Song Of The Day 24/05/2011: Bob Dylan - Tangled Up In Blue (New York version)

Today is the last day of our Bob Dylan week, and (not wholly coincidentally) Bob Dylan's 70th birthday. Something special is needed - I can't really post just another random Dylan song from somewhere in his back catalogue, it has to be one of his very best songs. However, I have to continue on the no-official-studio-album-releases train. Therefore, the best unreleased (indeed, arguably the best full stop) version of one of my favourite Dylan songs.

Tangled Up In Blue is one of the most dissected works of Dylan's career, so I won't really bother to try and match up to other, better, critiques (like this one here). It's ostensibly a fairly basic story song, yet manages to fit a massive amount of imagery in. It feels like one of Dylan's broadest, grandest works, yet feels like it lasts a fraction of its 7-minute running time.

This version is a lot less instantly catchy than the original, with a lot less strident guitar and more of a focus on the voice. He's also played around with personal pronouns a lot, bending the narrative of the story considerably. It's just a lot more personal. It's a stupendous performance, but you can definitely tell why this recording was discarded for the more polished officially released version, which went on to be one of the best-known songs of his later career, attracting more people to the genius that is Blood On The Tracks than would have heard it otherwise. Oh well. Dylan never was the greatest self-editor. There were plenty of other things he could do that would make up for it.

Happy birthday, Bob!

Bob Dylan - Tangled Up In Blue (New York version)

(one last thing - well done me. I got through a whole week of Dylan retrospection without using the phrase 'He was so much younger then'! I'm proud of myself.)

Song Of The Day 23/05/2011: Bob Dylan - Clothes Line Saga

Today's post in the Bob Dylan 70th birthday week extravaganza here on the Punch Table is from the fabled Basement Tapes. Dylan and The Hawks (his backing band on the '66 world tour, shortly to become The Band) holed up in Woodstock in 1966-7 and recorded loads of songs. Many were covers, but there are also a number of originals, in a very different style to the electric releases of '65-6.
This isn't one of the very best of the Basement Tapes songs, but it is a suitably enigmatic one: it raises lots of questions, and answers none of them. Its playful oddness is a good example of the feel of a lot of the Basement Tapes material, which is well worth checking out further.

Bob Dylan - Clothes Line Saga

Song Of The Day 22/05/2011: Bob Dylan - I'll Keep It With Mine

I'll Keep It With Mine was a song Dylan originally recorded at the beginning of 1965. This version was done by Dylan solo, on the piano, and it is the one I have posted a link to below. Although this was around the time of the recording of Bringing It All Back Home, which, with it's acoustic side, would have made a good permanent home for it, it was given to the folk singer Judy Collins for her to record and release as a single. Dylan apparently wasn't satisfied with this recording, and consigned it to the bin for 20 years.

Dylan revisited the song a year later, though, during the recording of Blonde on Blonde, and recorded a full-band rocked-up version. It was rejected for the album, and the recording of that version is particularly bad quality - despite being officially released on the Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3, the song only starts half way through the first verse, and there is a loud interruption by the recording engineer half way through. It's a pity, because it's a song that would definitely work better as a full-band track, as other artists showed - as usual with Dylan songs, there are also a lot of fairly serviceable covers. The best, which are the Fairport Convention and Nico versions, are well worth a look.

Bob Dylan - I'll Keep It With Mine

Song Of The Day 21/05/2011: Bob Dylan - Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?

Today's stop on our journey through Bob's Back Pages is the 1965 single "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?", one of his absolute best, bafflingly never put on record until Biograph. Self-sabotage is something of a theme of Dylan's career: he definitely has a habit of leaving some of his best material off records (as we have seen with some of the earlier posts of this week). In that sense he really doesn't help himself with regard to bootleggers: if all that there was was innumerable fragmentary jams, then people wouldn't buy them, but with songs this good, it's almost a public service (although of course this was out as a single).

Anyway, this is a belter: thin wild mercury Highway 61-period Dylan, cut with the Hawks, and featuring some great guitar playing from Robbie Robertson. Apparently there's a version with Mike Bloomfield out there somewhere, but I can't locate it at the moment.

Bob Dylan - Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?

Song Of The Day 20/05/2011: Bob Dylan - Lay Down Your Weary Tune

Continuing on this week's Bob Dylan birthday bonanza, here's a track originally recorded for Dylan's third album, 'The Times They Are A-Changin''. Very atypical of his protest song phase, which he was just then beginning to leave, it uses more vivid, unclear imagery than was normal for Dylan at the time. There is nothing remotely political about this song. Dylan wrote it all in one night at Joan Baez' house in the autumn of 1963, and then recorded it all in one take on October 24th. Having been left off the album for the track 'Restless Farewell', this original version circulated on bootlegs among collectors until its official release on Biograph, Dylan's career retrospective, in 1985.

As usual with a widely known Dylan song, many artists have covered it. The Byrds and Fairport Convention versions are probably my favourites, being not very far from the original but with a slightly more 'rocking' backing (and, in the Fairport case, Sandy Denny's lovely wailed backing vocals). Any other versions just don't really seem to work as well as the original, though - Dylan's voice really does give the song something extra.

