Poll--The Weakest Link: Bob Dylan TIME OUT OF MIND, Round 4

Our hearts just weren't with "Highlands."

Six remain, one must go.

Discussion question: TELL TALE SIGNS had several outtakes and unused songs from this album. Were there any you thought should have been on the album instead of what was issued? Also, if you want to comment on any officially unreleased takes that you may have come across on those "rare European imports," please do (especially if you can link to them on YouTube or other such service).

7 Highlands
T8 Million Miles
T8 'Til I Fell In Love With You
T10 Make You Feel My Love
T10 Dirt Road Blues

 

"Love Sick" one more time.

I won't deny that "Red River Shore" is a brilliant song, and may be "better" (if there is such a thing) than some tracks that made the finished "TOOM". But I personally find the endless "X should have been on the album instead of Y" Dylan discussions a pointless exercise, particularly when people compare one song to another without giving consideration to the overall cohesiveness of the album. The album is great, it should be left the heck alone.

 

That's fair.

One could use this question as a springboard to discuss the outtakes, since I won't be doing a WL game for TELL TALE SIGNS. I could have phrased it better for that purpose.

JcS

 

Please don't take my comment as me complaining about your choice of DQ. It's a relevant topic that LOTS (most?) fans seem to enjoy discussing at great length. In the song-by-song "Shot of Love" thread I did, it seemed like that was ALL some people wanted to talk about. But for me, personally, it's just a topic I have grown weary of. It's a "game" that often derails the discussion of the songs fans desire to "replace".

The TOOM outtakes on "Tell Tale Signs", IMO, are almost universally outstanding. One more album where an "every scrap recorded" boxed set would not disappoint.

 

Can´t wait. I don´t think I´ll be able to choose when the next round comes

 

I can't believe "Highlands" is gone. This is my first participation in a Weakest Link thread but I had assumed that when there were only four songs left, "Highlands" would be one of them. I voted for "Love Sick" again. Bob may think it is his greatest song of lost love but I think "Can't Wait" is better. But I see that is not a majority view.

 

Can't Wait again for me.

I think one of the (many) highlights of TTS was the 'fast' version of Marchin' To The City.

It's not better than 'Til I Fell In Love With You, but it's certainly its equal. Should it have replaced it? Maybe ....

That aside, TTS is as enjoyable an album as any of the 'proper' albums covered by its timescale. Simply essential Dylan.

 

Can't Wait.

Yikes, it's impossible! These songs are all excellent.

 

Oh, I didn't read it as a complaint about the question; it just gave me an idea of how I could have done it better.

After all these years, I can still improve.

JcS

 

It really is; it's a nice historical piece, a peek behind the curtain, but it works just to put it on and let it play as with any other Dylan album.

JcS

 

I've only done a few of these, but from what I've seen longer songs tend to go before their times.

It looks like Can't Wait is the frontrunner, that's a shame, it's my favorite of the 'new to me' songs.

 

Maybe.
If Highway 61 Revisited was being run, "Desolation Row" would be my winner.

 

My favorite track is "Not Dark Yet" and I also like (very much "Cold Irons Bound"). I have to admit that "Lovesick" sounds great too...a sound I didn't expect when I got the album. I enjoy hearing it live (as I do when Bob plays "Not Dark Yet").

 

DQ: It's been so long since I've played TELL TALE SIGNS, I don't remember all the songs on it from this session. I know I like "Mississippi," but I'm not sure it would have fit on this record.

I also adore the MASKED AND ANONYMOUS version of "Cold Irons Bound." Not exactly in response to the question asked, but I think it's better than the cut on the LP.

JcS

 

Generally speaking, I like Daniel Lanois as a producer, but I don't care for his choices on this album. Of his work with Dylan, I prefer Oh Mercy, but even that one is flawed.

The version of Can't Wait on TTS is, in my opinion, much more lively than the one of TOOM. But it's more than that. Now, I've never produced Dylan, ahem, but I think I'd have found a way to include Mississippi on TOOM (and Series, Dignity, Born and God on OM). It seems like these songs were excluded not because they weren't good enough, but because Lanois couldn't quite figure out how to put his stamp on them too. Dylan's contributions seem to be finished, but it's the production details that haven't been finalized. I think Mississippi would have fit on TOOM, even in the acoustic version, if Lanois prioritized good songs over production style. Grouse grouse grouse.

