Bob Dylan – The Bootleg Series Vol.16: Springtime In New York (1980–1985) (Content & Sound Quality)

I'd like to hear a quick pick-up acoustic version of "Wiggle Wiggle" from California Rundown Studios.

 

If this is any indication, I'd love to hear a stripped-down version of "Sweetheart Like You" on this new box. It's no wonder that it was the first single from this album. The lyrics are terrific and the song is just top notch.

 

I can't wait to see the tracklist. Bring it on.

 

Hey Sean, I may not have followed this, but why did the Brendan O’Brien “Dignity” fall out of favor in the Dylan canon? Did people greatly object to his latter day editing? I thought it was a fine single, at the time, and it was a nice re-appearance by Bob. Loved the banjo too lol.

If you remember, the years 1990, 91, 92, 93, 94 were a very weird time, to say the least, to be a Dylan fan. He’d had great notices with Oh Mercy but mainly, these were really the “lost” years.

I felt Bob was doing great live shows then, but I had the uncomfortable feeling of being absolutely alone in my belief!

TOOM and the next Bootleg Series were years away! Slim Pickens!

— David

 

I think it was ok but the original mix that appeared on bootlegs with the repeating D-G riff upfront hasn’t really been released - the version on ‘the best of V2’ in 2000 was remixed and edited, with several tracks absent and the guitar pushed back a bit. I think even Dylan’s piano is buried a bit. I also think ‘Dignity’ might be slightly sped up (or the boot runs slightly slow).

Anyway - there’s something about the version on bootlegs that feels like it’s missing a bit on the released versions.

 

I'd be happy with one CD devoted to Caribbean Wind outtakes tbh.
Can't get enough of that beauty. It's right up there with his other classic "time-shift" songs for me - VOJ and TUIB.

The original decision to leave out Angelina, Groom and Caribbean Wind from Shot of Love still leaves me bewildered. Incredible.

 

I'm not sure I'd ever heard that rumour of there being a Oh Mercy take. That would increase my estimation of those sessions even more.

 

From Heylin’s very tantalizing entry for “TV Talkin’ Song” in his book Still On The Road:

“Hard evidence that Dylan had been sketching out the song in his mind for a while is found on a “live” two-track recording of the song made not in L.A. but in New Orleans, back in March 1989, that was under consideration for Tell Tale Signs. Though there is no version of the song on the Oh Mercy multitracks, this prototype “TV Talkin’ Song” was no impromptu improvisation. Dylan worked on the song long enough to get a full version, and the vocal he unleashes is probably his scariest since “Black Cross” in 1961. What is entirely absent is the Speakers’ Corner setting, which may be the result of Dylan’s time in London in February 1990. In 1989, the man “on a platform” resembles the figure in Renaldo and Clara declaiming about how “everything you say to a man of God you say direct to God.” A number of lines, however, do survive to the red sky sessions, including the image of shooting the TV out, à la Elvis, and something proximate to the damning couplet in the initial red sky version, “Puts a [brain] inside your eye, and penetrates your skull / Lays an egg inside your head, and makes you dull.”

Excerpt From
Still On the Road
Clinton Heylin
‎Still On the Road
This material may be protected by copyright.

 

Clinton Heylin said in that live Badlands event this year that the Oh Mercy version of TV Talkin' Song is quite something.

Personally, an Oh Mercy Bootleg Series is the one that I crave the most. It's been my favourite Dylan album for a while now.

 

The other intriguing aspect of Time Out of Mind is the question around when the songs were written, revised, demo'd, worked on in studios, etc. The official story - Dylan sits up late during a few stormy nights on the old farm and suddenly writes a batch of new songs - always smelled strongly of manure to me. As did the Lanois tale of having the song lyrics read to him in a hotel room. My guess is that Dylan was working on those songs for years - and there have been hints, from Dylan and others, that this is so. We know about Oxnard, although we don't know for sure how much more there is in the vault from those sessions; there are other, rumoured sessions and, again, almost certainly some we don't know about.

There is also the question of mixing: a remixed (and much improved) Love Sick was issued as part of the Vicky's Panties EP: did they remix for that release (if so, why?) or was that mix taken from an entirely different, less Lanois-inflected mix of the album?

 

If it does exist it has to be included in the TOOM set.

 

Dylan recorded the entire album at Oxnard. Off the top of my head only one track - on “Tell Tale Signs” - has been released from Oxnard.

There’s also Bob Lanois unreleased 30 min film “My Heart’s In The Highlands” from the sessions which remains unseen. Also the “Love Sick” video.