Bob Dylan - Lay Down Your Weary Tune

(p.s. tomorrow is the Independent Label Market, where lots of independent record shops set up stalls selling their own wares (including some exclusive releases) on Berwick Street in Soho. See you there!)

Song Of The Day 19/05/2011: Bob Dylan - Talkin' John Birch Society Blues

Today's Dylan song is one of his best early talking blues (along with Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues), but one never released on an album. I suppose it's fairly topical, which might account for that, but it's a good piece of satire with some funny lines. It also caused something of a controversy back in 1963, when Dylan was supposed to perform it on Ed Sullivan's TV show. When CBS' lawyers told him he'd have to do a different song because of possible libel, he refused to perform and walked off the show. An interesting contrast with his recent tour of China, perhaps.

Song Of The Day 18/05/2011: Bob Dylan - I Was Young When I Left Home

On Tuesday, Bob Dylan is going to celebrate his 70th birthday. What better excuse could there be for the next Punch Table themed week?

Despite having released 34 studio albums, as well as many live albums and compilations, his officially recorded and released material tells nowhere near the full story. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of commercially released bootlegs available around the world, documenting live shows and studio outtakes from throughout his 50-year career. For the next 7 days, all the SOTDs will be taken from Dylan bootlegs, and I'll throw in a bit of extra information about that period in Dylan's career. There is so much to get through that I don't think we'll get much beyond the first part of his career, but that will leave us plenty of material of future Dylan features! I wouldn't necessarily recommend these tracks as the best way into Dylan if you've not really heard much before. Before you listen to any of these, you should probably make sure you've listened to 'Blonde on Blonde', 'Blood On The Tracks' and 'The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan' - between them, these albums cover most of the important directions Dylan's music headed in over the first (and best) 15 years of his career.

The first song featured is from the very early stages of Dylan's career. Originally from Duluth, Minnesota, Dylan move to New York in 1961 to learn his trade from the variety of folk musicians that then inhabited the cafes of Greenwich Village, most notable among them the invalid Woody Guthrie, who Dylan had idolised ever since his days in high school rock'n'roll bands. Playing mostly covers of old folk and blues standards, his style quickly evolved over the course of the year between his arrival there and the release of his debut album in March 1962. By the time it was released, 6 months after the recordings had been completed, he was effectively a completely different person to that captured on the record. A bootleg recorded in a Minnesota hotel room that I reviewed a few months ago contains some the best performances I have heard by Dylan from this period. I have chosen 'I Was Young When I Left Home' to represent this early stage, both due to the apt title and because it was exactly what Dylan was about at this stage of his career - a lovely fingerpicked folk song, adapted from the traditional '900 Miles', a favourite of Woody Guthrie.

Bob Dylan - I Was Young When I Left Home

Bootleg Review: Bob Dylan - Songs For Bonnie: The Minnesota Hotel Tapes

This is a bootleg recorded in December 1961, when Dylan was still very much a folk singer - he hadn't even really started the 'protest songs' phase that brought him to the attention of the nation at large. There are no songs on here by Dylan himself - he was mostly playing adaptations of old folk standards, whilst working his way through the extensive works of his idol Woody Guthrie. He had dropped out of college just the year before, moving to Greenwich Village to join the burgeoning folk community there and go and visit Guthrie in a New Jersey hospital. In September, he had been the subject of Robert Shelton's famous New York Times article, describing him thus;

"A cross between a choir boy and a beatnik, Mr. Dylan has a cherubic look and a mop of tousled hair he partly covers up with a Huck Finn black corduroy cap. His clothes may need a bit of tailoring, but when he works his guitar, harmonica or piano and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent... Mr. Dylan is vague about his antecedents and birthplace, but it matters less where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem to be straight up."

He had recorded his debut album by this stage, although it wasn't released until 1962. It was mainly comprised of folk standards as well, although it had a couple of original compositions on it. There isn't much crossover between the album and this bootleg, but those songs that appear on both are definitely stronger here - this was a period in which Dylan was developing with astonishing speed, even during the one month between that recording and this. Recorded in a single evening in the hotel room of the 'Bonnie' of the title, the collection of songs was a lot more diverse than that on his debut, drawing mainly on the blues but also on country and gospel. It showed him capable of much more than the fairly monotone, flat-sounding official release. It is frankly scary that at the time of this recording, Dylan was 2 years younger than I am now.

The sound quality is amazingly clear and precise throughout, bar a few momentary glitches, with Dylan in fine form. The second track, a version of Big Joe Williams' 'Baby Please Don't Go', is an immediate standout, showcasing Dylan's experiments with slide guitar. 'Baby Let Me Follow You Down' appears here too, years before it became one of the songs Dylan electrified with the Hawks when he 'abandoned' folk with a bang. This version has less of the punchiness of the later version, but has all of the heart and rawness. 'I Was Young When I Left Home' illustrates his more delicate fingerpicking guitar style, and the way his voice could mould itself to sound absolutely perfect for this type of folk song - there is no way he sounds a day under 60 in this recording, despite being only 20. Which I suppose is why, at the age of 70, he now sounds like he's at least 210.