EDIT: It's like Dylan was hired to do a Lanois album, rather than vice versa.

 

Man, I just love "Can't Wait". My #4 track on the album. Sorry it appears to be on the way out!

Fair enough, but this is the one and only album where Bob has spoken at length about the problems HE had with this, and acknowledged the problems that other people have had. I keep coming back to this because it's so singular,not just for Bob, but as far as I know, for ANY artist to acknowledge in an Grammy Album of the Year speech that some people's favorite songs were left off the album. Can you imagine any other artist who'd say that? Or any other album about which Bob would say it publicly?

Certainly in other cases, Bob has complained about people kvetching about this. He's especially exasperated by "Blind Willie McTell", which he never felt he finished, and felt no need to record after other people did a better job with it than anything he'd had in mind. He tends to think of his own live version as a cover of The Band's performance, much as he's spoken about his live All Along the Watchtower as a cover of Jimi's.

This album is completely different. He struggled to make songs fit, and let us in on the struggle from the get go. I've quote from several interviews he gave that went into this in great detail in earlier rounds of this thread, and he was much blunter than usual about it in the Tell Tale Signs notes. It's even different than "Oh Mercy", where he talks in Chronicle about the struggles to record it. The issue here wasn't just the process. (Although that was certainly a massive frustration.) It's that there were so many possible versions of the album that might have happened if songs broke one way or the other, and none of them was an obvious choice.

So, no kidding, this may be the only album in his discography where the alternate takes and songs that didn't make the cut are 100% squarely in the middle of the story of the album. Not like "Is 'Desolation Row' a piano song or a guitar song?" or "Should I add 'Abandoned Love' to the running order of Desire?" There are a dozen or more forks in the road that we know about, plus who knows how many others we don't, where this album could have been a million miles away from the one we have.

To me, this is played out especially clearly in the difference between "Standing in the Doorway" and "Dreamin' of You". Most of two verses are largely the same, but before we get to those differences, and musical differences that are as stark as any two songs he ever recorded -- seriously, pick any two songs of his that you think of as "different from each other", and they're probably not as different as these two branches of the same source -- we get to a fundamental question. Is the song about paralyzed, or forced to keep moving? More specifically, frozen by loss, or driven by madness?

I mean literally, in one song the guy is standing still, and in the other, he's moving. There's nothing about these two that's even vaguely reconcilable, not even by Nobel Laureate Bob.

And yet, many shared lines, with some wild divergences. Here's one example.

From "Standing in the Doorway", sung slowly, contemplatively.

Maybe they’ll get me and maybe they won’t (btw, one of Bob's all-time great lines)
But not tonight and it won’t be here
There are things I could say but I don’t
I know the mercy of God must be near

From "Dreamin' of You", sung by a driven man, with a band at full tilt.

Maybe they’ll get me, maybe they won’t
But whatever it won’t be tonight
I wish your hand was in mine right now
We could go where the moon is white

Certainly a different relationship to the absence of the woman -- maybe he left her. For that matter, it's not clear that they're broken up at all. Merely apart. In fact, when he sings "Travel under any star, you'll see me wherever you are", it suggests an ongoing connection. Certainly his ongoing obsession -- I'm dreamin' of you/that's all I do/and it's driving me insaaaaane -- is the polar opposite of Standing in the Doorway, where he sings "

There's also a very different picture of God. In the former song, present and merciful. Here, absent and capricious:

By the grave of some child, who neither wept or smiled
I pondered my faith in the rain

The singer's reaction to his crisis of faith? The very next two lines:

I’ve been dreamin’ of you, that’s all I do
And it’s driving me insane

Not even a crisis of faith -- not God, not life, not death -- is as compelling as his condition in relation to her. Death and God put in another appearance --

Somewhere dawn is breaking
Light is streaking ‘cross the floor
Church bells are ringing
I wonder who they’re ringing for

-- clearly referencing John Donne's observation on mortality "Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee", but really, they could be wedding bells or a call to worship. It doesn't matter. It's over THERE. It's far away. It's irrelevant.

