“YOU CAN’T EDIT IT OUT”
Bootleg Series co-producer Steve Berkowitz talks Uncut through Volume 15: “This is Bob Dylan’s life”
“THERE’S a guy in the Dylan office called Parker Fishel who has done a spectacular job in organising the files. It has become a cross between what’s in the Dylan vaults and what’s in the Sony vaults. We gather them together and see what they are.
“About a year ago, Dylan’s representative Jeff Rosen said, ‘Let’s focus on ’69 and Nashville.’ So Parker and I went through everything. Over the years regular review and tape maintenance goes on. ‘Do we have this, do we have that? Where is it, can we hear it?’ There are various vaults, physical and virtual. Sony has a vault in Iron Mountain in Pennsylvania. It’s like The Planet Of The Apes. It’s a super dome way below the ground, fire- and air- and pressure-controlled. They’re very secure, well-maintained places. There are armed guards! They work 24 hours a day, everything is barcoded and easy to find. If I were to call Iron Mountain before 4pm today, by tomorrow at 10am the tape or object would be in the studio.
“Parker and I started creating some digital files for listening, then myself and [mixing engineer] Steve Addabbo began mixing on June 10 this year. We mixed for approximately 20 days at Addabbo’s studio in New York and then edited, EQ’D and mastered with Mark Wilder at Battery Studios for an additional 20 days.
“Addabbo and I have been doing this for many years now, and the communication – verbal and nonverbal – is very good. It’s like we’re jamming! We do this hand in hand with the Dylan office; there’s give and take and back and forth. I feel artistically involved but ultimately this is Bob Dylan’s music, and life, and the answer will come from that office regarding what’s going to happen. Bob has called me on occasion, but I do most of my discussion with Jeff – and answers come back.
“There is an editorial point of view with each box, but we don’t shape this thing. Our decisions are based on what the artists did. This time, the decision came down that we weren’t going to do a lot of repeat tracks, that we’d be able to tell the story in parallel to the albums Bob put out. Three LPS is about the size of a really good listen, it tells the story and flows chronologically. We didn’t leave anything better out for any reason. [The sessions] didn’t ramble on, there weren’t hundreds of takes. At other times with Bob in Nashville, compositional recordings were taking place, and songs were being invented as he was going. Here, clearly, there were songs before he went in.
“John Wesley Harding is not a very well-recorded record. It’s a difficult one sonically, there’s an incredible amount of compression being hit in the original recording, and a lot of guitar leaks into the vocal track. But so what! It is what it is; you can’t edit it out. The moment of creation is not inhibited by any technical adjustment.
“From the …Skyline sessions, the version of ‘Tell Me That It Isn’t True’ is incredibly different and wonderful. A lot of times people go, ‘Woah, he changed his mind, I wonder why?’ Well, here’s a musician going in and playing and checking himself out, wondering how this or that would be. If you have these great musicians around you, why not give it a go? It seems to me that Bob usually chose the right version; that the music and the version raised its own hand.
“The Bob and Johnny stuff had been bootlegged and available for some time. Parts were there, parts weren’t, but nobody has ever accessed back to the real tapes and heard the bits in between, like we did. Some parts are taken from the multi-tracks, and some are from the safety quarterinch mono running in parallel. They would let the safety tape run all the time in the studio at a slower speed in case they missed something on the multi-track. We picked up some things on that and added it in at the correct chronological spot. We also had to use some expert engineering to bring up the volume of the studio chatter. It was so good to get that feeling of being in the room.”