First Thoughts On More Blood More Tracks, the Latest Dylan Bootleg

We take so much for granted in life. As one who has worked in marketing I am continually impressed by the orchestration involved in a new launch from the team. Quite a ways before the launch the publicity machine begins. Then the website, BobDylan.com, is re-arranged to feature the new album, CD, series or product line (e.g. Heaven's Door).

The PR machine goes to work and an article by Jeff Slate, who wrote the liner notes, appears in The New Yorker days before. Links to many of the tracks from the Deluxe edition appear on NPR's website, deliciously selected to amplify desire.

All the ducks are in a row so fans can pre-order, and a launch date is set. Finally there is the "execution" phase, which is coordinated with Amazon and shipping entities so that Bootleg Series #14: More Blood, More Tracks arrives at my door precisely on the day they said it would more than a month ago.

It's all first class, a model of execution, year in and year out. Any company with an established fan base could probably get an education from watching the machinery here. Can the company you work for, if you work for a company that has new products, accomplish this?

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After several listens I feel obligated to make a few observations based on first impressions.

1. If Dylan had not re-recorded half the album at Sound 80 in Minneapolis, Blood on the Tracks would never have been a Double Platinum album. I may be wrong, but my impression is that the stripped out version of these songs leaves them lacking in some way. Dylan may have captured what he was looking for in New York, but after he got it he must have felt it was missing something, though he couldn't put his finger on it.

2. My immediate thought here after a few listens was that the original New York sessions had produced something akin to John Wesley Harding, itself critically acclaimed with a lot of very good songs, conscientiously avoiding overproduction.

3. Being intimately acquainted with the backstory of the December sessions here in Minnesota, I can't help but feel that like so many things in Dylan's career serendipity proved to be a key factor, and that by trusting his "better angels" or that "Dylan instinct" we ended up with something so magical that one of the songs itself is about the twists of fate that sometimes serve as a form of saving grace.

EdNote: Napoleon Bonaparte was one of the great strategists and commanders in the history of warfare. Of the top 20 battles of all time more than half were conceived and executed by Napoleon. When it came to planning, he was very thorough in his planning, yet simultaneously he "recognized Chance as a variable and believed every plan should allow a period of time to remedy or exploit the unpredictable." Dylan's career seems to have been repeatedly  a beneficiary of the element of Chance. 

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Jeff Slate's liner notes are a good read. I liked the inclusion of this Dylan quote on page 6:

"The thing about rock and roll is that, for me anyways, it wasn't enough. There were great catch-phrases and driving pulse rhythms, but the songs weren't serious or didn't reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings."

That quote, from when Dylan turned 50*, is pure Dylan.

I admire Tony Attwood's effort to write on Untold Dylan about every song (that he could find) that Dylan has recorded. Though I've covered quite a few Dylan songs on this blog over the years, there are some I've desired to tackle but felt inadequate to the task. "Ballad of a Thin Man" is one of these that I still desire to offer my own spin on someday; "Tangled Up In Blue" has been aanother I've shied away from. And so it was fun to see Jeff Slate's Culture Desk piece in The New Yorker this past week.

In the liner notes Slate, which is such a cool name that it ought to be a magazine, notes that Dylan drew inspiration from the painting classes he'd been taking, as well as the stories of Anton Chekov. I

I found this sentence to be pretty cool, having seen some of Dylan's handwritten lyrics that are in the possession of Bill Pagel, keeper of BobLinks.com and collector of artifacts: I listened while perusing Dylan’s fabled “red notebook,” in which he’d written the lyrics to the ten songs on “Blood on the Tracks” in his tiny, precise scrawl. I love that description at the end of the sentence. So precise.**

Slate also noted: A decade later, in 1984, on the album “Real Live,” Dylan felt he’d finally found the song he’d been looking for. “On ‘Real Live’ it is more like it should have been,” Dylan told Rolling Stone in 1985.

Yes, that was a great concert, and yet another great version of "Tangled Up In Blue." (Carlos Santana joins Dylan and band for the encore in that one.)

Slate continues: Dylan has performed “Tangled Up in Blue” 1,546 times during his Never Ending Tour, which began in 1988 and is still going. Like any good Dylan obsessive, I’ve seen many of those performances. It’s a guilty pleasure of Dylanologists to trainspot the tweaks—both large and small—that Dylan makes to the lyrics from year to year, or sometimes from night to night.

That observation also rings true, as long time Dylan fans well know.