 

My best guess: the November release of the 'new' Let It Be project will likely spawn a massive promotional oversaturation of Beatles hype. Not that that's a bad thing--I remember the 1995 "Anthology" rollout (also in November) as being a lot of fun, but it also kind of sucked all of the oxygen out of the room as far as other holiday music releases that year. (The only other one I can think of off of the top of my head was Springsteen's "Ghost of Tom Joad" album.)

 

Well, I remember Peter Stone Brown mentioning an early mix, done by either Dickinson or Robillard. That's one rumoured version of the album. There is also a mix that was rumoured to be scheduled for inclusion in the big collected albums box but then shelved. Those could be the same mix, of course. Then there's the Vicky's Knickers mix of Love Sick, and the remix of Not Dark Yet (a b side of a later single, can't recall which offhand): were they taken from one of those earlier album mixes, or remixed specifically for single/ep release?. It has been posited, in the past, that Lanois's co-production contract gives him a veto on remixes, so we might speculate that maybe that doesn't cover single releases and thus those two remixed songs squeezed through that loophole. Either way, that Love Sick remix is significantly superior to the album version - you can actually make out individual instruments playing on it!

 

I spoke to Lanois back in the day. They demo-ed a few tracks in Oxnard, they did NOT record an entire album.

 

My sense is that the O'Brien "Dignity" was fairly successful in 1994-1995 as a career boost for Bob; the Greatest Hits Vol. 3 CD got good reviews, his live reputation was slowly recovering, and the Woodstock and Unplugged shows kind of brought him back into the mainstream consciousness. But then the Touched By An Angel soundtrack was released just a few years later (in 1998), and fans who weren't aware of the song's origins were like, "A-ha! Here's the 'real' version of the song!" This mix of the 1989 version subsequently became the "standard" version on Dylan comps, leaving the O'Brien version as a somewhat forgotten oddity.

It was a strange time indeed. Oh Mercy was a big hit, and while UTRS was something of a misfire, it was hardly the punching bag that KOL or DITG were. There was the big, splashy "Bobfest" in 1992, and The Greatest Songwriter of the 20th Century capitalized on it with ... an acoustic album of covers?! Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong were both part of the process that resulted in Time Out Of Mind and ModBob, of course, but at the time it seemed like the well had run dry again. To me, the O'Brien "Dignity" was a fine track, but also an acknowledgement by Dylan Inc. that "We got nothin' new, folks."

Very true. I'm not a big "concert guy"; my first Dylan show was in 1986 (with Tom Petty), and I didn't see him again until early-mid 1994 -- general admission (i.e., standing) in a college gymnasium somewhere in Jersey. It was pretty ramshackle. I had read about the Supper Club shows and how great they supposedly were, but I didn't see evidence of that at the show I saw. To me, Bob's comeback started with "Boogie Woogie Country Girl" -- easily his most exciting studio track in years -- and then the Woodstock show in August 1994, followed by his remarkable, countrified "Forever Young" on the David Letterman show that November. He still didn't do much but tour for a couple more years, but when reports started emerging of an amazing album being recorded in Florida in 1996, it felt like seeing water for the first time after a long walk in the desert.

 

maybe bucky made an early mix too lol.
not sure how any of these people made 'early' mixes with Lanois holding the master tapes.

 

Forgive me for diverging slightly off topic, and the long post. Please ignore the following if you're not interested. Here's a repeat of a post from an earlier, nit very popular thread, where I collated all I currently 'knew' about the TOOM sessions, etc...

There has been a lot of speculation and rumour that a Bootleg Series release focused on the Time Out of Mind sessions is potentially on the cards for next year (the 25th anniversary of the original album). What do we know about these sessions, and therefore what might still be in the vault, post-Tell Tale Signs?

Someone should put together a definitive list of 'sessions' and what we might reasonably expect (curated or not). Off the top of my head, the known sessions are...

Malibu Jam Session, 1996
Ron Wood Session, Dublin 1996 (?)
Oxnard Sessions, 1997
Criteria Sessions, 1997

Additionally, there is the rumoured film of the Criteria sessions, plus any number of wonderful live performances (released and unreleased) that could make up a bonus live disk (or two).

Also:

Remix of album prepped, but not released, for the Complete Albums box
Rumoured, Lanois-less mix by Duke Robbilard

Not much is known (to me) about the extent of the Malibu or Ron Wood / Dublin sessions, but we know, surely, that a number of alt versions exist from both the Oxnard and Criteria sessions. Particularly tantalizing is the alt take of Not Dark Yet.

I have only ever read in passing about what may or may not have been done in Dublin, with Ron Wood. Maybe there is nothing to it, but it would be good to know definitively. Same for the Malibu Jam or Rehearsal sessions, few details are available and, again, there may or may not be worthwhile recordings.