Bells are ringing for someone in "Standing" too, but Bob's reaction? "I can't win." Wow. Complete resignation. His reaction in "Dreamin'" is that he's still in motion, still dreaming, and still insane. I even love that reference to sunrise. The light isn't moving -- it's streaking. Such a propulsive song!

btw, there's a whole 'nother thing to talk about another day, which is the number of these lines that come verbatim from the poetry of Henry Rollins (yes, the 4th lead singer of Black Flag). I'm of the "magpie, not plagiarist" school, but it's still interesting. There are a number of Rollins lines all over this album and, appropriately enough, Love and Theft too. Check out this terrific analysis.)

So beyond the difference of standing still vs. compelled motion, there's the difference of resignation and...compelled motion. The singer of "Standing" is still aware of the pain, but he's pretty numb. "I don't know whether I'd kiss you or kill you." In fact, he's partly paralyzed because he wants to go back, but feels like he'd be betraying himself. In Dreamin'", though, he's "sleeping in the palace of pain" -- a grand edifice of agony --but one reason why the ringing bells are irrelevant is because THIS guy is almost beyond life and death altogether.

Feel like a ghost in love
Underneath the heavens above
Feel further away than I ever did before
Feel further than I can take
I'm dreamin' of you, it's all I do
And it's driving me insane

I mean, this guy is truly unhinged.

And he's using the same tools to paint that picture that he's using to paint "Standing in the Doorway"! That's the thing you have to keep coming back to. Not that he might have included this song on the album or he might not have. It's that there's a fundamental vision for what the album might BE, and the answers to all of these questions affect all the others.

Maybe you haven't heard "Dreamin' of You", so you have no idea what I'm talking about. I probably should have started with that.

This song is so powerful, and so unique in Bob's catalog, that Columbia used it to put together a nifty promo video for Tell Tale Signs starring (and I do mean STARRING) Harry Dean Stanton. They also made the song available as a free download via Amazon, which is where this promo originally ran.

The story is that our hero is driving. It's only when he gets to his destination -- a garage attached to an abandoned gas station somewhere near Joshua Tree -- that we see his goal: sorting through stacks of old tapes to put together....Tell Tale Signs! Very meta. In fact, if you watch closely, the name of the gas station is Bob's Highway Service! And Harry is sorting through a pile of memorabilia and actual bootlegs, including a cameo from The Great White Wonder!

But the video gets the song exactly right, which is why I absolutely adore it as video. It's a reminder that the noir of Raymond Chandler is rooted in sun-bleached southern California. The darkness derives from the soul, not the scenery. It's very easy to see Harry as Bob's stand-in, even though the character in the video is apparently some record label functionary. Say, more Jeff Rosen than Bob Dylan. But this is killer stuff.



Holy sh}t, I absolutely adore everything about it....but it raises a number of issues. Musically, yeah, it's long gone, Daddy. It barely sounds like the same artist who made Time Out of Mind. Just as it creates a center of gravity around the 2 or 3 CD set of Tell Tale Signs, it would have pulled the single Time Out of Mind in too many directions.

For one, you'd lose "Standing in the Doorway". To me, even without "Dreamin' of You", that's no great loss, because it sounds too similar to "Tryin' to Get to Heaven" anyway, and I HATE that song. There's not many songs Bob ever did that I hate, but that one, I really do. Well maybe not hate hate....but maybe not not, too.

But I can see one major hesitation from Bob, that there's already a propulsive, obsessive rock and roll stomper on Time Out of Mind, which is the Grammy-winning "Cold Irons Bound". Me, I LIKE how the album goes if you get rid of "Tryin'" (which is trying too hard to make a flat metaphor dimensional, and trying my patience) AND "Standing in the Doorway" (another thing I don't like: WAY TOO LONG at 7:43, compared to a sprightly 5:48 for "Dreamin' of You")....but it completely shifts the center of balance. Now, rocking songs with weird instrumentation ("Dirt Road Blues", "Can't Wait", "Cold Irons Bound") become the dominant flavor. Frankly, in this context, "Love Sick" starts sounding weirder and heavier.

