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::k4:
a r t i s t :: Bob Dylan
t i t l e :: The Cutting Edge 1965-1966: The Bootleg Series Vol. 12
d a t e :: 2015-00-00
l a b e l :: Columbia Records
g e n r e :: Folk
s o u r c e :: CD
b i t r a t e :: 787 kbps avg
e n c o d e r :: FLAC 1.2.1 -8 -V
t r a c k s :: 36
p l a y t i m e :: 145:03
s i z e :: 826.5MB
tracklist
Disc 1
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1 Love Minus Zero/No Limit - Take 2 3:10
Acoustic
2 I'll Keep It With Mine - Take 1 Piano 4:11
Demo
3 Bob Dylan's 115th Dream - Take 2 Solo 6:17
Acoustic
4 She Belongs to Me - Take 1 Solo 2:57
Acoustic
5 Subterranean Homesick Blues - Take 1 2:38
Alternate Take
6 Outlaw Blues - Take 2 Alternate Take 3:29
7 On The Road Again - Take 4 Alternate 2:31
Take
8 Farewell, Angelina - Take 1 Solo 5:28
Acoustic
9 If You Gotta Go, Go Now - Take 2 2:50
Alternate Take
10 You Don't Have To Do That - Take 1 0:50
Solo Acoustic
11 California - Take 1 Solo Acoustic 3:05
12 Mr. Tambourine Man - Take 3 With Band, 3:23
Incomplete
13 It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A 3:28
Train To Cry - Take 8 Alternate Take
14 Like A Rolling Stone - Take 5 1:44
Rehearsal
15 Like A Rolling Stone - Take 11 5:56
Alternate Take
16 Sitting On A Barbed Wire Fence - Take 3:58
2 Unreleased Take
17 Medicine Sunday - Take 1 Early Version 1:01
Of Temporary Like Achilles
18 Desolation Row - Take 2 Piano Demo 2:00
19 Desolation Row - Take 1 Alternate Take 11:16
Disc 2
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1 Tombstone Blues - Take 1 Alternate 7:29
Take
2 Positively 4th Street - Take 5 4:24
Alternate Take
3 Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? 4:05
- Take 1 Alternate Take
4 Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues - Take 3 5:39
Rehearsal
5 Highway 61 Revisited - Take 3 3:30
Alternate Take
6 Queen Jane Approximately - Take 5 6:02
Alternate Take
7 Visions Of Johanna - Take 5 Rehearsal 7:40
8 She's Your Lover Now - Take 6 4:58
Rehearsal
9 Lunatic Princess - Take 1 1:20
10 Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat - Take 8 3:26
Alternate Take
11 One Of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later) 5:10
- Take 19 Alternate Take
12 Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The 4:03
Memphis Blues Again - Take 13
Alternate Take
13 Absolutely Sweet Marie - Take 1 5:01
Alternate Take
14 Just Like A Woman - Take 4 Alternate 5:19
Take
15 Pledging My Time - Take 1 Alternate 3:22
Take
16 I Want You - Take 4 Alternate Take 2:51
17 Highway 61 Revisited - Take 7 False 0:32
Start
releasenotes
After 2013's Another Self Portrait, and given the continued brilliance of
Dylan's bootleg series in general, you start to get the idea that Bob Dylan
has alternate versions of damn near every album in his career in the hopper.
The Cutting Edge, gathering music Dylan recorded over 14 months in 1965 and
1966, for the albums Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and
Blonde on Blonde, does not dispel this notion. The set exists in several
editions (2xCD highlights, ultra-limited 18xCD complete, and this set, the
deluxe 6xCD edition) and could conceivably be mined to assemble two or three
alternate versions of each of those three albums.
Pick a random deep cut like Highway 61's "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a
Train to Cry", and it appears here in four versions, three of them complete.
The five versions of Blonde on Blonde's "Visions of Johanna" total 33 minutes.
No fewer than 20 of the tracks are given over to "Like a Rolling Stone",
including the various rehearsals, alternate versions, false starts, and tracks
highlighting the stems containing individual instruments from the master take.
So The Cutting Edge is the last word on obsessive studio documentation
designed for rabid superfans. But it also happens to contain an almost
unbelievable amount of great music that, broken into more digestible portions,
any Bob Dylan fan can appreciate.
During the period covered by this compilationùthe transitional,
acoustic-leaning folk-rock of Bringing It All Back Home, the gnarled
blues-rock of Highway 61, and the Americana fusion of Blonde on Blonde,
enabled by producer Bob Johnston and his Nashville session prosùDylan recorded
in a way that has become rare in the era of unlimited tracks and
non-destructive editing: He got a band of musicians in a room and recorded
live. In a 1985 interview with Bill Flanagan (who also happens to contribute
an essay to this set), Dylan claimed, "I don't think I knew you could do an
overdub until 1978."