There is also, according to Heylin, supposedly a song called 'All I Ever Loved is You'.

FWIW, although I have many reservations and gripes about the Lanois production (or, really, the Lanois/Dylan/Howard production), I still love the album as it is, and I don't seek a replacement version: I just want to hear whatever there is to hear, and make my own judgements. By and large, so far I generally prefer the album versions, anyway; but the alts are very much worth hearing. For instance: everybody seems to prefer the Oxnard take of Can't Wait (TTS Disc 1), but much as I love that take, I still prefer the album version, particularly in context of the album as a whole.

There were rumours of a remix or remastering that was planned then shelved at the time of the Complete Albums box set. Certainly they remixed Love Sick, a remix was included on the Victoria's Secret release. There was also (I believe) some sort of remix or remastering of ‘Not Dark Yet’ was released as part of a single for ‘Rollin’ And Tumblin'. Derek Barker wrote: "These two major improvements [Love Sick and Not Dark Yet] in sound would indicate that re-mastering (even remixing) was in fact carried out in 2003 and that these two tracks were taken from the proposed SACD master tape."

Peter Stone Brown spoke of a Duke Robillard mix (or maybe it was a Dickinson mix, I can't find that article now) which was, I infer, done at the time and is presumably less foggy. So that's yet another mix.

By the way, in his book 'Listen Up!', Mark Howard goes into a lot of detail about the mastering process, how they presented Dylan with a number of different masterings on CD, none of which he liked as much as a Maxell cassette of the mastering he had from earlier. It's fascinating but slightly confusing. In the end, I think all that really happened was they ran the CD mastering through a cassette deck and gave that to Dylan so the CD sounded like the cassette that he'd liked but in essence it was the same mastering. Additionally, I reckon some of us (myself included) may well have been giving too much credit (or blame) to Lanois. Mark Howard seems to have been much more influential that originally thought, if what he has written, and said in interviews over the years, is to be believed: for instance, it was Howard who pushed the harmonica through the effects pedal and then did the same for Dylan's voice, so there was a 50/50 split between a 'clean' vocal and a reverbed vocal, which were then blended to produce that particular effect. He also claims credit for many other facets, including the 'three dimensional' quality; whether he was responsible for burying Dylan's voice far, far too deeply in the mix on some tracks, I cannot say.

Anybody care to fill in more detail?

 

Yeah, it's a great single, a great production and a great song. One of Dylan's best. But it's become almost reflexive now -- any choice the artist made to change something from some otherwise arcane, earlier and/or unreleased version must have been for the worse and we must seek out the grail for true redemption. For me the O'Brien version is a WAY more appealing, exciting and enjoyable record than the '89 version. These unfinished scraps left behind by Dylan aren't always the best they could be -- sometimes, in fact most of the time, there are worthy aesthetic reasons a artists leaves behind what they leave behind. Not all the scraps are buried treasure.

 

I think the thing to remember - that a lot of people don’t seem to get - is that Daniel Lanois production isn't running everything through a computer and adding reverb after it’s recorded.
The ‘sound’ is largely vintage equipment, tube amps, analogue pedals and room set up.

 

Alan Fraser just stated on Twitter that the official announcement is expected next week:

https://twitter.com/alanhfraser/status/1415265397797015554?s=21

 

Oh sure, we get that. As you might have inferred from what I wrote re. Mark Howard and the vocals etc. There are two aspects of the Lanois/Howard production and mixing that I feel are unfortunate:

(1) The murkiness, the soupiness, the fact that we can't really hear individual instruments clearly.

(2) The treatment of the vocals: not just the distortion but their burial deep in the mix, in some cases sounding so far away as to be hugely detrimental.

So presumably some elements of those two aspects are kind of 'done' in the recording process and cannot be ameliorated significantly, whereas others are functions of mixing and can be. Certainly the Love Sick remix seemed to address some of (1) but not (2).

 

I don’t particularly understand this thing about removing or rolling back production. I think it’s a trend of the moment, unfortunately. The Beatles more recent releases seem to have started that. I like Daniel Lanois production. Conversely I hate the trend towards dry non-production of some of Dylan’s albums that came later.

 

It's also important to remember that Bob LOVED the production of TOOM when it came out in 1997. I'd have to look up the big Rolling Stone story or interview he did to promote it, but he said something like, "My albums usually sound like blueprints for the final versions, but this is the real thing." It was only after Jack Frost went solo as a producer that he spoke out against the "cauldron of drum theory" that is a Lanois production. I'm not doubting that Bob and Dan clashed during the TOOM sessions -- by both accounts, they did -- but Bob didn't publicly diss the TOOM production until Love & Theft came out.

 

obvious is that its going to be announced right after the stream.