Again, to me, not a bad thing, and I've done a Spotify playlist called Tim Out of Mind (pun intended) that does exactly this....but it has the unfortunate effect of having "Not Dark Yet" now feel almost too slow. It's almost like, you've got to shave off a couple of energy spikes to keep the flow moving through the slow spots, rather than grinding it to a halt.

But he obviously could have gone much further in THAT direction too. "Can't Wait" is the best example. The release version is a MASSIVE swampy rocker, slow, but with this giant guitar reverb that'd crush a mid-sized town. MASSIVE, with a nifty swirling organ.

I’d like to think I could control myself, but it isn’t true (a line lifted from Henry Rollins - nice!)
That’s how it is
when things disintegrate (this is one line, but he sings it as two, so that "it isn't true/That's how it is" can also be heard as a couplet)
And I don’t know how much longer I can wait

I’m doomed to love you, I’ve been rolling through stormy weather
I’m thinking of you and all the places we could roam together

Hey, wait a minute! Obsessed, compelled, on the move, "I'm THINKING of you" -- don't you mean "Dreamin' of You"? That's right. The same themes AGAIN. It works for me , but hey, I'm nuts. I can see why Bob didn't feel a need to go to the well THREE times on the same album.

The alternate version isn't even vaguely similar. For one, it's a PIANO song. Reverb is still there in spades, thank god for THAT. But it's also sloooow. The fella is in motion, but barely ambulatory. It feels like the whole thing is about to fall over. On its own, not a bad thing....but now, it turns down the tempo of the whole album, where "Highlands" and "Love Sick" now sound downright perky. It's a weird balance.

But in fact, if you take off the drums and bass, it sounds like a piano-fied companion of "Meet Me in the Morning", from the alternate universe where Lanois produced Blood on the Tracks. No kidding though, this could have been on that album....except that the alternate version is soooo dark. That's the thing. Sooooo dark.

And once again, has some lyrics that wound up in other songs. Unlike "Dreamin' of You", where I think all those lyrics work best, some of these work better where we eventually heard them, on Love and Theft. Really, though, this isn't the same song as the Time Out of Mind version of "Can't Wait" AT ALL. After the first line, they've got almost nothing in common at all! Here are just SOME of the lines in the Time Out of Mind version that have pretty much zero reference to Time Out of Mind...although again, with a reference to Love and Theft.


Did you ever lay awake at night
your face turned to the wall
drowning in your thoughtlessness and cut off from it all
I don't know
Maybe for you it's not that late
But as for me, don't know how much longer I can wait

It's got to end
Everything about it just feels wrong
I pretend
Being close to her is where I don't belong

Well my back is to the sun because the light is too intense (another Henry Rollins nod, worked better in "Sugar Baby")
I can see what everybody in the world is up against
I'll stay here
Where I can feel the hand of fate
And I don't know how much longer I can wait

Skies are gray (although honestly, he sings it like "scars are gray", which is in fact a cooler line!)
Life is short and I think of her a lot
I can't say
If I want the pain to end or not

Well the blindness overtaking me is beating like a drum
I don't know where it starts or where it's coming from
It's how it is
When I try to concentrate (In fact, the biggest similarity between the two versions of "Can't Wait" is the way he uses the line break after "how it is" to connect to the line before AND the line after, to make completely two different readings!)
And I don't know how much longer I can wait

I've been drinking
Drinking forbidden juices
I've been living
Living on lame excuses

My hands are cold
The end of time has just begun (Heck, even the apocalyptic reference makes a good fit with Blood on the Tracks!)
I'm gettin' old
Anything can happen now to anyone
I walk across the floor till I wear out my shoes

Think you lost it all, there's always something more to lose
I'm so clear
She can keep my head on straight

Wait a minute -- she's keeping his head on straight? This dude does NOT sound like his head is on straight. LOL Maybe he's singing "CAN'T" keep his head on straight....but again, as a SLOW song, with a PIANO. Adding it turns Time Out of Mind down a whole 'nother road.

There's one other example of Bob having to choose which song to use a line on -- "I've been hit too hard, I've seen too much/Nothing can heal me now, but your touch" is in "Walking to the City", but he was right to use the line in "Til I Fell In Love With You" and keep THAT song. In fact, "Walking To The City" sounds closer to the territory he'd mine on Together Through Life, although frankly, I wouldn't have included it there either. Tell Tale Signs is its perfect home -- a nifty song that helps flesh out a truly satisfying double-or-triple album-length experience.

