“Some of these bootleggers, they make pretty good stuff.”
— Bob Dylan, “Sugar Baby”, from “Love & Theft” (2001).
“I still don’t like bootleg records. There was a period of time when people were just bootlegging anything on me, because there was nobody in charge of the recording sessions. All my stuff was being bootlegged high and low, far and wide. They were never intended to be released, but everybody was buying them. So my record company said, ‘Well, everybody else is buying these records, we might as well put them out.’”
— Bob Dylan, from an August 2006 interview Rolling Stone with Jonathan Lethem.
With the release earlier this year of The Bootleg Series, Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs, the sixth proper release in Sony’s official string of Bob Dylan “bootleg” compilations, it should be clear by now to anyone who is paying attention that a veritable treasure trove of unheard music sits in Columbia’s vaults and elsewhere. Ceaselessly touring, Dylan is arguably the second-most bootlegged artist of all time (behind the Grateful Dead), and the first rock bootleg was a Dylan one, Great White Wonder, which surfaced in 1969. Since 1988, Dylan has been on what he calls the Never Ending Tour, playing over 100 concerts a year, all across the world. All of these have been bootlegged.
Still, if you are a workaday Dylan fan, you might go blithely through your days believing that Columbia has selected the best of what’s out there and delivered it to its trusting consumers. In a way, that’s true. The material on Columbia’s bootleg issues is top-notch, and barring a few complaints that only Dylan obsessives such as myself would possibly dare to make, you have been getting quality product with the Bootleg Series releases.
But the simple fact is, there is actually a hell of a lot more.
Let me give you one example of why, as a Dylan fan, you might want to investigate what’s beyond the official releases: That jaw-droppingly gorgeous version of “Born in Time” on the first disc of Tell Tale Signs has circulated among collectors for years on a number of different sets that collect outtakes from 1989’s Oh Mercy. You could have been listening to that for years instead of just the past couple of weeks. In a way, you were wasting a part of your life. But you can fix that. There’s plenty of similarly stunning stuff out there that hasn’t been released and may never be released.
For example, earlier this year, there was a three-disc bootleg collection circulating called The Genuine Bootleg Series, Volume Four. Cute, huh? While nowhere near as good as the official ones, it was worth the download alone for a soul-stirring, near a capella version of “Going, Going, Gone” from the Planet Waves sessions. Also, the complete recordings of the Town Hall and Carnegie Hall concerts from 1963 suddenly surfaced a few months ago. Dylan nuts had been waiting years for those — they were holy grails. “I’m Not There (1956),” one of the grails from the sessions that yielded the Basement Tapes, finally saw official release on the soundtrack from the Todd Haynes film of the same name last year, but what about another much-heralded song from the period, “Sign on the Cross”? You’d have to go the bootleg route to get it. (Columbia is practically asking you to, having originally slated it to appear on The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3, but cutting it at the last minute.)
“If You See Her, Say Hello” has long been a favorite of Dylan’s songs, but did you know that he completely rewrote the song with some vitriolic verses and played it live that way — but only twice? This was in Florida in 1976 and the sound quality isn’t fantastic on known extant recordings, but as every bootleg collector knows, the performance can more than make up for sound quality. He also played “Handy Dandy” (from 1990’s Under The Red Sky) for the first time ever earlier this year, and he’s been performing “Beyond The Horizon” and “Workingman’s Blues #2” with a few new lines…and those songs aren’t even that old.
However, over the years, Columbia has done a pretty good job of separating the wheat from the chaff. The bootleggers hadn’t gotten their hands on more than half of the stuff on Tell Tale Signs, as Dylan and his people have kept much tighter security on those studio tapes over the past couple of decades. “Red River Shore” was a holy grail that collectors all knew about but couldn’t get on their hands on, and it was generously given to us as an official release. It works both ways though. Did you know that the ethereal live take of “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven” on disc three is an audience recording? Yep, same take as the Crystal Cat version. (Crystal Cat, incidentally, is a company that illegally presses and sells bootlegs.)
