Shall I Be Released?
Just how good is Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series?
by Michael Pelusi
(Originally published in the March 23-31 2004 issue of the Philadelphia City Paper.)
Bob Dylan and the bootleg record industry have been intractably linked since 1969, when the first unauthorized rock album, Great White Wonder, was released, collecting much-rumored Dylan recordings he had yet to deem worthy.
Twenty-two years later, Dylan and his label Columbia responded with The Bootleg Series: Vols. 1-3, a three-CD boxed set. It collected 58 tracks previously unreleased (by Dylan or Columbia, that is) from across the spectrum of Dylan’s career. With the issuing of the box, staggering songs like “Blind Willie McTell” and “She’s Your Lover Now” and rich alternate takes of classics like “Tangled Up in Blue” and “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” finally received official release. The two subsequent volumes captured career-defining live performances from 1966 and 1975, respectively.
On Tue., March 30, The Bootleg Series: Vol. 6 is due to enter stores, a two-disc set, containing a concert from Oct. 31, 1964, at the Philharmonic Hall in New York City. Dylan performed the entire concert solo, save for a cluster of duets with then-lover Joan Baez. The set list was dominated by Dylan’s protest songs, which by then were already lauded anthems: “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Amid these, however, Dylan also performed brand-new songs such as “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” that display a new stream-of-conscious, psychological rather than social, lyrical perspective. He was on the verge of making music with a rock band. Yet he was still a darling of the civil-rights and anti-war movements. This Halloween night caught an artist between two crucial epochs. It was a seminal concert. Or was it?
Clinton Heylin doesn’t think so. Heylin has authored four Dylan books, including the bio Behind the Shades and The Recording Sessions 1960-1994, as well as Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry and other rock tomes. He’s had sharp words for The Bootleg Series over the years, and Vol. 6 is no exception. “I’ve never rated [the Halloween show] as a performance,” he explains on the phone from England. “Dylan is very focused when he comes to doing the new songs. … But the old material, he’s completely and totally bored with. It’s not a good performance. He’s clearly stoned. … The concert was a real landmark, not in the positive sense, but in the negative sense because it looked at the time like Dylan was going off the rails.”
Steve Berkowitz, an A&R head at Sony Music, says he’s never heard of Clinton Heylin. Berkowitz has worked on all the Bootleg Series discs with the Dylan office — he stresses that the brainstorming and decision-making is theirs, not Sony’s — and co-produced Vol. 5 and Vol. 6. Even so, without Berkowitz directly responding to Heylin, it’s easy to see how The Bootleg Series works opposite Heylin’s views.
There are infinitely superior solo acoustic shows from that era in Sony’s vaults, Heylin claims, such as from Carnegie Hall or New York Town Hall, both in 1963. Berkowitz says those very two concerts were considered, and rejected, for Vol. 6.
Heylin also charges that the Halloween show bootlegs that have been available for years are more than adequate. “It’s very hard to get enthusiastic about something one has had in perfect quality for 30 years. And certainly when you’re talking about an acoustic performance, there’s very little nuance that a bit of digital remastering is going to bring out.”
Berkowitz says, “Certainly whatever was first bootlegged, whether it was the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s, couldn’t have possibly been done as well as how we’ve transferred from the original tape through the technology we have now, which actually allows us to present as close to the original source since anybody who was actually at the show.”
Perhaps most significant is the question: Who is this for?
“The target audience is everybody,” Berkowitz says. “You could look at it as Bob is a pop star; Bob is an artist; Bob is an icon; Bob is a political commentator; Bob is a songwriter and many other things. I think that everybody should hear these, and we go for the masses.”
But Heylin says, “There is no point in pretending that archival releases are for anyone other than people with an archival interest.”
Confused yet? Alan Light, editor in chief of Tracks magazine (and a frequent talking head on VH1), has written extensively about Dylan over the years. He lauds The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6 included, and takes issue with the tendency among writers such as Heylin to endlessly cite Dylan’s huge backlog of unreleased works. “You can get lost in this parallel universe of Dylan stuff. You have to maintain some relationship to what [most people] can listen to.”
Nevertheless, Heylin does raise some important issues. “The whole point of hearing [archival] material is to give you an insight into the way these people approach their work, and to hopefully re-examine the quality of the work,” he says. “If the point is to sell 7 million units, you are conning the people who are buying it.” He says The Beatles’ Anthology series sold less and less as each volume came out because it misguidedly tried to make the band’s outtakes sound perfect to appeal to a mass audience. “The people who wanted the archival stuff were conned, the people who wanted another Beatles record — apparently unaware that they broke up 25 years ago — also felt conned. So everyone lost: Everyone lost interest; record companies lost money.”
So is The Bootleg Series insightful? It’s a question that can only be answered from listener to listener. Clinton Heylin offers a strong case that the series might be doing a disservice to Dylan’s legacy; in the end, though, it’s but one way to view a career that’s defied single interpretations for over 40 years now. Advises Alan Light, “I think you have to take this series for what it is, and if you approach it as saying, “Well this has to be definitive,’ there’s no such thing as definitive Dylan. There’s no such thing as unassailable because he never allows himself to be fixed in that way. So you can always make the argument for why it should be this version instead of that version, or this show instead of that show or any of those things. That’s sort of the beauty of what his career has been.”
Bob Dylan performs March 29 at the Tower Theater; March 30 at the Electric Factory; and March 31 at the Trocadero. The shows are sold out.
Michael Pelusi, Content Strategist 