4 of the 6 players from the Mnpls sessions on set of Paul Metsa's Wall of Power
L to R: Billy Peterson, Gregg Inhofer, Kevin Odegard, Paul Metsa, Peter Ostoushko

Related Links
More Blood, More Tracks -- The Bootleg Series Thunders On
Bob Dylan's First Day with Tangled Up In Blue, in The New Yorker
* Los Angeles Times, Pop Music: Bob Dylan Turns 50
* * Bill Pagel's "Einstein Disguised As Robin Hood" Exhibition
BOTT players on the set of Paul Metsa's Wall of Power two weeks ago.

More Blood, More Tracks -- The Bootleg Series Thunders On

In January I had the privilege of being a guest on Highway 61 Revisited, the Dylan-themed radio program hosted by the late John Bushey which aired on KUMD for more than 26 years. Every once in a while he would ask listeners for theme ideas for future programs and as a regular listener I always enjoyed making lists of ideas that might capture his imagination. His part would be to look at my list and then pull an unusual take from a concert in Paris or a rare outtake from a bootleg.

I don't recall what the theme of that specific evening was, but the experience we shared that evening was unforgettable. The song was "Idiot Wind" from Blood on the Tracks. The selected take was straight from the album. We were each wearing a pair of super-sensitive KUMD studio headphones so that every breath, every note, every subtle aspect of the song was radiantly sharp and crisp, with Dylan's vocals impossibly anguished, as if his whole inner self had been unshuttered. When the song finished playing John and I just stared at each other, in awe of what Dylan had created. Kevin Odegard, in the book Simple Twist of Fate (about the Minneapolis sessions for Blood on the Tracks) called it "an agonizing poetic tantrum."

This memory emerged foremost when I got the news that the BOTT Bootleg had finally been released, or would be available soon. There had been buzz circulating in the Northland since spring, if not sooner, that the next bootleg series from the vault would be Blood on the Tracks.

I pulled my copy of the book A Simple Twist of Fate off the shelf to brush up on details surrounding the making of this album that many rank as one of Dylan's finest. The story, by Andy Gill and Kevin Odegard, gives an insider's view of how Dylan re-recorded several of the tracks at the Sound 80 studio in Minneapolis three months after doing the initial recording in New York with producer Phil Ramone and musicians there. Dylan's brother David assembled the local talent in Minnesota, one of them being the guitarist Odegard. To say it must have been a rush is, as you can imagine, an understatement.

Unfortunately, after the new tracks were laid and approved for the finished vinyl, the Minneapolis musicians learned that 100,000 album covers had already been printed so that they would not get credit for the work they'd done, at least not initially. Purportedly when the first 100K sold there would be an edited revised version produced, an agreement that got lost in the shuffle of other more pressing things.

Such a revision may not have had much importance in New York, but for the guys in Minnesota it would have been a form of validation. To just "say" they were the musicians for classics like "Tangled Up In Blue" and "Idiot Wind" but not have it documented felt hollow.

Ironically, some of the New York musicians were even more upset. Their attitudes varied in degree, but ultimately could be summed up like this: "Why didn't Bob just tell us he didn't like the sound on some of those songs. We're pros. We would have been happy to give him what he wanted."

So with the release of More Blood, More Tracks, Bootleg Series #14, there's a sigh of relief that the hometown team is being acknowledged. Even so, there's still a bit of controversy. The single CD version which I already placed an order for features only New York sessions. To own the Minneapolis sessions you'll need to acquire the "strictly limited Deluxe 6 CD Set."

The late Paul Williams, a music journalist who befriended the author Philip K. Dick the last 14 years of the sci-fi writer's life, weighed in on the two versions of the album saying without reservation he liked both the New York sessions and the Minneapolis versions of the songs. Nevertheless, his take, as stated in his book Performing Artist, was that Dylan made the right choices for the album.

Even so, when it came to "Idiot Wind" Williams noticed two significant differences. First, and of less importance, was that there had been revisions in the lyrics. The second observation was that the New York version conveyed less rage and a more ominous or threatening tone.

Despite being removed from the official release, the New York studio sessions were soon on the street as an underground bootleg album called Joaquin Antique.

It won't be long before we all get the chance to compare the sessions. And whatever the outcome of that comparison, there will be nothing (for me) that quite compares to that moment last winter in the John Bushey Studio at KUMD...

Related Links
The Story Behind the Music: The Recording of Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks
A Simple Twist of Fate: Bob Dylan and the Making of Blood on the Tracks
A Simple Twist of Fate Revisited
The Principle of Cognitive Dissonance as Illustrated by Dylan's Simple Twist