Bob Dylan – Bootleg Series Vol. 14: More Blood, More Tracks (2 Nov 2018)*

Oh interesting, if they do i'd love if they'd include Eric Clapton, Joan Armatrading and The Boomtown Rats performances as well for a large Picnic at Blackbushe box set doubt i highly doubt it.

My dads just talking to me now about it, he was 20yo and got in with a friend with counterfit tickets, two for a fiver, that a guy was selling just outside, the police didn't stop him because the guy was calling them fake when he was selling them . He says his memory of it is a little foggy but he does remember he liked all the performances but especally Joan Armatrading's, he said she was amazing.

 

Me too! But I am sure that this would not sell as good as other bootleg series, especially of course "The Cutting Edge".

 

Some of the sweetest folk music I've ever heard is the young Bob Dylan trying out different voices and guitar arrangements as he explores traditional ballads on home-made tapes between 1958 and 1961. The kid obviously loves music and needs it to survive. In a way, to listen to these tapes is to observe the growth of a young artist as he improves his skills. He starts out a primitive, but his performances are always passionate, committed, discerning. The material is right for him, and he is right for it. At times he seems driven by something larger than himself. There is method in his madness and immense talent in his playing and singing on these early tapes.

Biographers have written about them . There's the John Bucklen tapes, the Kangas tape, the Eve and Mac MacKenzie tapes, the Bonnie Beecher tapes, the Ralph Gleason tape, Karen Wallace's tapes, David Whitaker's tapes, and others. What's become of these early tapes? I know they've been booted in various degrees of bad quality and incompleteness, but what about the original tapes? Have the master tapes been secured somewhere? by somebody? will they ever be officially released in the best possible quality?

I mean, after more than a half century has passed, it's time for the Dylan organization to come to terms with his old friends and ex-friends who recorded these performances in their living rooms and kitchens. Everybody, make peace with the tapes. There's no reason to hide 'em away anymore. If I were Dylan, I would be immensely proud of them. It's all good, wonderful music.

 

Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

Double album.

 

I'll pre-order again..sign me up now.

 

"A Minneapolis man has donated some of the earliest recordings made by Bob Dylan to the Minnesota Historical Society. Cleve Pettersen said he made the reel-to-reel tape at a Minneapolis apartment in 1960 after getting to know Dylan at coffeehouses in the Dinkytown neighborhood of Minneapolis near the University of Minnesota. Dylan, briefly a student at the university, didn’t make any formal recordings until two years later. On the tape, he sings traditional folk songs by Woody Guthrie, Jimmie Rodgers and others. Pettersen, a teenager when he invited Dylan to the apartment to record the songs, has been the sole owner of the tape ever since. But the tape’s existence has been well-known by music buffs and Dylan aficionados who have come to know it as the “Minnesota Party Tape.” "The surfacing of this original recording should correct all the rumors and speculation circulating on the Internet and within the circles of Dylan followers and music critics,” said Bonnie Wilson, curator at the Historical Society. The tape includes such songs as “Blues Yodel No. 8,” “San Francisco Bay Blues” and “Johnny I Hardly Knew You.” The public can listen to the tape, copied onto CDs and cassettes, for free at the Minnesota History Center library in St. Paul, but making copies won’t be allowed."

Early Bob Dylan recordings donated

I think this article has mixed up some of its information because "The Minnesota Party Tape" is generally accepted to be the May 1961 Beecher tape. Here is an image of the original 1960 tape held at the Minnesota Historical Society:-



Homepage - MNHS.ORG

Collections Online : mnhs.org

(Contrary to the enticing information on the second of these links, you can't buy it....!)


My recollection is that Bonnie Beecher tried to sell the May and December, 1961 Minnesota Tapes but didn't get any (large enough) offers so donated the tapes to a library. Can't remember which one - I thought it was the Smithsonian but my memory isn't as good now as I used to think it was. Perhaps someone can help on this (the whereabouts of the tape, I mean, not my memory).

#

 

And here is the back of that tape box:-




I'm drooling...!

 

I was there!!! The best concert ever seen by me

 

Yes, poor "marketing" to say the apparently completely unique tape you have is something that has commonly circulated for decades!

 

Spectacular find, Percy Song.

Do try to remember which library.

Although the Minnesota tapes have circulated for decades, and in fact were one of the first Dylan tapes to emerge in the Great White Wonder days, digital and lossless transfers off the master have never happened before (that I know of), and that makes a HUGE difference in quality. Nor has there been a professionally mastered release. Now if the Dylan organization knows where the original masters are, maybe it could happen.

