Dylan happy to ring changes on bootleg album
You can't trust his lyrics, but you can trust him to produce a great album, writes Barry Egan
A Playboy magazine interviewer once made the mistake of trying to ask Bob Dylan a serious question -- along the lines of what made him decide to go the singer-songwriter/voice of a generation route. Dylan looks at him from beneath his cowboy hat and, rather than walk out, offers a Sphinx-like answer: "Carelessness."
What followed was a long silence before Bob decided to amuse himself with a rambling tale that sounds something straight off Modern Times or Time Out Of Mind.
"I lost my one true love," Bob begins. Pause.
"I started drinking. The first thing I know, I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman."
Another pause. "I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a 'before' in a Charles Atlas 'before and after' ad."
Dylan continues apace, with him moving in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chilli and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy -- "he ain't so mild" -- gives her the knife, and the next thing Bob knows he is in Omaha.
There is another long pause before he tells the, by this point, completely bemused Playboy journalist that "it is so cold in Omaha and by this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish.
He continues on: "So I stumble on to some luck and get a job as a carburettor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but who's built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce."
Everything's going good until the delivery boy shows up and tries to knife Dylan.
Pause.
"Needless to say," Dylan continues, "he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?"
Playboy: "And that's how you became a rock-'n'-roll singer?"
Dylan: "No, that's how I got tuberculosis.
Bob Dylan, justly regarded as America's greatest living songwriter or not, is something of an expert spinner of bullshit. One story, possibly even true, has it that many years ago when he was auditioning to play piano with Bobby Vee, Vee asked him his name. "Elston Gunn," replied Dylan.
Vee laughs and asks, "Is that "Gunn" with one "n" or two?"
"Three," says Dylan.
For some, the unreleased recordings, alternate takes, mess-ups, live tracks, and innumerable outtakes -- such as those on his newest release, Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol.8 -- can, on occasion, be far more compelling than the more polished efforts that make it into some of Dylan's albums. And you get the sense that sometimes the great man himself doesn't disagree. John Mulvey in Uncut made the salient point that Tell Tale Signs initially seems to answer a few questions about how Dylan works, "but eventually only adds yet more puzzles and dead-end trails to the myth. And, of course, adds a bunch more great recordings to the canon, too."
And what a canon. Dylan's bootleg series started in 1991 with the first three bootleg volumes.
These covered the first 30 years of his career and were something of a revelation. Tell Tale Signs covers that period that produced the albums Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, Modern Times and Oh Mercy. You get the sense from Tell Tale Signs that Bob is never happy with what he releases: that his songs are in a constant flux.
There are 10 alternate takes or unreleased songs (Most Of The Time, Dignity -- a piano demo no less -- Born In Time, Everything Is Broken among others) taken from the Daniel Lanois-produced Oh Mercy sessions which feed into the theory that Dylan was never truly happy with that album in its final form.
Though, in fairness to Daniel Lanois, there never appears to be any finished version with Dylan: merely what Dylan was happiest with on the day it came to choose what went on a particular album. The bard would invariably change his mind again after the album was pressed and released to the world.
On this, the fragmentary likes of Mississippi is unrecognisable in this stripped-down version and Dignity is like an old rockabilly groove that wouldn't be out of place on a Stray Cats set. Dylanologists will enjoy that there are two versions of Mississippi from the 1997 Time Out of Mind sessions with producer Daniel Lanois to be found here on Tell Tale Signs.
The first one has Bob singing "But my heart is not weary, it's light and it's free". This lyric didn't make Time Out Of Mind; it turned up on the 2001 Love And Theft album. On Red River Shore, unreleased from Time Out Of Mind, he sings, seemingly of Jesus or some other such messianic type: "I heard of a guy who lived a long time ago ... that if someone around him died and was dead he knew how to bring 'em on back to life."
We also get glorious live versions of Cocaine Blues and Ring The Bells, as well as Bob singing of the dead landscapes of Marchin' to the City and 32-20 Blues (unreleased from World Gone Wrong) and the Biblical floods of High Water (For Charley Patton) and the plain ol' sadness of Lonesome Day Blues and The Lonesome River (with Ralph Stanley).
Mikhal Gilmore writes in Rolling Stone that Tell Tale Signs sets a new milestone for the 67-year-old guru of American. "Dylan has always written about morally centreless times, but this collection comes from a different perspective -- not something born of the existential moment but of the existential long view and the courage of dread."
As Gilmore adds in his review, Jack Fate, who was Dylan's character in Masked and Anonymous, intones what might work as the precis for Tell Tall Signs.
"Seen from a fair garden, everything looks cheerful. Climb to a higher plateau, and you'll see plunder and murder. Truth and beauty are in the eye of the beholder.
"I tried to stop figuring everything out a long time ago," he writes.
So should we with Dylan.
- Barry Egan
