At least since 1969, Bob Dylan’s officially released albums have been shadowed by a legendary counter-canon: outtakes, demos, home and concert performances, bootlegged under such titles as “Great White Wonder.” “The Bootleg Series, Volumes 1-3,” which hit stores last week, isn’t Columbia’s first attempt to cash in on the cachet. “The Basement Tapes” (1975) were low-fi (and much overrated) 1967 home recordings with The Band. The “Biograph” anthology (1985) supplemented the classics with 18 previously unreleased cuts: mostly variants of known songs, but also such rarities as the countryish “Caribbean Wind” and the 1965 Beatles-Stones knockoff “I Wanna Be Your Lover.”
Despite its naughty-naughty title and its rough edges–an out-of-tune guitar, a barking dog in the background–“The Bootleg Series” is closer in spirit to “Biograph” than to “The Basement Tapes.” It traces Dylan’s songwriting from 1961 to 1989, though this time with minimal reference to the work that made him famous. No “Blowin’ in the Wind,” no “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and only one verse of “Like a Rolling Stone.” Its 58 outtakes and oddities include 38 songs he’d never put on an album.
Fans perplexed by recent Dylan records will be relieved: this one takes no getting used to. The chronological presentation, from guitar-harmonica days through mid-’60s rock and roll and so on, prepares leery listeners for the off-putting ’80s. The last dozen of these tracks would make a far stronger album than such cranky collections as “Knocked Out Loaded” (1986) and “Down in the Groove” (1988). The earliest is from 1979, the year he turned publicly Christian; most are pre-“Biograph.” Yet he’s released just three of these songs in any version. Dylan, apparently, has done little better than the rest of us at making sense of his late work.
But a too-discerning inner critic might have inhibited Dylan while he was doing the most daring work in the history of popular music. “It’s always been my nature to take chances,” Dylan sings in “Angelina” (1981), an extraordinary outtake from “Shot of Love,” It’s usually paid off. What songwriter was ever better at sketching characters and capturing voices? “It’s too bad for his wife and kids he’s dead,” says the prizefight manager in “Who Killed Davey Moore?” (1963). “But if he was sick he shoulda said.” And as a singer, Dylan was always in full control: “Quit Your Low Down Ways” (1962) shows his distinctive knack for fusing manic energy and self-deprecating wit.
The unfamiliar versions of well-known middle-period songs–a solo “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” a fragmentary “Like a Rolling Stone” in waltz time–are less revelatory than the unknown late songs. The bluesy “Lord Protect My Child” (1983) castigates the sin that leads the pious to “sing “Amazing Grace’ all the way to the Swiss banks.” The minor-key meditation “Blind Willie McTell” encompasses singing, and South and (what else?) sin. And “Angelina,” a seven-minute surrealist dirge, features a god with the head of a hyena (rhymes with “Angelina”) and a trip up “spiral staircases/past the tree of smoke, past the angel with four faces.”
Does it seem a long way from Davey Moore’s cigar-puffing manager to these apocalyptic creatures? But Dylan–as prophet, poet or just topical songwriter–has always been a moralist. It’s sometimes hard to remember that this powerful set is really only a marginal gloss on his canonical recordings. For anyone else, “The Bootleg Series” would be “The Best of.”
