimental, schmaltzy.

I'm also finding that if you substituted the lyrics to the Shot Of Love outtake versions with say, Prince lyrics, you'd have just about the dirtiest horniest sound ever committed to tape. Need a woman? Yes indeed!

 

I too prefer San Diego and all the other 1979 material and also the stuff from January/February 1980 to the Toronto show. Toronto is absolutely great still but I feel you can tell Dylan is already moving on from some of the Slow Train and Saved Songs.

 

Got it. Thanks!!!

 

Anyone know anything about Steve Ripley? Where he came from, what happened to him and why he was suddenly added to the line up of the band? Fred Tackett must've been a bit peeved, surely?

 

Steve Ripley is a Tulsa guy who worked on the road and in the studio doing sound/recording for Leon Russell. He was also the leader of The Tractors later. I don't know the reasons the sudden change.

 

Thanks a lot!

 

I think these are very important pronouncements and say more about the core sources of Dylan's art than just about anything else he's ever said--or anyone has ever said, for that matter. As far as the gospel years are concerned, they explain in no uncertain terms why the songs and performances are so good and the "sermons" so bad. For Dylan, the song traditions are live wires, and he long ago established a tight connection to their energies, which have been powering his imagination and creativity for almost 60 years now. He could--and maybe for personal reasons had to--parrot the words of preachers and evangelists for a while, but it was in the creation of songs that he could commune in faith with something bigger than himself and then testify to the nature of the experience as an offering to others.

FWIW: I don't think the blood and wine line in the later song is a statement of doubt about that faith. In both versions of the song it seems to me he's referring to a debased secular context. It's the blood of that he can't call wine. And the thing about things seen from a distance is that you can't tell how big they are unless you have a clear sense of how far away they are (something of only moderate size might seem very large if, for example, you think it's farther away than it is). When things are up close you can gauge their true size. You have some assured perspective. In the Bootleg Series version the line the singer is, I think, clearly referring to the same debased secular context as he is in the blood/wine line (that is, Babylon, which seemed, I suppose, a bigger deal to him at a distance than it did when he finally encountered it up close--and while there he never stopped hearing the prophetic voice). The EB version is a little stickier and weirder, given that the voice in the wilderness is now the voice of the guy in the powder-blue wig (who now is going to be shot in addition to getting a beating), but I still think the general sense of the distance/up close line is that whatever all that business with the singer and the guy in the wig entailed, it seemed a bigger deal at a distance. I don't think either version is saying that about the faith Dylan espoused a few years earlier.

L.

 

I generally fall into this category as well. Dylan has been a great collector of ideas who has freely sprinkled various quotes or references through his career (including the later years with accusations of plagiarism). This was an odd era for him, in that he stuck with one set of influences for an extended period.
I like dipping my toes in the deep lyric analysis pool, but I tend to leave it to the local experts.
As in many places on this forum, the most intelligent discussion of music I’ve come across exists here.

 

Yeah it's easy to make the assumption, like I did a page back, that he was lulled to sleep, couldn't learn to drink the wine and it doesn't look so big up close, that all these things refer to him stepping back a bit from Jesus. You can just as soon interpret it the other way. Perhaps you're right, fame and secularism look so big from a distance, and you try to call it wine, but it's blood (paganism?). I don't want to go too far into interpreting or you end up going through his garbage for needles.

 

I don't pretend to know what happened (and happens) inside the man. But what's happening in the songs themselves is another matter. That's something you can get a grip on, and once you do it's possible at least to think about how whatever is going on with the man gets pressed into and through the forms and images of the song traditions--a different thing than trying to figure out how the songs (or the garbage in the alley) contain some decodable message about the man's inner life or relationships, etc.

In the case of the gospel songs, it's a sort of perfect storm: a set of powerful experiences meets with modes of expression already deep in Dylan's artistic sensibility, and the songs and arrangements, the ensemble set-ups, performance concepts, and the performances themselves all start blasting out like water from a high-pressure hose. Eventually the purity of the original feelings and experiences changes, and something else, something more mixed, starts to come out as other experiences press into the stream and demand other modes of expression. These two song versions are mixed in that way, but I don't see anything in them that suggests a repudiation or even a backing away from what the more purely "gospel" songs express.

L.

 

This happened to me too - U.S. copy.

 

Just found this, too!

 

As someone with some financial restrictions and a view that this period isn't among my favorites, can anyone shed any light on how well the 2-CD set is curated relative to the full deluxe release? I mean, I've dropped coin on Dylan over the years, but I'm inclined to pull back on this one if warranted/justified.

Thanks in advance.

 

Thoughtful and well-expressed as always, but I'll continue to disagree with you (well, at least to a degree). I don't think Dylan would take such an obviously religious piece of imagery (blood/wine) and apply it to the secular world. I could see, perhaps that "that" blood he couldn't learn to drink was the "blood" of the organized Christian Church, or more specifically, the teachings of The Vineyard (which by all accounts he had long separated himself from by this time). Why would rejecting the Babylonian world play a role (or at least exist in parallel) with his inability to embrace the woman he seems to love? If anything, the earlier lyrics about her would suggest it would aid in his ability to be with her.

 

Well, that depends on what you want to hear and understand, but I do think that the two disk version, which is the same as the first two disks of the deluxe, offer a very well curated survey of the live gospel performances from the '79-'81 tours. At least it's about as good as can be fit on two CDs. What you miss is the studio material, which is less satisfying musically, track-by-track, but does have some priceless things, and is very revealing as a matter of history. You also miss out on the superb set of multitrack recordings from the stand in Toronto 1980 and a full '81 show from London--the latter of which includes some samples of Dylan's return to his older material.

As someone up thread has done, one way to do this might be to get the 2 disk version and then download a handful of selected tracks from the rest to stay in a comfortable budget?

L.

 

Thank you, thank you and thank you. This is all I needed to know. I have Biograph and I know that I'm missing some things by not buying the deluxe set, but I think you allayed my fears of missing out on anything really, really critical. I revere Dylan, but sometimes one has to make choices, and you've made mine quite easy (and what I intended to do before posting).

 

I wouldn't say he's applying the religious image to the secular world. He's just saying he can't "worship" the "gods" of that world, can't commune with that world, have faith in its promises. He has to wipe the blood from his face. He can't see through it any more. At least that reading of the line works for the context of the two verses--and more for the Bootleg version. I'm really not at all sure what the singer's attitude toward the woman in the song actually is. If you're right that she's on the side of the precious angels, maybe the juxtaposition of his statement about Babylon with his statement about not being able to lover her/hold her/look into her face and call it his is meant to suggest he's suspended between the world of Babylon and the purer world she maybe represents? Maybe his problem is that he's not at home in either world?

L.

 

You're welcome! It's the least I could do given that I learned from one of your posts on the Grateful Dead thread that "Dark Star" goes from A to Em, not G. An important "ah ha!" moment for me that opened up some doors in how to play the tune. Very useful over the past year as I've been trying to develop some basic improv skills. I'm eternally grateful!

L.

 

For me, it is up there, with Tell Tale Signs and Another Self-Portrait. It flows way better than The Best of the Cutting Edge. Fantastic live set. And I not a big fan of live records. Or of gospel music, for that matter.
The energy, groove and urgency of these performances is devastating. Slow Train, Gotta Serve Somebody, In The Garden, Shot of Love, wow.