I wish it weren't on Realistic tape. Realistic was junk, a brand sold only through Radio Shack outlets. The lowest priced tape on the market that made the lowest quality recording. The tape you'd buy when you were counting the pennies to make sure you had enough at the cash register to pay for it.

 

BOOTLEG SERIES # 14

PRE-ORDERED!

-- David

 

Great stuff! Dylan Inc. should acquire the tapes and transfer them to the Tulsa Archives.

 

Perhaps someone around these parts and within spitting distance of St.Paul could check the tape out and give us a report on the sound quality....

Minnesota Party Tape.
A recording of Bob Dylan singing and playing the guitar with a group of his friends: Bil Golfus, Bonnie Beecher, Cynthia Fincher (or Fischer?), and Cleve Pettersen.
Recorded by Cleve Pettersen at an apartment in Minneapolis in the fall of 1960.
Note: Copying not permitted
MNHS call number: Audiotape 203

"The library hours are: Tuesdays, noon to 8 p.m.; Wednesday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; closed Sundays and Mondays. This recording will become a part of the expansive collections at the Society, including more than 2,000 sound recordings, 4,000 newspaper titles, more than 350,000 photographs, and more than 36,000 cubic feet of manuscripts."

Library | Library Home


It also houses the handwritten lyric for "Temporary Like Achilles:-

http://www2.mnhs.org/library/findaids/00907/pdfa/00907-000001.pdf

 

That would be nice. They could release it with the supporting acts -- Clapton, Ringo, Armatrading etc -- or just Dylan. Dylan's two sets were superb performances. I thought the Zeppenfeld picnic concert has the performance edge on Blackbushe, but they're both awfully good. All those June and July concerts in Europe were awfully good. The peak might be in Paris. He was at his very best that summer.

 

15 July, 1978.
Blackbushe Aerodome - Camberley, England.

The last show of the European tour.

 

What did you think of Billy Cross' lead guitar work on that tour?
A lot of people didn't like it. They thought Cross was "too Vegas" whatever that means.

 

Hi, sorry if i missed it but does anyone know if hard rain the concert video is getting released (hopefully expanded from 50 mins) or has it been and i missed it?

 

An official release of the Blackbushe show would redeem some of the stigma the 1978 tour (and band) carries because of the not-yet-mature performances enshrined on the unfortunate Live at Budokan. (Which I love in its own special way. I dated a girl in college in the early 90s who had Budokan as not only her only Dylan album but the only Dylan she'd ever heard. And she loved it. She spent her adolescence growing up on a remote atoll in the South Pacific so I suppose that's as good an excuse as any for that.)

 

I would be all over this set. I thought one of the possibilities was a Coffee house set. To have these recordings in an all in one place archival setting would be so great. I would also love to see the 60s period be finished and completed. There can't be too much more, can there?

 

There's an abundance of 1960s material to release.
It can never be too much.

No, it hasn't been and no plans have been announced.

 

You make some good points but I never understood what people have against Live at Budokan. The music is brilliant, the arrangements are creative and brilliant, the musicianship is brilliant, and Dylan is in fine voice. It is the most well-modulated singing of his career. The whole presentation is a soulful bounding leap in his art. The rejection of this album just baffles me.

 

There are some fine rearrangements on there (I really like It's Alright Ma) but some of the reworks don't work as well for me (All I Want to Do sounding like 59th Street Bridge Song? no thanks). The shows from later in 1978 really are a few levels above Budokan, though. I'd love a huge Bootleg Series (or even a Live 1966 style box) for 1978.

 

Agreed! Love the Budokan-album. The Blackbushe-concert is similar, but even better. As I said above, the whole Blackbushe-concert should be released!

 

I've always hated that song, "All I Really Want to Do." I can't stand it. It's an inventory of things he doesn't intend to do. A list. With a sustained high note that his particular voice should not reach for. He plays the damn thing every night of the 1978 tour -- at least it seems as if he does -- and it's the low point at every concert. I wish he'd dropped it. I skip over it whenever I listen to the tapes. The song is not to be used as a measure of the music on the tour. Every song that comes before and after is a hundred times better. Should there ever be a Bootleg Series of the 1978 Tour I would be vastly grateful if they omit the song. I'd pay extra for the box-set if they omit it.