Consider at the outset how splitting Shot of Love material between this release and the earlier, more explicitly Christian era-focused Trouble No More box set only underscores how fast Dylan moved out of that phase, and how secular the blues and R&B sound that undergirded this music always was. Even the most widely beloved tracks from this time (“Jokerman,” “Silvio,” etc.) have a shimmering quality wholly at odds with what Dylan had recorded the decade before and certainly the stripped-down, gravel-voiced neo-Americana that has fueled his astonishing late-career revival.Īnd yet, once again, the Bootleg Series not only clears the vaults of alternate takes and cut songs it adds chapters and edits to the Bob Dylan story which, like Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, will be in a state of revision and expansion as long as the artist is alive (and likely well afterward). This period has long been a subject of fascination and frustration for Dylanologists and casual fans, the moment in which the man who’d chased down the “thin, wild mercury” of his 1960s poetry and given it up to explore the “old, weird America” where he blended his own voice with those of American folk and blues traditions suddenly went adult contemporary. Springtime for New York, the 16th entry in the series, circles back around to this era, encompassing recordings from 1981 through to the recording and aftermath of Empire Burlesque, Dylan’s most spit-polished, glossy record of the 1980s. What kind of madman, everyone asked, could write a song as majestic, beautiful and definitive as “Blind Willie McTell” and then leave it off an album? Even more surprisingly, it was this chunk of material that immediately emerged as the highlight of the set, revealing gold that fans and critics alike could not believe never made it onto an official album. It’s telling that the very first Bootleg Series, which covered Dylan’s entire career to the point of its 1991 release, spent two of its three discs traversing half of the artist’s discography, only for the majority of the entire final disc to be devoted solely to 1981’s Shot of Love and 1983’s Infidels. And short of the Basement Tapes sessions, perhaps no single stretch of his career is as defined by the what-ifs of cutting-room-floor material than his mid-‘80s phase. Ever since the Bootleg Series began in 1991, Bob Dylan’s output has come to be scrutinized as much for what didn’t make official releases as the epochal LPs he has issued over a 60-year career.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |