Liner
Notes by Peter Stone Brown
2008
It was the late summer of 1989, and one day a
package with a cassette inside appeared in the mail. The cassette
was an advance copy of the new, as yet, unreleased Bob Dylan album, Oh
Mercy. All I knew was the album was recorded in New Orleans with
producer Daniel Lanois, whose work I mainly knew from the first
Robbie Robertson album.
It was the second year of what would become known
as the Never Ending Tour, a tour where anything could and did
happen, and a tour that would eventually redefine Bob Dylan's entire
career as a musician. The previous tours of the past few years had
been with either the Grateful Dead and Tom Petty & the
Heartbreakers. Both tours had their moments, but I left all those
shows feeling something was missing, that Dylan needed his own band.
The show with the Dead in Philly was to say the least controversial,
and a lot of people were whining they'd never see him again. Back
then, there were still disc-jockeys and radio stations that cared
about music and their comments ranged from sort of sympathetic to
what was that!?
For me, he played two songs I never thought I'd
see, "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest," and
even more amazingly, "John Brown," an anti-war song that
appeared on an album I had, called Broadside Volume 1, which
was a sampler of the topical songwriters of Greenwich Village in the
early '60s. On that album Dylan appeared under the pseudonym Blind
Boy Grunt, which turn out to the first of many. "John
Brown" was based on the traditional country song,
"Reuben's Train," that had a definitive guitar lick to it,
and Jerry Garcia, no stranger to traditional music used that lick in
the arrangement. The show had two other surprises, "Chimes of
Freedom" and "Queen Jane Approximately," and even
though the latter song kind of collapsed in the middle, I didn't
care. It happened to be my birthday, I was seeing Bob Dylan and saw
songs I never thought I'd see. It was a hint of things to come.
When Dylan went on tour the following summer, it
was with a stripped down band, and they were to say the least
rocking. In those days there was no Internet to give you instant set
lists each night. If you wanted to know what was going on a tour,
you had to go to the library and find a newspaper from another town
that hopefully reviewed the show. So when I saw my first Never
Ending Tour show at the Garden State Arts Center, in Holmdel, New
Jersey, and Dylan opened with Subterranean Homesick Blues, another
song I never expected to see, my mind was somewhat blown and blown
even further when during the short acoustic set, he pulled out Woody
Guthrie's, "Trail of the Buffalo." That fall Dylan opened
up his tour with two nights at the Tower Theater just outside
Philly. I was beyond belief when in the middle of the show he
launched into "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," and again two
songs later, when he inserted a new verse about Vietnam into
"With God On Our Side," a verse that would appear a few
months later on a Neville Brothers album, Yellow Moon, that
was produced by Daniel Lanois.
The next morning, I was invited to watch a
recording session with Dylan's bass player at the time, Kenny
Aaronson. When I arrived at the studio, my friend who was producing
the session cautioned me, saying Bob was kind of mad at the band
last night, so be cool. Finally at the end of the session when
everyone was relaxed, I got up the nerve ask Aaronson, "Did you
know Bob was gonna do 115th Dream last night?" "He kind of
fooled around with it at sound check was the response."
The following summer, the traditional songs were
replaced by covers of other artists such as Gordon Lightfoot, Van
Morrison and country singer Don Gibson. Knowing a new album was on
the way, I was hoping for new songs, but it wasn't to be.
And so I opened that envelope and put Oh Mercy
on my tape deck. From the first note I knew it was a serious Bob
Dylan album. Dylan's two previous studio albums were comprised of
covers and originals, recorded at various sessions and were far from
having a cohesive feel. A lot of people felt his best work of the
past few years was with The Traveling Wilburys. Oh Mercy
wasn't New Orleans R&B, it was Bob Dylan music. The sound was
dense with layers of guitars, the production steamy. The songs were
deep, dark and mysterious, some funny and some with anger brewing
beneath the surface. In other words, everything you want in a Bob
Dylan album. Immediately apparent, and perhaps best of all was that
Lanois knew how to capture Bob Dylan's voice at that time.
Throughout his career, Bob Dylan has had a spooky intensity, that
when it happens, can cuts right through you. It's a magical thing.
It cannot be defined or even named. It doesn't always happen, but
when it does, you know it and it's on this album in abundance. After
listening to the album, I called a friend heavily into Bob and said,
"You have to hear this album." Skeptical from the last two
albums, he didn't believe me. That night I went to see some friends
play at a local bar and he was there. I walked in the bar, walked up
to him and said, "Come out to my car right now." I put on
"Ring Them Bells," "Most Of The Time," and
"Man In The Long Black Coat," and watched his skepticism
change to a smile.
