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.

Trump Humor

I realize that even though late night talk show comics are having a field day with this year's presidential race, there are some folk who see nothing funny about the current political reality show. The New Yorker, naturally, wanted to prove the contrary position and did so by having every single cartoon in its April 25 issue be about Donald Trump.  Inasmuch as it came out the weekend before the New York primary, it did not have a great impact on the outcome in the Empire State.

Last night before heading to slumberland I got a little late night reading in, and it was this April 25 edition of The New Yorker. Now I realize that reading the cartoons first is probably akin to young men looking at the pictures of women in Playboy first, but I'm willing to confess that I did that last night. (I don't usually do that, because what I usually do is look at the cartoons as soon as my magazine comes in the mail.) Some of the cartoons were pretty hilarious.

I knew right away that something was up wen I hit the second cartoon and it was about Trump like the first had been. The third confirmed my suspicions. By the end I felt like I'd just finished a nice dessert after a long day.

Here are a few examples, described.

1) It shows a scene at the beach in which a little boy has made an absolutely gigantic sand castle that spells out his name: Trump. The letters are taller than he and it's about 18 feet wide. The caption reads, The Formative Years At Rockaway Beach.

2) The second is a table of bridge players looking at their cards. The caption reads, "One no-trump. Oh, please, God, no Trump."

3) Two women sitting in a diner holding wine glasses and chatting. The one says to the other, "If Trump becomes president, I don't care how high he builds that wall -- I'm going over it."

So against this backdrop, when I woke in the middle of the night I found that all those cartoons only served to feed my subconscious. Upon waking the first thing in my head was a Trump cartoon. It went like this.

The image is of an unemployment line, with a large sign at the top that reads, Unemployment. But the line is made up of famous monsters from Hollywood. The Wolf Man, the Mummy, Frankenstein etc. Frankenstein says, "Before Trump came along I was the scariest thing going."

After that one made me smile I thought of another one that would be a spin-off for a conservative magazine. At the end of the line we see Hillary.

O.K. you can replace Hillary and have the same effect by putting Trump in that line after Hillary gets elected.

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The next cartoon features two people sitting on a park bench with the N.Y. skyline in the background. They are dressed in stylish clothes, clearly New Yorkers, and happen to both be reading this same edition of The New Yorker. Instead of a caption, they have those word clouds that contain the words they are saying. The first one says, "Wow, Trump's amazing. He not only controls the media, he controls the cartoonists, too. Next thing you know --"

The second one cuts him off: "Don't say it."

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Anyways... hope something here made you smile. If you are a cartoonist and use one of my cartoon ideas, please send it my way to post here, and maybe I will send you a copy of my book A Remarkable Tale from the Land of Podd. Thanks!

This Wheel's On Fire, Woodstock and Marketing the Basement Tapes

It's been a month since release of The Bootleg Series #11: The Basement Tapes, and though I've yet to weigh in I'm tilling the soil and planting seeds. There's plenty of chatter these days with almost everything Bob Dylan does. He's become an icon of our culture (though he famously disdains labels, so as soon as I wrote that I wanted to take it back.)

For the past month I've been listening to RAW, the 2-CD version of this bootleg collection, as opposed to Complete, the full 6-CD version. Simultaneously I have been paying attention to the reviews, some in surprising places. I've already noted the New Yorker feature, and I can't imagine a release of any Dylan music without a Rolling Stone feature. I suspect that marketing data is available to show that any time they can find an excuse to get a Dylan cover they increase sales by 10%. Just guessing, because those are the only ones I buy.

What's interesting about the Rolling Stone cover and the New Yorker piece is that they both rely on photos which originally appeared as part of a Saturday Evening Post feature in which a photographer and journalist went up to see what was happening with regard to Dylan's recovery from his motorcycle accident. I have had a copy of that Saturday Evening Post for so long that you can see how faded the ink has become when you compare the two pictures here. Perhaps the Rolling Stone photo looks richer because it's been re-mastered somehow. You can certainly see that it's been recycled from the same shoot.

Well, as I was saying above I've been prepping to weigh in on this latest Bootleg Series and one of the ways I've been gearing up is by reading Levon Helm's This Wheel's On Fire, a book that I will also review during another space of time. Helm was one of the original members of The Hawks, the band recruited to join Dylan in his new "electric" phase. You may recall from Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966 how these concerts generally unfolded. The first half of the concert would be Dylan solo, acoustic guitar strapped across his should, with a tight hold on his audiences. Part two would be Dylan pugged in, The Band (formerly The Hawks) producing a blistering sound that had the same effect in town after town: loud boos. The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert in Manchester culminated in one fan famously bellowing "Judas."

The tour began in the U.S. though before Dylan took it abroad, and with the exception of Texas, the results were the same everywhere, and Levon Helm really disliked it. He and the Hawks were accustomed to crowds embracing and loving their performances. Suddenly they were being disdained, almost violently. Ironically, Dylan loved it. Helm didn't say it this way but Dylan seemed to consider the publicity from this insulting treatment to be equivalent to writers who get tagged as "Banned in Boston."

Before they left the country Helm split the tour. Helm skipped about passing time in various ways including briefly bussing tables in Florida and working oil rigs off the Gulf coast. After Dylan's motorcycle accident Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko and gang were invited up to Woodstock, as was Levon Helm, and something magical happened. The creative energy was uninhibited, channeled into a different kind of sound independent of performance driven material. Whereas the Hawks cut their teeth as performers, this was a whole different gig, hanging with Bob and just letting the juices flow.

Fast forward. One of the tunes Dylan and Rick Danko co-wrote was "This Wheel's On Fire." It later became the title of Helm's book about the history of The Band (and his personal history). It also became the selected song from The Basement Tapes for this promotional video narrated by Jeff Bridges and released today to promote the Bootleg Series Volume 11. Watch it here.