The songs have been doing the rounds among Dylan fans for a very long time. Some of them were originally released on the very first bootleg LP, 'Great White Wonder', in 1969. The sound quality of that record wasn't great, and the tracklisting was incredibly haphazard, rearranging and interspersing this performace with other completely unrelated recordings. It was, however, a massively important release, not just to Dylan fans after more than the mere 10 or so albums and handful of 7" tracks they had to listen to by that point, but to recorded music as a whole.

Bob Dylan - Songs For Bonnie

Song Of The Day 19/02/2011: Bob Dylan - Blind Willie McTell

I'm currently having a weekend of listening to nothing but Bob Dylan, so I though today's song had to come from somewhere in his extensive oeuvre. This is probably the most well-regarded bootleg-only track ever, by any artist. In the early 80s, Dylan had done 3 albums in a row dealing with largely Christian themes, and had therefore sunk slightly off the radar of the mainstream rock critics. 1983's 'Infidels' was his return to secular songwriting, but was found fairly flat and lifeless by many of his most ardent fans, and really has not stood the test of time well. And this song, a song that would be the crowning glory of pretty much any artist bar Dylan, was left off the album.

Apparently he just didn't finish it. Whatever the reason, he seems to have re-assessed the song since the album was released, it featuring regularly in his live sets as a full-band version. It was finally given a release on 1991's Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3 collection, opening it up to a wider audience, and has since been covered by a variety of artists and discussed by a variety of critics, who put it up there with the most famous songs he has written. There are a few other versions available, with different arrangements, but I think this original one is the best.

Bob Dylan - Blind Willie McTell

Song Of The Day 06/02/2011: Jim James & Calexico - Goin' To Acapulco

I decided this blog needed more food for the eyes, and not just the ears, so for today's song I've chosen one from a film, and am posting the relevant clip as well as the mp3. It's My Morning Jacket singer Jim James' version of Dylan's 'Goin' to Acapulco', from the Dylan biopic 'I'm Not There' of a couple of years ago. The film itself is stunningly good, provided you're a fan of Dylan who already has a pretty good idea of the stories of his 1960s heyday - the much-publicised gimmick of getting 6 different actors (and actresses) to play the various sides of his character leads to a fair bit of jumping around in the story. Some of the characters work better than others - the 'poet' element, 'Artur Rimbaud', barely gets any screen time at all, and the Heath Ledger character who portrays Dylan's personal life doesn't really work very well. Most of the film is brilliant though, with my favourite parts being the ones focusing on 'Woody Guthrie', the small black folk-singing child, as well as obviously Cate Blanchett's portrayal of Dylan as he appears in 'Don't Look Back' and 'Eat The Document'.

This song comes from the 'Billy The Kid' section near the end of the film, where Richard Gere portrays Dylan the outsider, focusing on the Americana of the Basement Tapes period. The film cuts to Jim James and Calexico performing the song at a funeral in the Old West, and it really is a stunning performance. Here's a clip on YouTube.

The song predictably featured on the soundtrack, in a longer version. Here's the mp3.

Jim James & Calexico - Goin' To Acapulco

Bootleg Review: Bob Dylan - Blood On The Tracks (New York Sessions)

I'm going to start a new section on reviews of bootlegs I've been listening to. I think a good starting point is one of the most well-known studio bootlegs there is, by the artist who has probably been bootlegged more often, and who has a bigger bootleg-consuming following, than any other, Bob Dylan. I think I can put up a download link, but I'm not sure on legalities. If anyone has any problem with this, let me know.

Bob Dylan - Blood On The Tracks (New York Sessions)

Blood On The Tracks is widely regarded as one of the finest ever albums. Written against the backdrop of a messy divorce in 1974, the songs are pretty much all about either anger ('Idiot Wind') or loneliness ('If You See Her, Say Hello'). After the initial sessions, Dylan decided to re-record much of the album, including all the more personal songs, giving them a more produced sheen. Some of the songs gain from this, some lose something. The sound is very different, firstly - the final release had gone through a lot of noise reduction, and some of the personality of Dylan's voice and of the guitar parts had been lost. This is restored, for better or worse, and the changes are noticeable from the very beginning of 'Tangled Up In Blue'. This version is a lot less immediately catchy than the officially released version, which went on to be one of the better-recieved singles of Dylan's later career, but I think it manages to get across Dylan's feelings about the song much more effectively. I also find the New York versions in general flow a lot better into each other, making for a more cohesive album. Admittedly, the version of 'Idiot Wind' here seems a lot less angry, which means the deprecating lyrics fall a bit flat, and 'Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts' is definitely a bit over-long, but the version of 'If You See Her, Say Hello' seems much more heartfelt and genuine. Fundamentally, after having listened to this version, I think the official release just seems to fall a bit flat.

Having said that, though, anyone who has even a vague interest in Bob Dylan, or in acoustic-based guitar music in general, should hear both the official and bootleg releases of this album. They're both absolutely essential releases, each with good points compared to the other, and it is just a question of your own particular tastes. The argument over which is 'better' has raged for 35 years already, and shows no sign of stopping.