Keep playing my game with me. What would you take off? We're right at 72 minutes as it is, the best a CD could reliably do in 1997. And how does that affect the running order? What does it do to the whole ALBUM?

The fact is, sure, if you want to, we can put on "Mississippi #1", "Can't Wait", "Walking to the City", and/or "Red River Shore" from Tell Tale Signs, drop off "Cold Irons Bound" (save it for Masked & Anonymous!), "Till I Fell In Love With You" (since we've added "Walking to the City"), and "Dirt Road Blues," leave off "Dreamin' of You" rather than following my earlier advice to add it -- and NOW you've got a balls-out folk album! In fact, the slow version of "Can't Wait" and "Love Sick" are the two most uptempo tracks left!

This is especially interesting to me in light of the released version of Time Out of Mind STILL winning the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album! But there's obviously an even folkier version of this album that's really good, that I think would be remembered maybe as his best folk album, maybe only behind "Freewheelin'" or something...but frankly, maybe even better.

The problem with including any of these Mississippis to me is the one Dylan identified, that Lanois just didn't get the song at all. "Lanois didn't see it. Thought it was pedestrian. Took it down the Afro-polyrhythm route—multirhythm drumming, that sort of thing. Polyrhythm has its place, but it doesn't work for knife-like lyrics trying to convey majesty and heroism."

What a phrase! "Knife-like lyrics trying to convey majesty and heroism"! To me, this isn't just one of Bob's best songs, but among his most important, too (speaking artistically and literarily, rather than socially of course). It's certainly one of my couple of favorites. Most days, I'd tell you it's my VERY favorite. But not yet. LATER.

Bob talked about how he and Lanois used to go into the parking lot rather than arguing in front of the kids in the studio -- "we'd sit on the fender of a truck, in this parking lot in Miami, and I'd often think, if people see this they won't believe it!" -- but with "Mississippi", it got rough.

Maybe we had worked too hard on other things, I can't remember, but Lanois can get passionate about what he feels to be true. He's not above smashing guitars. I never cared about that unless it was one of mine. Things got contentious once in the parking lot. He tried to convince me that the song had to be 'sexy, sexy and more sexy.' I know about sexy, too. He reminded me of Sam Phillips, who had once said the same thing to John Prine about a song, but the circumstances were not similar. I tried to explain that the song had more to do with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights than witch doctors, and just couldn't be thought of as some kind of ideological voodoo thing. But he had his own way of looking at things, and in the end I had to reject this because I thought too highly of the expressive meaning behind the lyrics to bury them in some steamy cauldron of drum theory.​

It's no wonder that his second time in the barrel with Lanois led him to becoming his own producer....but the thing is, there's no 1997 version of the song that we've heard (including the THIRD version, for which I paid like another $80 for the 3 disk version of Tell Tale Signs) that you can use to create a track listing for Time Out of Mind that works.

I don't know, maybe you disagree, but try it in Spotify or iTunes or the playlist-making thing of your choice and listen to it. Not that I wouldn't be thrilled for any excuse to get rid of "Tryin' to Get to Heaven", but my own experiment suggests that "Mississippi" isn't necessarily an upgrade ENOUGH relative to where it grew into. In context, the versions we have are too slight. They emphasize its musically embryonic state relative to pretty much any other song on the album, admittedly, partly because Bob stopped fighting and decided to move on.

Still, the song is a million times more valuable to Love and Theft than it could ever have been to ANY track listing of Time Out of Mind. WE'RE better off, and the SONG is better off, heck, the WORLD is better off, because Bob waited for the right combination of song, band, performance, recording, and context.

Which is where I'm going to try to bring this thing in for a landing. Bob has talked about working out songs on the road, but having stopped doing that because of -- he says "bootleggers", but nowadays, it's anyone with a phone at a concert -- spreading them wide before they're ready. "Mississippi" didn't need much more work, but it needed THAT BAND. Even more than Lanois, I think THAT was the issue with Time Out of Mind -- Bob didn't have the band together, didn't know what he wanted the musicians to do once they were in the room, and even when he had something in his head, he couldn't communicate it in a way that they understood.