After I first discovered Dylan, I spent my first year of college buying every official release that I could get my hands on: albums, live releases, compilations, and the rest of it. At the same time, I began to use the internet to further research this musician who had touched me so deeply but at the same time remained a complete mystery. Stumbling across and plowing through Dylan message boards, newsgroups and various articles, I started to recognize various terms of art native to Dylanology, but I didn’t quite understand what was going on. What was this NET that everyone seemed to be talking about? What was “I’m Not There (1956)?” It couldn’t be a Dylan song, I figured, since I didn’t see the lyrics on the official website and it wasn’t on any of the discs that I owned.
At some point soon thereafter, I went to my first Dylan show on February 11, 2002, at the Charleston, West Virginia, Civic Center. After the concert, I went on the Web and saw links to mp3s from the show I had just attended. Needless to say, I was intrigued. After some further investigation, I found someone who was kind enough to do a B&P with me. Wondering what that is? It’s an acronym for “blanks and postage,” meaning you send someone a couple of blank CD-Rs and a self-addressed, stamped envelope, and they burn the show and send it back to you. Then, what’s obvious to anyone who has ever swapped bootlegs soon became clear to me: What I needed to do was build up a good base of shows, compile a list of said recordings and start getting in touch with others with similar lists.
I now have roughly 700 boots. At an average of two discs apiece, that’s about 1,400 CD-Rs. They are in storage at my parents’ house because I don’t have room for them in my downtown apartment, and if I tried to drag them down here my fiancé would kill me. The funny thing is, I know people that have a lot more.
Before the days of high-speed internet, Dylan fans had to pay exorbitant prices for small print-run bootlegs of shows and studio outtakes that were pressed in Europe and elsewhere. These bootlegs are still available, and completists with plenty of money on their hands still buy them up, but they are no longer necessary. Now, the CD-R trading by mail has now been supplanted by BitTorrent downloads, which is obviously more convenient, but also has some downsides. First, you don’t make the personal connection that trading by mail encourages. More important, hard drive space and CD-Rs are dirt cheap these days, so where does one stop?
Dylan makes it easy for bootleg collectors to get out of hand. One reason is his repertoire: Dylan not only draws from 600 or so of his own songs, he also plays wonderful covers. The Beatles’ “Something,” which was a one-off tribute to George Harrison in November 2002. Then, naturally there’s old traditional songs such as “Eileen Aroon” and “Wild Mountain Thyme.” Oddly enough, the autumn ’02 tour (a favorite of mine and other Dylan fans alike) a featured cover of Don Henley’s “The End of the Innocence.” He changes the set lists around from night to night, and when apologists say that he never plays the same song exactly the same way twice, that’s pretty close to the truth. Often he rearranges them drastically, occasionally adding, deleting, or changing lyrics as his muse sees fit. He’s been known to pull out a song from a 30-year old album that has never been performed live before…and then never play it again.
As much essential-seeming material can be drawn from even his most recent live performances, there are still the studio outtakes to consider, many more than have made it onto a Bootleg Series release. But why stop there? Why not radio shows, interviews, soundchecks, upgrades of those bootlegs you already have with better sound quality? Why not three different recordings of the same show from 2004?
At some point, I got burned out on it all. I still download the occasional show if it’s supposed to be really good or if it is one of the holy grails that come to light every now and again. And I definitely still download multiple sources of a show that I was at, because, hey it’s Dylan…and “I was there, man.”
But how does one decide what is a good boot and what isn’t? A good starting point is the “must have” section on bobsboots.com (link below). After that, the best thing to do is find out which shows you like and go after others from that tour. Also, study the set lists (links below) and see which ones call out especially to the Bobcat in you.
My advice to a newbie would be do some research before diving into the Dylan cornucopia. You can have it all, but you don’t really want it. It will eat up all of your time, and your enjoyment of the music will diminish by the time you hear your 500th version of “Like a Rolling Stone.” Yeah, it was voted the best rock song of all time, but he plays it every night.
Some helpful links:
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