BOB DYLAN – GREAT WHITE WONDER
Before I get into The Iguana Chronicles – the series of albums of Stooges music put out by Greg Shaw of Bomp! Records – I’ll take some time to relate my early acquisitions of albums of this kind. There are records out there which are not authorized that can include recordings that fans cannot get any other way. They are usually referred to as “bootleg” records and consist of music that was never officially released. “Pirated” records are illegal copies of major-label releases, and they are a different thing altogether. That is what got Napster into so much trouble many years ago. Bootlegs exist in a grey area and are generally (if grudgingly) tolerated by the music industry. In the same way, the major record labels almost never try to retake possession of the early promo copies of albums that are supplied to DJ’s and rock critics ahead of the official releases, even though they are typically marked with something like: “Licensed for promotional use only. Sale is prohibited.”
That memorable time – I always thought it was late 1969, but based on the dates I see in Wikipedia and elsewhere, it must have been in 1970 – I went by the Record Bar in Raleigh near the North Carolina State University campus, and there were several tables full of bootleg records that had been set up in the middle of the store. I picked up four that day: two by Bob Dylan, Great White Wonder and John Birch Society Blues; one by the Beatles, Kum Back; and one by the Rolling Stones, The Greatest Group on Earth. The music I got that day was a revelation and has informed my record collecting habits ever since.
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“The Rolling Stones” does not appear anywhere on the label or the cover on The Greatest Group on Earth or Live’r Than You’ll Ever Be. Occasionally, the labels on bootleg records are misleading; for instance, some editions of Great White Wonder on Rocolian Records show the artist as “Dupre and His Miracle Sound” and have completely different song names. More often, the record labels are completely blank or just have “Side 1” or “A” or something like that.
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Bob Dylan’s bootleg albums fall into a different category entirely from all of the rest, if you ask me. While latter-day Bob Dylan concerts often show up on bootleg records, dozens if not hundreds of songs that had never been released on any of his studio albums or singles can be found on the myriad bootleg albums that have been issued over the years, as taken from a wealth of demo recordings, live performances of early songs (where less than 20 people appear to be in the audience in some cases), and many other sources. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Bob Dylan is the most bootlegged artist of all time, and that certainly doesn’t surprise me. For his part, Dylan hates bootleg records but eventually responded in his own way to get his unreleased recordings out there to his fans.
Great White Wonder is probably the most famous bootleg album of all time and one of the earliest as well, being released in July 1969. It is a double album with a total of 25 cuts – electric songs and acoustic songs, quiet songs and fast songs, guitar songs and piano songs, solo performances and others with a full rock band, a dramatic recitation of a poem called “Black Cross” (or “Hezekiah Jones”), an interview with Pete Seeger, and a strange story called “East Orange, New Jersey” where Dylan complains about playing in a chess club there and relates a dream he had where they paid him in chess pieces rather than money. The music is fantastic, without question, but the album has a real personality as well. It is a simply amazing album that is unlike any that I know of that have been released by Bob Dylan or anyone else.
A few of the songs on Great White Wonder I knew already; alternate takes of “Man of Constant Sorrow” and “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” (which both appear on Bob Dylan’s first album, Bob Dylan) are included, and “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)” I knew as a single, “Mighty Quinn” by Manfred Mann, released in early 1968. Another song on the album, “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” was also a single for Manfred Mann (“If You Gotta Go, Go Now”) and was a hit in England, though I am not sure I had heard it before. But that’s it.
Great White Wonder opened up a whole world for me. To me, many of these songs are now as familiar and as solidly in the Bob Dylan canon as anything that I have heard on the Columbia Records studio albums released in the 1960’s, “The Death of Emmett Till” (a great old-school protest song), “Only a Hobo” (my favorite song on Great White Wonder and one of the earliest songs by anyone about the plight of the homeless), “Black Cross”, “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)”, “If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Or Else You Got to Stay All Night)”, “Poor Lazarus”, “Baby, Please Don’t Go”, “I Shall Be Released”, “Open the Door, Homer”, “This Wheel’s on Fire”, “I Ain't Got No Home”, and “(As I Go) Ramblin’ ’Round” (the last two being Woody Guthrie songs) among them.
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What attracted the most attention on Great White Wonder were seven songs recorded by Bob Dylan with the Band, probably at a house called Big Pink that is referenced in the name of the debut album released by the Band, Music from Big Pink (1968). They are clustered mostly on Side 4 and also include the last two songs on Side 2; in order (as listed on the Great White Wonder labels), they are “Mighty Quinn”, “This Wheel’s on Fire”, “I Shall Be Released”, “Open the Door, Richard!”, “Too Much of Nothing”, “Nothing Was Delivered”, and “Tears of Rage”. All great songs, no question; but this was barely a quarter of the music, and many people seem to think that the earlier acoustical songs that I loved equally well didn’t matter. I have never felt that way myself; Great White Wonder is great from one end to the other to these ears.
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As I mentioned earlier, bootleg records were generally tolerated, but there was definitely considerable resistance to them. I would read in the press from time to time and hear from other sources that “legitimate” releases of the songs on Great White Wonder were coming, and we should just be patient and wait. Needless to say, I wasn’t having it; in all, I have purchased 23 Bob Dylan bootleg albums (many being double album sets, like Great White Wonder), and I will likely purchase more if I get a chance. It has been a while since I have seen any in a record store, however, now that I think of it.
As it turned out, we didn’t have to wait too long – about 6 years. With great fanfare, a two-album set called The Basement Tapes came out in mid-1975. While it was exciting to see another two-album set of unknown Bob Dylan music, the albums ultimately left me feeling underwhelmed.
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When I started playing the albums, early on I didn’t recognize any of the music. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but if The Basement Tapes is what you were supposed to buy instead of Great White Wonder, it sure wasn’t filling the bill. At the end of Side 2, I finally heard one of the songs from GWW, “Tears of Rage”; and then “Too Much of Nothing” to start Side 3, but no more again until Side 4. In a way, The Basement Tapes was structured like Great White Wonder, except that other “basement-tape” songs were provided in the parts of the discs where the early Bob Dylan songs were slotted on GWW.
What I noticed right away, first and foremost, is that none of Bob Dylan’s early folk music and acoustical songs were included on The Basement Tapes. While Great White Wonder included a variety of songs, that is the kind of music that I was encountering on most of the other Dylan bootleg albums that I had been gathering.
While there is a lot to love on The Basement Tapes, and I cannot argue with the 5-star rating on Allmusic and other sources, I gather that I am not the only one who was somewhat disappointed. By the time The Basement Tapes came out, the Band had gained considerable stature in the music world and were no longer just “the band” backing Bob Dylan (they were actually called the Hawks in the basement-tape days). Still, I certainly hadn’t expected that fully one third of the songs (8 out of 24) on The Basement Tapes would be songs by the Band alone, with no involvement from Bob Dylan.
Finally, I dare say that anyone buying The Basement Tapes would have expected, at a minimum, to hear those seven basement-tape songs from Great White Wonder; but the album came up short in that regard also. Only five of them are on The Basement Tapes, amazingly; “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)” and “I Shall Be Released” are omitted from the 1975 album. To be sure, they both had previously been included in the 1971 Bob Dylan retrospective album, Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Vol. II.
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One might think that my other Bob Dylan bootleg acquisition that day long ago, John Birch Society Blues would have been completely overshadowed by Great White Wonder, but that isn’t true at all – it is a blockbuster album as well.
(September 2017)