By 2000/2001, he DID have a band like that.

That said, the 2001 band has acknowledged that Bob assumed that their telepathic skills were more evolved than they were, and there was still some friction, especially when solos got out of hand (I'm looking at YOU, Mr. Sexton )...but it can't be overstated enough how much "Mississippi" and ESPECIALLY the 2003 version of "Cold Irons Bound" RELIED on having a band of unified intent.

Compare that to pianist Jim Dickinson's observation of the TooM sessions: ""I haven't been able to tell what's actually happening. I know they were listening to playbacks, I don't know whether they were trying to mix it or not! Twelve musicians playing live—three sets of drums,... it was unbelievable—two pedal steels, I've never even heard two pedal steels played at the same time before!" Some of that was on Lanois, but some of it was on Bob. He didn't know what he wanted, and there were too many moving pieces, including the songs, which hadn't finished gelling, and too many possible versions of the album.

Not just because of songs that might or might not have made the cut, or different arrangements, but for a plethora of different VISIONS, some of them irreconcilable.

As it is, it's pretty amazing that we wound up with an album this good! And in fact, yeah, I guess for normal people, it's enough to look at these versions of these songs, and not extend the evaluation any further. But to me anyway, there's still no album he's ever made that more rewards digging deep into these other potentials.

 

I'd been patting myself on the back for restraint for only posting the video once on this game, but hey, that was last round. Since you brought it up THIS TIME, I'm giving myself permission to bring it up again. And as I mentioned last time, worth considering in the context of alternates because it consolidates and rewrites a couple of verses, and jacks the tempo for a ride that's faster, harder, and a minute and a half shorter -- in a good way.



Y'know, one thing I meant to mention in my previous essay that among other things, praised "Dreamin' of You" is that that song basically lays out the opening plot point for this movie:

For years they had me locked in a cage
Then they threw me onto the stage

I can see why those two lines in particular felt a bit on the nose in terms of Bob's career, but as the movie begins, he is in fact in a cage (also the case for "Cold Iron Bound", at least figuratively, another reason not to have them both on the same album), and gets pushed onto the stage to legitimize a bogus piece of political theater that ultimately has nothing to do with him. Sound familiar?

 

A fair rebuttal, although 'Desolation Row' is still a good 'Like a Rolling Stone' shorter than 'Highlands.'

I'm still trying to rationalize what happened with Eat a Peach, it turned out like the bizarro world, IMO.

 

I totally agree that it might be difficult to assemble a better album out of the 'leftovers' we have, but that really points to production problems.

72 minutes is too long for an album. That's Blonde on Blonde length, and TOOM ain't no Blonde on Blonde. Just because you can fit a bunch of music on a CD doesn't mean you should. Lanois should have helped Dylan pick the best songs to make a cohesive whole and then gotten them down. Instead, Lanois was way too worried about 'sexy, sexy and more sexy' for a Dylan record. I mean, come on. It turned out like one long 72-minute tone poem, with astonishingly little variety. But people were ready to welcome Bob back, and bleak was 'in'.

Dylan was absolutely right to starting producing himself, and the proof is in one of his best albums, Love and Theft. (Which is still too long though...)

 

Once you eliminate Make You Feel My Love, there are no week tracks.

 

I think I bought the movie during a binge at a pawn shop a few years ago, and still haven't watched it.

JcS

 

I wouldn't call it a great movie, but it's better than a lot of people say. There's at least one thread about the movie in the Visual Arts section, but I honestly enjoyed it a lot. It was written and directed by Larry Charles, the Seinfeld writer whose most famous contribution to the lexicon is "Not that there's anything wrong with that!" He also wrote, directed, and or produced bunches of episodes of Mad About You, Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm, the movie Borat, etc....but this isn't at exactly a comedy.

Keeping things on topic, sort of, there's a snippet of Standing in the Doorway that wasn't in the theatrical cut, so I hadn't seen it until recently. (I never got around to buying the DVD, although I keep meaning to.) John Goodman, Owen Wilson, and a ventriloquist's dummy weigh in.

