I’m getting Dylan withdrawal symptoms and have never really investigated most of the Bootleg Series. I hope I’m not stepping on toes, but I did try and check a couple of times first!
Anyone up for a listening club spin-off?
In
0voters
If so, I reckon we could start mid-week and then allow a week and a half for the three volumes of Rare & Unreleased, then proceed with a new release each Monday as follows:
Week
Release
W/C
1
The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3: (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991
14/01/25
2
The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The Royal Albert Hall Concert
26/01/26
3
The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue
02/02/26
4
The Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964 - Concert at Philharmonic Hall
09/02/26
5
The Bootleg Series Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack
16/02/26
6
The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs
23/02/26
7
The Bootleg Series Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos, 1962–1964
02/03/26
8
The Bootleg Series Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait (1969-1971)
09/03/26
9
The Bootleg Series Vol. 11: The Basement Tapes Raw
16/03/26
10
The Best of The Cutting Edge 1965-1966: The Bootleg Series Vol. 12
23/03/26
11
Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 13 / 1979–1981
30/03/26
12
Bob Dylan - More Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series Vol. 14
06/04/26
13
The Bootleg Series Vol. 15: Travelin’ Thru (1967-1969)
13/04/26
14
The Bootleg Series Vol. 16: Springtime in New York (1980-1985)
20/04/26
15
The Bootleg Series Vol. 17: Fragments - Time Out of Mind Sessions (1996-1997)
27/04/26
16
The Bootleg Series Vol. 18: Through the Open Window, 1956-1963
don’t know if i have the stamina for this, after the main listening club. but if you include polls to pick the top 2 tracks from each volume, i’ll listen to them!
Yeah sure, feel free to get involved as much or as little as you like. They’re a Dylan gap I’d like to fill and I imagine will generate less discussion than the studio albums, so even if it becomes more of a structured listening experience then that’s good with me.
So with the latest volume, I was thinking the ‘Highlights’ version that’s up on Spotify. I’m not sure the full disc ones are even on streaming are they? Even if they were I reckon that would be too much.
I’ve got the full version of The Cutting Edge, it has an entire disc comprised solely of versions of Like A Rolling Stone. That snare hit starts to lose impact after a while
I’m up for this but the timing isn’t right for me, I need a Bob break. I’ll poke my head into this thread as the year progresses and I’ll jump in occasionally.
The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3: (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991
I’m going to post the description and ranking from Uncut’s bootleg feature each week as a preamble:
Uncut Bootleg Series Ranking: 1st (/16)
Six years after Biograph, the Bootleg Series introduced itself with a 3-CD set, released around Dylan’s 50th birthday and featuring an extraordinary 58 previously unreleased tracks. What a haul it was! Many of the tracks would have been crowning achievements in the careers of most other songwriters and you wondered again at the contrarian whims that had consigned them to the archives, that dead place.
The breadth and quality of the songs was breath-taking and for the number of top-tier previously unavailable Dylan material it collected, the set remains unbeatable. It reminded us from the start that Dylan’s habit of leaving key tracks off his albums started early, with a dramatic version of the traditional ballad “House Carpenter”, dropped from his first album. Nearly 30 years after it was replaced on Freewheelin’ by the just written “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, we finally heard “Let Me Die In My Footsteps”. There were tracks everywhere making their official debuts that made your head spin. Fabled cuts like “Walls Of Red Wing”, “Farewell, Angelina”, “No More Auction Block” and “Seven Curses”, “I’ll Keep It With Mine”. Alternative versions of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” and songs from Blood On The Tracks.
CD3 was astonishing in itself, every track a back-of-the-net match winner. The abandoned Shot Of Love masterpiece, “Angelina”; “Someone’s Got A Hold Of My Heart”, an early version of “Tight Connection (To My Heart”) from Empire Burlesque; the E-Street Band version of the same album’s “When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky”, the raging Infidels out-take “Foot Of Pride”. At last, the hallowed “Blind Willie McTell”, dropped from Infidels. The collection ended with the five-minute fever dream of “Series Of Dreams”, a track Daniel Lanois had desperately petitioned Dylan to include on Oh Mercy, Dylan having none of it. For once, it was an argument you wished Lanois had won. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about it all was the feeling that there was a lot more of this to come. That there were many more tracks, unheard, waiting to be discovered, dusted off and offered to the world.
