Archival Dylan set provides behind-scenes glimpse
Among the many things Thomas Edison famously said, he remarked: “I have not failed once. I have simply found 10,000 ways that do not work.”
That idea is clearly evident in Bob Dylan — The Cutting Edge 1965-1966: Bootleg Series Vol. 12, the revelatory latest release of Dylan archival recordings released last week.
Culling a wealth of outtakes, alternate versions and rehearsal snippets during sessions over an astonishingly fertile period for Dylan, which yielded three of the most influential albums in rock history — Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde — the new set offers a panoramic view into the creative process of one of the 20th century’s great artists.
The album is being released in multiple formats: a two-CD Best of the Cutting Edge with 36 tracks (mostly alternate takes of the finished recordings from each album); a six-CD deluxe version and an 18-CD “collector’s” version ($599.99, available only at bobdylan.com) that compiles every moment recorded in those studio sessions.
The “best of” collection offers the equivalent of a snapshot. But the deluxe version is where things get truly fascinating, with multiple takes on landmark songs such as Like a Rolling Stone, Mr. Tambourine Man, Desolation Row and Visions of Johanna.
The third disc comprises 20 takes, recorded over two days, of his monumental 1965 hit Like A Rolling Stone, which topped a list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” as ranked in 2011 by Rolling Stone magazine.
For anyone remotely interested in how great art is made, this is the equivalent of an audio master class as Dylan works and reworks the song until it captures the energy, defiance, outrage, empathy, celebration and liberation embedded in the lyrics.
The song starts with full band accompaniment, but it’s played as a waltz, which isn’t as odd as it might sound. But in that three-beat pulse, it’s a dance rather than a declaration of spiritual independence.
Early in the process, he sings, “You used to make fun [instead of “laugh”] about/ Everybody that was hangin’ out.” As the band tries to figure out the song’s structure, Dylan is heard saying it should be “a little bit slower, and softer.”
He also hasn’t settled on the song’s famous chorus.
“My voice is gone,” he croaks after the fourth take. “Want to try it again?”
These sessions came at the end of a day recording the Highway 61 Revisited album, and the group called it quits after five passes late that night. The next day they reconvened, this time with Al Kooper taking over on the organ.
Kooper was a guitarist who had hoped to crash the sessions, but he reportedly was awestruck hearing what Mike Bloomfield was playing and shifted to the organ instead.
Bloomfield is heard discovering the slightly distorted backing figure that would become one of the song’s musical signatures, and Kooper is experimenting with single note organ lines rather than the chords Griffin had been playing, but they’re still unfocused. So far, Dylan’s harmonica also is anonymous.
Day 2 is where all the elements coalesce into the version that appeared on the album, yet they continued with 11 more takes — faster tempo, less organ, more piano, less guitar (“Is my guitar too loud?” Dylan asks at one point, clearly more interested in the big picture than the prominence of his own instrument.)
When Kooper finally hits on the organ motif that answers Dylan’s query “How does it feel?” it’s like the lighting of its torch.
There’s a sense of musical inevitability that emerges across the multiple takes of Like A Rolling Stone, but elsewhere there’s an equally powerful argument for the malleability of art.
Although Dylan rejected attempts to record Visions of Johanna with members of the Hawks (who would in a few years become better known as the Band), there’s a rollicking version here that is every bit as valid as the more laid-back recording he made in Nashville with session pros and chose to release on Blonde on Blonde.
On the Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited sessions, he’s frequently heard interacting with producer Tom Wilson, who will ask “What’s this one called, Bob?” to which he often gives outlandish spur-of-themoment responses such as “Uhhh, Bank Account Blues.” Producer Bob Johnston had taken over for Wilson, for reasons still unknown, when Dylan started recording Blonde on Blonde, much of which was completed after he shifted from New York to record in Nashville.
In addition to the even greater depth that all these experiments are presented in on the 18-CD collector’s version, which is being limited to 5,000 copies, the entirety of disc 18 demonstrates Dylan’s passion for country, blues and folk music in songs recorded in hotel rooms during his various tours in 1965 and ’66.
We hear him sing Scott Wiseman’s Remember Me, Hank Williams’ I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry and traditionals such as Wild Mountain Thyme.