When Dylan returned to the Tower Theater that
fall, a few Oh Mercy songs were in the set, but typically
they sounded nothing like the record, rougher, rawer, louder.
"Most Of The Time" melded right into "All Along The
Watchtower." There were surprises in store, but they weren't
necessarily musical. At the end of the second night, Dylan did
something I never thought I'd ever see. A crew member brought him a
different microphone for his harp, and the band launched into
"Leopard Skin Pill-Box Hat." During a harp solo, Dylan
edged closer and closer to the lip of the stage, then jumped into
the crowd still playing and ran out a side door ending the show.
When the tour resumed in 1990, with a three-set
club show in New Haven Connecticut at Toad's Place, he debuted a new
original song for the first time since 1981. That song was
"Wiggle Wiggle." It was the last time a new original song
would be debuted in concert. That show, a warm-up for the coming
tour also included numerous covers songs that ranged from
"Pretty Peggy-O," in a far different rendition than the
one on his first album to various country songs to blues to Bruce
Springsteen's "Dancing In The Dark." No one knew it at the
time, but that show was a forecast of the decade to come.
Late that summer, another album Under The Red
Sky, appeared. I was writing for a local weekly and much to the
displeasure of my editor covered every Dylan show in and around
Philly. Late that summer, I was contacted at the paper where I
worked by Bob Dylan's publicity agent Elliot Mintz. Unfortunately, I
was in the hospital, with a lot of broken bones, having been a
robbery victim the night before. The day I was released from the
hospital, a tape arrived in the mail from Mintz. It was Under The
Red Sky. Produced by Don Was, it had a different sound and
different feel than Oh Mercy. Was had a different production
style than Lanois. Lanois, with a couple of exceptions provided
Dylan with the same crew of musicians. Among other things, this
enables a groove to happen, and once the musicians find that groove,
then the sessions start to flow. While maintaining the same rhythm
section, Was had different guitar players and keyboard players on
each session.
Many of the tunes sounded like apocalyptic nursery
rhymes and in a sense they were. It should be pointed out that many
nursery rhymes were originally broadsides, sung or shouted in the
streets and about topical issues, often mocking royalty. At roughly
the same time, Dylan was also recording the second Traveling
Wilburys album and touring. Following those two albums, Dylan
concentrated on touring and it would seven long years before there
was a new album of original Bob Dylan songs and two years, before
there was another Bob Dylan album.
In 1992, with little advance notice or fanfare, a
new album, Good As I Been To You appeared. It was Dylan alone
doing old ballads, and blues, a pop song, and closing with the
children's song, "Froggie Went A Courtin'." The production
was minimal, the playing and singing, often rough. A little less
than a year later, a similar album World Gone Wrong, was
released. It seemed like a little more thought and care went into World
Gone Wrong, from the song selection to the album cover, and of
course the performance. For the first time since Desire, the album
contained liner notes by Bob Dylan. Writing in a different, more
linear, though still free-flowing style than he used previously, he
wrote about the source of each song and at the same time managed to
connect the songs with the current time. Curiously enough, for the
first time, he directly addressed his fans, saying the Never Ending
Tour ended with the departure of guitarist G.E. Smith in 1991, and
then quite humorously naming all the subsequent tours. Nonetheless,
fans continued and still continue to call it the Never Ending Tour.
At that point in time, it almost seemed being a Dylan fan made you a
part of some secret group. I had my friends who may have once
listened to Dylan but stopped along the way, and I had my friends I
shared Dylan with, which meant going to shows and trading bootlegs.
When I went to England a few years later and attended a Dylan
conference in Liverpool and took part in some other related Dylan
activities, a friend of the friend I was staying with asked me with
total seriousness, "Are you part of the Dylan
underground?" It cracked me up.
In the mid-'90s, that all would change with the
Internet. A friend had been telling me, you have to get on
the Internet, there's this Dylan discussion group, it's insane! And
so I did and discovered there was not only a discussion group,
Rec.Music.Dylan, but a Dylan mailing list, Hwy 61, that would
deliver Dylan news (mainly from the group) right to your inbox every
few hours, and tons of websites that covered every aspect of Dylan,
from roots and sources of songs, to religion, to lyric
interpretations, to official rarities, to statistical sites about
what songs were played where, when and how many times, and then
finally an official site that featured both rare and new, live
versions of songs. Later on there was the Dylan Pool, where you
could bet on what songs would be played during a tour, and win
prizes, which also featured among many other things a database where
you could look up when a song was played. It seemed as if the
Internet was made for Bob Dylan fans. You could meet people from all
over the world and discuss Bob Dylan
In the early winter of '97, word leaked out that
Bob Dylan was recording a new album in Miami with Daniel Lanois
returning as producer. There was very little info about it. Every
once in a while mysterious persons would show up on the newsgroup,
with little tidbits of info, maybe naming a musician or two, and
promptly disappear. Then in the spring of that year, on the Friday
of Memorial Day Weekend, leaving my job and turning on my car radio,
I was hit with a news bulletin that Bob Dylan was in the hospital
with a heart infection. I immediately recalled a day almost 31 years
before when my brother came running across a field at camp to tell
me Bob Dylan had been in a motorcycle crash. I sat staring for a
minute, then drove home to find an answering machine full of
messages and an full in-box of e-mails.