That approach partially explains why this massive trove exists in the first
place. With the recent Led Zeppelin reissue sets, we were left mostly with
early and alternate mixes as bonuses because the masters were carefully
constructed in the studio from fragments. With Bruce Springsteen's ongoing
archival series, he's been liberal about recording new instruments and even
vocals in the present day to fill in blanks. But Dylan's alternate versions
could more accurately be called alternate performances, meaning each one is
unique. And given the way he refined and re-worked songs during this
periodùtrying them with just voice and acoustic, adding a full band, changing
tempos, time signatures, and lyricsùthe different versions can be sharply
different in mood and effect.
"She's Your Lover Now", a song recorded during the Blonde on Blonde sessions
but not included on that album, is a good case study in what makes this set
fascinating. It wasn't included because Dylan was never able to record it
properlyùit's a complicated song, with some unusual changes and held notes,
and he and his band were never able to get through it without mistakes.
Eventually Dylan grew frustrated and moved on. But it's easily one of the best
songs Dylan had written to that point, meaning it's one of the best songs he's
ever written period, an alternately hilarious and pained story of a guy, his
ex-girlfriend, and her new boyfriend encountering each other at a party. The
title refrain basically amounts to Dylan saying "You deal with itùshe's your
problem now," and his disdain for the new guy reinforces how much it still
hurts, and how he thinks this dude isn't anywhere nearly enough for her ("And
youùjust what do you do anyway?"). Songs this rich were coming fast and hard
for Dylan during this period, and "She's Your Lover Now" is so powerful it's
almost a shock to the system when it breaks down after six minutes, a bum note
and everyone stops playing, and you are reminded that they were living inside
this song and the famously oblique "wild mercury sound" Dylan hoped to conjure
at the exact same moment.
One of the main points of Greil Marcus' book on "Like a Rolling Stone" is that
the song could have been many things, but what it was owed a lot to chance.
Dylan recorded it many times but one take turned out to be the take, and the
slight variations in phrasing altered how it was heard forevermore. That
quality, of all the possible worlds these new versions suggest, animates the
set. What if "Like a Rolling Stone" had been a slow waltz? What if
"Leopard-Skin-Pillbox-Hat" was filled with goofy sound effects? What if "Mr.
Tambourine Man" had been released in its full band version? (The recording of
the latter ends hilariously when Dylan cuts it short and says "The drumming is
driving me mad! I'm going out of my brain.") Some of the differences were
subtle and some weren't, but the way this music has been pored over in the
years since, none are insignificant.
These two years are Dylan at his wildest. He revolutionized popular music
lyrics during this period, bringing in surrealism and romanticism as channeled
by the Beats and making it work in a pop context. One of the things he
inherited from the Beats was a belief in spontaneous writing and trying to
take lyrics more as dictation. Which is not to say he didn't reviseùhe did,
and often. But it's always been a mistake to put too much emphasis on the
details of these words and what they might "mean." Sometimes they were
selected because a turn of phrase was funny, or because Dylan couldn't think
of a better rhyme, or sometimes simply because that's what came out. Later on
in his writing, he'd have discipline, but this is what he sounded like when he
was free.
The structures of these lyrics probably owe something to Dylan's rumored drug
experimentation during this period, specifically with marijuana and
amphetimines. People on speed use a lot of words and cram them into spaces too
small to contain them; they follow digressions and join phrases and ideas that
needn't necessarily be joined; the desire to make illogical connections leads,
on the one hand, to paranoiaùyou start to see things that aren't there. But if
these tendencies can be channeled just so, they can lead to new structures.
"The sun's not yellow, it's chicken" goes one of my favorite lines in
"Tombstone Blues" (heard here in a complete alternate take and another partial
version). Nouns and adjectives get chopped up and mixed together, the
collisions of language leading to Gertrude Stein-like moments where you can
feel your brain being rewired.
All of which is to say that the idea of "Dylanology" in the classic sense of
decoding these lyrics to undercover what they might "mean"ùWho is Mr. Jones?
Where is "Desolation Row", what the hell are those jewels and binoculars doing
hanging from the head of the mule???ùis missing the important point: During
this period, language itself was a playground for Dylan. The Cutting Edge is
music of the present, but not the '60s present, an eternal present; the songs
are about observation and they exist in a place where it's always now, in
sound and word.
The music here conjures a feeling of acceleration that couldn't
continueùDylan's songs couldn't get any knottier or more surreal. The album
after this one, John Wesley Harding, released in 1968 after Dylan's mysterious
motorcycle accident (The Basement Tapes were recorded in between, but not
released until 1975), found him heading in the complete opposite direction,
stripping everything to the bone and writing with shocking economy and
clarity. If everything up until this point had a certain logic to it, the
hotshot young folk singer who is growing immensely with each year turns to
rock'n'roll, after 1967 Dylan would be impossible to get a handle on. He had
many brilliant records ahead of him, but he started to understand the precise
value of theater and artifice. Here he was too wild and moving too fast to
even figure out how that might work; he was a trickster, as witnessed in his
infamous press conferences, but nothing was channeled into a specific
direction: It was all blasting outward, in every direction, all at once.
http://www.bobdylan.com
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Bob_Dylan-The_Cutting_Edge_1965-1966_The_Bootleg_Series_Vol._12-2CD-FLAC-201