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

There were, and still are, excellent sounding boots of Manchester 1966, Royal Albert Hall 1966, the Basement Tapes, the 1965 and 1966 studio sessions, but that did not prevent Dylan from surpassing them with a superior release.

I do.

 

When they do release a Blood On the Tracks set what do you think this would include?

I can imagine a 2 disc set including outtakes from Pat Garrett... and Planet Waves on disc 1, with BOTT New York sessions on disc 2. But I do struggle to imagine how they would create a 6 disc deluxe set out of it. Any thoughts?

 

What is this 2 cd set you speak of? I have Pecos Blues but I'd like to hear more.

 

I certainly do.
Mentioned this on a thread awhile back.
Lot of the music heard in movie never made the soundtrack.
A clean version of "Rock Me Mama" hopefully exists.
And the long version of "Heavens Door" should be out there too.

 

Today's dismaying news reminded me of Bob Dylan's remark:

"I accept chaos. I'm not sure whether chaos accepts me."

Where did he say that, does anyone know?
I thought it was in 1964 liner notes, but evidently not.

 

I believe it is in the liner notes to Bringing it all back home.

 

What do you think of the new arrangements for Oh Sister, Don't Think Twice, and It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)?

 

Not that you were asking me, but I love that arrangement of It's Alright Ma, not that it could replace the original or anything. It sounds to me like some of the ideas in that arrangement got reworked into Solid Rock.

 

You could be right. They are similar.
I love all the new arrangements during the first seven months of 1978. You could tell from the reggae makeovers he'd been listening to Bob Marley and the Wailers, but it's surprising how easily the classic songs fit into the new format. Love the voodoo rock of "Oh Sister"; can't imagine where he got the idea for that. But by far the most sublime new arrangement was "Tangled Up In Blue" in the Fall, sung as a torch ballad blues with sax, keyboard and a guitar. It won the audience over every night. There hasn't been enough discussion of the arrangements | orchestrations on the 1978 tour as sampled on the Budokan album. He was in a good, soulful voice during the first seven months, too.

I've just been informed

 

The 1978 versions of Tangled Up in Blue are the best in the 40+ year history of the song. Though the arrangements during 1978 of TUIB were similar, the performances from 1978 vary in many ways. I once made a collection of all of the 1978 versions and played them together. It was like a suite of varied emotions.

 

A "suite of varied emotions" also describes the tour. Well put. I'll have to do that, make a tape of the different performances. It hadn't occurred to me that the song evolved during the tour, but of course it did.

 

I'm not so sure that "evolved" is the right word. For many years, I believe, Dylan approached each performance of a song with spontaneity. It would never come out exactly the same way, even if the band and the general arrangement or approach was similar. I would consider them spontaneous variations, rather than some evolutionary development.

The songs themselves can evolve, mostly with respect to lyrics.

 

Listening to TUIB from BOTT through 1975 and 1976 RTR performance and then early / late 1978 is a truly incredible journey.

 

I'm so enamored with the album version of Oh Sister, as well as the Hard Rain version, to the point where I can't help but find the Budokan version to be sacrilege. It is very rare for a song to make me upset, and yet it did just that. It probably has as much to do with what I put into it as what he was putting out. Don't Think Twice, meanwhile, is a gem.

 

I understand where you're coming from. Oh Sister (and One More Cup of Coffee) were -- are -- my favorite songs on Desire. That's why I couldn't stand the 1976 RTR version of Oh Sister. It felt like a leering sneering violation of the eloquent ballad still resonating in my head. The album Desire had just been released in January 1976 (after being delayed about 90 days over the Hurricane controversy) and the songs were living in my mind when Hard Rain changed them nine months later. Maybe it was too soon to make the change. How Dylan went from one to the other so quickly, I don't know. But I quickly adjusted to the voodoo version of 1978. It made sense to me. Go figure.

The original on Desire and live 1975 RTR remains my favorite, however.

 

Love everything '78. Such an adventurous year, and yet, at the same time, carries on the same lyrical-intelligence that marked the mid-seventies (and great vocals). Can't wait to hear the Bootleg Series '78 release . . . in the meantime, still very excited about the Gospel Years.

