If there were an encyclopedia of late 20th century popular music — a definitive compendium of artists, albums, genres, movements, slang, scenes, debuts, ODs, legends and all the other little details that make music worth loving — the listing for “bootleg” would read something like: “A recording illicitly produced, bought or sold. See also: Dylan, Bob.”
No other artist, not The Beatles or the Stones or Michael Jackson or the Grateful Dead, has attracted fans and followers of unofficial recordings in comparable quantity or fervor as Bob Dylan. No other artist has presented the same Delphian combination of mystery, wisdom, directness and inspiration that defines Dylan’s musical persona; to fully understand him as an artist is as impossible a task as assembling a complete collection of Dylan’s full — that is to say unofficial — catalog.
Ever since Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan, fans have collected and traded unofficial recordings by the enigmatic (and prolific) artist. Tapes include everything from home recordings to live shows to interviews to demos to outtakes to alternate versions. For decades, bootleg recordings were the domain of Dylan’s most rabid fans, an elite group — some of whom view collecting the artist’s unofficial recordings as a spiritual more than musical pastime. That’s how things were until ’91, when Dylan’s longtime label, Columbia, released The Bootleg Series: Vols. 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased), a three-disc collection of non-album tracks that spanned Dylan’s career from Greenwich Village coffeehouses, civil rights rallies, electric inspiration, motorcycle accidents through to the supposed “third comeback” and the inception of the Never-Ending Tour in the late ’80s.
Since then, some of the most historic performances of Dylan’s career have been released; live recordings from ’75’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour, ’64’s Carnegie Hall performance that marked the apex of Dylan’s acoustic career and the essential ’66 Free Trade Hall show during which a wild-haired Dylan, backed electrically by touring band The Hawks, was denounced by a dissatisfied folkie as “Judas!”
The most recent installment in the series, The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7: No Direction Home — The Soundtrack, doesn’t capture the music made on one evening or one tour; this release is meant to accompany the story of Dylan’s ascension as a controversial folk poet and his controversial “second coming” as the new musical landscape’s electric messiah, which is shown in the upcoming Martin Scorsese-directed documentary of the same name, airing Sept. 26 and 27 on PBS. No Direction Home’s first disc is comprised mostly of early and live recordings from Dylan’s acoustic years, including what most believe to be the first recording of his music in existence (opener “When I Got Troubles,” whose faded, crackly quality and bluesy simplicity is reminiscent of selections from the Anthology of American Folk Music, which may have had a hand in inspiring it). Dylan’s fascination with folk legend Woody Guthrie shows on recordings of “This Land Is Your Land” and one of only two self-penned songs on his first album, “Song to Woody.” These tracks exhibit Dylan’s fascinating experimentation with persona early in his career; on “Troubles” and the home recording of “Rambler, Gambler,” Dylan’s voice is youthful, almost sweet; he sounds like a barefoot Appalachian boy whose only contact with the outside world comes from fuzzy transmissions of blues and country radio shows from the Tennessee Valley. By the time he recorded “Song to Woody” and “Dink’s Song,” Dylan’s voice had aged and hardened to that familiar nasal rasp of gravel and soul that characterizes the folk classics (“Man of Constant Sorrow”), social commentary (“Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War”) and pre-psychedelic epic visions (“Mr. Tambourine Man”) that made the singer/songwriter from Minnesota into a cultural vanguard.
No Direction Home’s second disc kicks off with an alternate take of the delicate, rhapsodic “She Belongs to Me,” one last reminder of Dylan’s first public identity. But in between this and the next track we hear an announcer’s voice: “Ladies and gentlemen … the person who’s going to come up now … has a limited amount of time … his name … is Bob Dylan!” Momentary applause, and then — in the flash of a second — the world changes as we hear the rough preliminary twangs of “Maggie’s Farm” as performed at the ’65 Newport Folk Festival. According to legend, the raucous electric performance so affronted festival attendees that pandemonium broke out; the audience booed, and musician Pete Seeger supposedly went after the band’s cables with a hatchet. The song was a response to fans’ initial rejection of Dylan’s electric experimentation; the line “I try my best to be just like I am / But everybody wants you to be just like them,” is a combined slap in the face and “fuck you” to those who wanted to hold Dylan back. This is the definitive moment in the most important era of Dylan’s career; regardless of Scorsese, Columbia could have released this single recording and fans would have understood.
The rest of disc two takes listeners through 1966 with alternate takes and live versions of songs from the powerful Highway 61 Revisited and the career-defining Blonde on Blonde. Lyrically, these outtakes don’t differ much from the album cuts, but the musical framework is often different. The bluesy, languorous album version of “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” featured twangy, fast-paced music, and on this version of “Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat,” organ slinks beneath Dylan spitting out slow, innuendo-heavy lyrics. The aim here is not to rehash Dylan’s music “greatest hits”-style, but to show the hours of experimentation and activity that went into producing two of the most important rock albums ever recorded.
No Direction Home comes at a time in Dylan’s career at which he has transcended the persona of plainspoken protest singer, enigmatic rock-poet, ghost-faced fortune teller; now he’s the larger-than-life legend, the weathered old musician he tried so hard to sound like when he was 20. It feels a bit like a retrospective, a premature look back at Dylan during his most creative period. But if we have faith in him — and we do — we know that this is just more hero worship or canonization; and that the era of Bob Dylan as living legend isn’t over.
Rating: 4 and 1/2 out of 5 stars