No arguments from me that it's too long, but I like this a lot better than Blonde on Blonde. And fwiw, I'm not saying that you can't make an alternate mix that you might like better. I've made two of them. One that turns it into an even weirder, swampier, harder rocking record, and one that turns it into a folkier record. Both of them shorter than the released version.

But in fact, many reviews at the time complained that the album wasn't cohesive enough, that there were at least two albums fighting each other here. NY Rock was especially blunt: "It's sort of two records mixed together. Half the songs compare to the introspective plaintive compositions that we witnessed on Blood on the Tracks. The other half are 12-bar blues ditties that often sound as if Bob is making 'em up as he goes."

The point of my big post isn't that there are TWO albums fighting each other. It's that there are a potentially infinite number of them. THAT's what the alternate versions of songs and unreleased tracks reveal. But when you've got songs as crazily different as "Not Dark Yet" and "Cold Irons Bound" back to back as one single example, I'd say exactly the opposite of what you did: not astonishingly LITTLE variety, but astonishingly LOTTA variety.

And I do happen to prefer the version of "Cold Irons Bound" that's a minute and a half shorter, from Masked & Anonymous, with its shorter length being one of the reasons I prefer it.

I actually just took another run at my weirder running order, and it turns out that the SECOND version of "Mississippi" works pretty well: 10 songs, 56 minutes total. I mix it up quite a bit -- "Dirt Road Blues" opens it, "Love Sick" closes it, "Mississippi #2" is in the 4th slot, behind "Dreamin' Of You" -- and I can share the whole thing if anyone cares....but honestly, "Mississippi" gained EVERYTHING by waiting. Even more than waiting for Bob to produce it, it was waiting for the right band.

Over at Expecting Rain, David Kemper makes it sound almost accidental.

I know of two versions of “Mississippi”. We thought we were done with Love And Theft, and then a friend of Bob’s passed him a note, and he said, oh, yeah, I forgot about this: “Mississippi”. And then he made a comment, did you guys ever bring the version we did down at the Lanois sessions. And they said, yeah, we have it right here. And he said let’s listen to it. So they put it up on the big speakers, and I said, damn – release it! But it was just me and Tony, and Larry wasn’t on it, and Charlie wasn’t on it. And so we all just said, wait a minute. And Daniel is producer on it. Let’s re-record it. So we did our version of it.​

Hmmm. Not sure I buy that Bob forgot COMPLETELY about it, and certainly at odds with what Bob has said about the importance of it to him elsewhere....but I'm buying the idea that Bob can fire up THIS band, and get exactly what he was looking for off the bat. Not just because of Bob vs. Daniel, but because of THIS BAND vs. whatever previous collection of musicians was randomly in the room when the tape was rolling last time.

I don't like Lanois' work most of the time (Achtung Baby may be my only fully enthusiastic thumbs up in his whole discography), and I certainly don't care for what he did on either TooM or Oh Mercy...I think of parts of Tell Tale Signs as the "Let it Be: Naked" versions of those albums...but I do still strongly feel that Bob's lack of clarity on the band is the larger issue. If he'd known who the players were going to be and what he wanted them to do, he might have had more emotional bandwidth to fight Lanois. And been able to communicate with the band, which he's been abundantly honest in his assessment that he was unable to do.

I absolutely think that one reason he felt confident enough to be the producer of L&T himself is because he knew he wasn't going to need to wrestle the band the way he had to TooM. He could just be a bandleader, record the thing more or less live so he didn't have to cede much control to the engineer, and just play. Nothing about that experience is anything like what he went through on TooM.

Lanois sure as spit didn't help the chaos, mind you, but I think he gets way too much blame for everything wrong with the album, and too little credit for anything right.

Even though it's my favorite Bob album, I'm also going to agree with you about Love & Theft being too long, by at least two songs. Cutting them would have given us a chance to have them on Tell Tale Signs, since that was the only album of the era otherwise overlooked. Win-win.

 

DQ: "Can't Wait" [Alternate Version #2, Disc 3]. Also, "Dreaming of You" is too good of a song to not have made the album's sequencing.

 

Poll--The Weakest Link: Bob Dylan TIME OUT OF MIND, Round 5