 

I've heard from a reliable source that European bootleggers are preparing a box-set of Warfield '79, all 14 shows. Let's hope Dylan heads them off at the pass with a right and proper release just like the Live 1966 collection.

 

I'd love some late 1978 shows. Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte is one of my favorite Dylan boots, and it sure as hell blows away his Budokan set, recorded early in the tour before the band found its groove.
Right now I'm listening to the New Orleans show from '76 and while there's great moments for sure, I'd pick 1978 as one of my two top choices to have live releases of; the other would be a great live show from 1988; the shows with G.E. Smith are so different from anything he's released; if he thought enough of Smith to write in World Gone Wrong's liner notes that the NET ended with G.E. Smith, even if he was being kind of facetious, he clearly missed G.E., who stupidly took SNL over Bob!
So a show from that tour would be welcome to someone like me - I think G.E. Smith was so fantastic; as someone somewhere wrote, Bob never had a more sympathetic guitarist than him (or at least since Bloomfield or Robertson).
There's so many shows...I wish he would keep releasing the 2 and 3 CD sets (sans "deluxe" exorbitant ones) and just put out as many shows as possible...and not bother with the outtakes as much (though I'd love an official release of the original Infidels).
He should also release the full Town Hall Show from '63 and Carnegie Hall too - complete versions. Hollow Horn did exemplary, incredible jobs, but I'd still love it.

 

Here's what Dylan had to say....1965 interview conducted by (future filmmaker) Norah Ephron & Susan Edmiston:


Q: Like what songs?

A:"Little Brown Dog." "I bought a little brown dog, its face is all gray. Now I'm going to Turkey flying on my bottle." And "Nottemun Town," that's like a herd of ghosts passing through on the way to Tangiers. "Lord Edward," "Barbara Allen," they're full of myth.

Q: And contradictions?

A:Yeah, contradictions.

Q: And chaos?

A: Chaos, watermelon, clocks, everything.

Q: You wrote on the back of one album, "I accept chaos but does chaos accept me."

A: Chaos is a friend of mine. It's like I accept him, does he accept me.

Q: Do you see the world as chaos?

A: Truth is chaos. Maybe beauty is chaos.

 

I like the arrangement of "Oh, Sister" the best of those three in comparison to their originals. The song is my least favorite on Desire - which I generally think is overrated, with "Isis" still being a favorite (Top 10 ?) Dylan song for me. When it comes to "Oh, Sister," I don't like it lyrically. The new arrangement, however, gives me another reason to listen to it.

 

Don't the rules work such that if a bootlegger issues a session or concert, the major labels are not allowed to issue it for 50 years?

 

For me, the closest thing to a "leering sneering violation" on Hard Rain is Lay Lady Lay. Even then, I still like it. But he turns it into something far less than what it was.

Maybe my problem with the '78 Oh Sister is that it has an overt sexual power. While I recognize the undertones inherent in the song, I prefer to read it perhaps with religious meaning, but definitely in a literal sense of a brother singing to (or, on the album, singing with) his sister. Such an interpretation is pretty incompatible with the '78 version. Now that I think about it, as much as I connect deeply with a good amount of songs (Dylan's works being among them) I don't know that any of those songs, bar Oh Sister, resonate with my relationship to my own sister.

 

Well, Dylan didn't have a sister. The song can't be about a literal sister. He's using the term first in the spiritual sense and then in the carnal sense knowing that it will cause confusion and vexation among the listeners. The singer could even be a priest trying to persuade a nun to yield to temptation, to her suppressed desire. In the 1978 version the devil is exerting an influence over the singer, metaphorically speaking. Or, the devil just might be the singer. Emmylou gets it even if no one else does. The song is metaphorical and has mystery and I don't think it needs explaining.

 

Let's hope The Cutting Edge and Live 1966 has reversed the situation.

I've been giving Dylan my money since 1973 and would like to give him more of it more frequently if only he'd release more stuff from the archive.