A friend of mine recently gave me a heads-up about the next instalment in the Dylan Bootleg series. It´s due to be issued in about a week and focuses on his Self-Portait period. Here´s a taster:-



( What has happened to Chives and blastingas10 ? I haven´t seen a post from them in ages :( )

His most country album was Nashville Skyline, probably his most consistent album?

after Blood on the Tracks, of course...

Actually that scene from the D.A. Pennebaker documentary is a bit deceptive. Pennebaker wasn't allowed to film the initial encounter between Dylan in Donovan in that London hotel room in 1965. By all reports they got along famously and Donovan later introduced Dylan to the Beatles.

The actual documentary footage for Don't Look Back was staged for Pennebaker after their first meeting together. The scene where Donovan gushes with praise for Dylan's performance was cut from the YouTube video. Donovan actually requested the song It's All Over Now Baby Blue, which was perhaps the best song Dylan wrote to date. If Donovan was feeling competitive with Dylan, why did he request the most powerful song Dylan had ever written after singing one of his lesser known songs?

From Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary by Tim Riley:
I've seen that clip from Don't Look Back dozens of times and I don't think there was any animosity between Dylan & Donovan. If anything, Donovan got the last laugh. According to a Donovan biographer, the song he sings, To Sing For You, was a newly written tribute to Joan Baez, Dylan's girlfriend, with whom Donovan had a secret one-night a few nights before encountering Dylan for the first time.

Donovan was only 19 years old when the documentary was filmed and had just signed his first contract with Pye Records. Many critics correctly noted that Donovan was technically a better vocalist and guitar player than Dylan.

In one scene when the hotel management is complaining about bottles being thrown at pedestrians from Dylan's hotel room window, Dylan arrogantly dismisses their complaint, while Donovan humbly offers to go outside and pick up the broken bottles himself.

Listening to Blood On The Tracks now. Always loved this album and it's my favourite Dylan album but I'd forgotten about it for a while.

The guy's a genius.

You´re right, Fluffy ! That album is just so good; difficult to think of any other artist who could write and perform such a collection of great songs. Sometimes I like the epic story songs like Tangled Up In Blue and Jack Of Hearts best, sometimes the more modest ones like Buckets Of Rain, but really there isn´t a weak track on the whole album.

I hope these all turn out to be pretty great.

Blood On the Tracks was the peak of Dylan's songwriting career. It's one of the few Dylan albums where he's completely honest about his personal life and isn't a complete enigma. Every song on the album is perfect & collectively the songs add up so a semi-autobiographical collection of Dylan's well guarded love-life over the first decade of his public career.

He's also in the best signing voice of his career on Blood On The Tracks and he really conveys a great deal of emotion. His signature nasal world weary vocal sing-sing approach is gone. From around 1970 to 1978 Dylan really did develop into a first rate vocalist and even quit smoking. But by 1980, Dylan's voice was wrecked by all of those years of singing with his nose & throat, instead of using his diaphragm.

On Blood On The Tracks, Dylan in his mid-30's and finally seems to have gain some balance and perspective in his life and no longer needs to hide behind the angry young man facade. He finally seems to have come to grips with his status as a cultural icon who captured the zeitgeist of an entire generation of young Americans.

You make some interesting points about Blood on the Tracks, Gavin and I´m not going to argue with someone who shares my own high opinion of it; I imagine that both of us have spent many agreeable hours listening to this album with a sense of wonder.

On some of the tracks, he certainly sounds touchingly sincere, but I´d never say that Bob was "being completely honest about his personal life". In some songs he seems to be laying bare his heart, but I think Dylan is always the conscious artist first, and I´m not sure how many autobiographical details can be gleaned from the lyrics. Did he really get a job in the Great North Woods working as a cook for a spell ? Was he ever hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn ? No, that´s Dylan the artist, inventing stories and crafting images for effect.

Not that it matters much; the metaphors, the sentiment all add up to a wonderful album and it´s rather like Chief Bromden says in One Flew Over The Cuckoo´s Nest; "It´s the truth, even if it didn´t happen that way."

BTW, have you come across these lyrics that Dylan wrote, but left off the album?

Shelter From The Storm:
Now the bonds are broken, but they can be retied
By one more journey to the woods, the holes where spirits hide
It´s a never-ending battle for a peace that´s always torn.
"Come in," she said,"I´ll give shelter from the storm."

If You See Her :
If she´s passing back this way, and I hope she don´t
Tell her she can look me up, I´ll either be here or I won´t.

Dylan made this rare introspective album in the wake of his divorce from his first wife Sara (Noznisky) Dylan, who almost as much as a mysterious enigma, as Dylan himself.

The narrative of Tangled Up In Blue does roughly follow Dylan's early wanderings before eventually ending up in New York in 1961. From around age 17 to 20 Dylan was indeed traveling around the Midwest and South and working menial jobs prior to surfacing in Green Village and nearly instant stardom. Dylan did indeed live in an apartment on Montague St. in the East Village when revolution was in the air, as he sings in the song.

The Tangled Up In Blue narrative seems follow Dylan's hitch-hiking expeditions that led him to finally settling in New York and meeting Sara Nozinsky who was,as the song goes, was a topless dancer but she was also a Playboy model and aspiring actress. As the song goes, Sara was married at the time to Hans Lownds who was a character on the fringes of the cafe scene in Greenwich Village.

It wouldn't surprise me if Dylan had worked as a cook in Minnesota's Great North Woods when he just out of high school or during his short lived year or so at University of Minnesota. We know during this period he auditioned to play in Bobby Vee's band under a false name, he met blues musician Jesse Fuller while travelling in Denver and tried unsuccessfully to meet Fats Domino in New Orleans. Did he work on a fishing boat in Delacroix? Who knows... Dylan doesn't talk about the past.

Bob and Sara Dylan's son Jakob comments on Blood on the Tracks: "The songs are my parents talking" Apparently Dylan wrote another album's worth of music about his separation with Sara but he refused to record the songs. Dylan's friends who heard the unrecorded songs said they were even better than the ones on Blood on the Tracks.