Bob Dylan returned to the road in August. Over the
past couple of years he started bringing more never played or rarely
played songs into the set, as well as an increasing amount of folk,
blues and bluegrass songs. Among the never played songs was
"Blind Willie McTell," and I kept going to shows until I
finally saw it at Wolf Trap.
Sometime early in September, another an advance
copy of Time Out Of Mind appeared in the mail The album
dominated by blues, with only four out of the 11 songs being
ballads. The songs were brooding with a consistent theme of
restlessness bordering on despair. Many people, not realizing when
the album was recorded immediately confused Dylan's hospitalization
with the album. The blues had always been a staple of Dylan's music
starting with his first album, and Dylan always made his blues his
own, minus the vocal affectations of many of his contemporaries. On Time
Out Of Mind, there was a difference because unlike Dylan's
earlier blues recordings, there was a conscious effort to get not
only the sound, but the feel of the great blues records of the '50s.
Following the albums release, there were many
articles and interviews, with Dylan and Lanois. But the one article
that caught the fan's attention was an interview with keyboard
player Jim Dickinson, where he mentioned two songs not on the album,
"Mississippi" and "Girl From The Red River
Shore." He then echoed a favorite cry of Dylan fans and
collectors, "They left the best songs off the album." Fans
were immediately intrigued even though they only had song titles to
go on. "Mississippi" was of course re-recorded for "Love
And Theft", leaving "Red River Shore" something
of a holy grail for collectors. Both songs are among the many high
points of this set. My reaction on hearing "Red River
Shore" was the same as when I first heard "Blind Willie
McTell," this is the best Bob Dylan song in ages.
For his part, Bob Dylan told the New York Times,
''Many of my records are more or less blueprints for the songs. This
time I didn't want blueprints, I wanted the real thing. When the
songs are done right they're done right, and that's it. They're
written in stone when they're done right.''
Within a year, the onstage arrangements of many of
those songs had changed considerably. Two of those changed
arrangements are included here.
Dylan of course returned to the road and in
addition to the songs from Time Out Of Mind, other songs were
continually added to the set list, blues songs, country songs,
bluegrass songs, songs he'd never played. A lot of people including
myself would stay up until the set list appeared on the internet.
Some music he dived into deeply, most notably The Stanley Brothers
and the country duo, Johnny and Jack. You never knew when or where a
new song would appear. It could be in Portugal, it could be in
Wilmington. What was clear was that Dylan was not just performing,
he was exploring and in doing so exposing his audience to all kinds
of music they might not have known about. Once they heard it, or
even heard about it, people wanted to know what it was, and where it
was from. And usually there was someone on one of the various Dylan
Internet forums who would know the answer. As a friend said to me
recently, "I wouldn't have known about the Stanley Brothers if
it wasn't for Bob Dylan." Simply by performing a song, Dylan
did what the purveyors of the sixties folk "revival"
always wanted to accomplish, without the didacticism, and, because
of the Internet, the result was world-wide. He was, as he said in
the film No Direction Home, a "musical
expeditionary."
In the fall of 2,000, Dylan moved into an area,
he'd only briefly touched before, jazz. In Dublin, he stunned the
crowd at a club show with a dramatically rearranged "Tryin' To
Get To Heaven." This was followed a few weeks later to an
equally stunned crowd in Munster, when he pulled out "If Dogs
Run Free," and a month after that, by a Western Swing song,
"Blue Bonnet Girl." It was clear Bob Dylan was up to
something. That something turned out to be his next album, ""Love
And Theft"", an album that was among many other
things, an exploration of specific American roots-based music
genres, an exploration that was continued five years later on Modern
Times.
This, the eighth volume of The Bootleg Series
isn't only about outtakes, alternate takes, and songs never heard.
It's also about making the musical connections, connections that
cover the wide canvas of American popular music. This is something
that Bob Dylan has done not only during the 18 years this album
covers, but for his entire career.
