BOB DYLAN – Collecting Landmarks
When I first realized that I was a record collector – which happened while I was still in high school, maybe even junior high – I had many “dreams” of what I wanted to accomplish. I was an instant Bob Dylan fan from the first time I heard “Like a Rolling Stone”, so naturally, I wanted to get all of the Dylan albums, and I started ordering those albums from Columbia Record Club soon thereafter. That sounded easy enough to do back in the 1960’s; but as it turned out, Dylan’s first album came out a full 50 years ago, and he has been releasing albums continuously over that period. I am probably still missing several of them, because I started to get careless about keeping up sometime in the 1980’s; however, I have really been enjoying his recent releases, from Time out of Mind on.
There were some dreams though that were not meant to be. Not long after I first got to college at North Carolina State University (probably in late 1969), one of the big record stores in Raleigh, the Record Bar (which was within walking distance of the campus) had several tables set up in the middle of the store that were piled high with bootleg albums. I had never heard of such a thing before, so I snapped up four right away, including two by my man Bob Dylan: the famous Great White Wonder double-album set, plus John Birch Society Blues (also on the G.W.W. Records label).
I loved those bootleg albums and played them all the time, as did Dylan fans everywhere. It was actually not until I bought the “legitimate” 1975 release of the Great White Wonder music as The Basement Tapes that I realized that most people were not enamored, as I was, with the songs that Dylan had recorded early on that never made it onto any of his albums. Obviously, what most people loved were the later electric songs that he recorded in 1967 with The Band, because that is what is on The Basement Tapes.
At any rate, long before The Basement Tapes came out, I decided I wanted to try to get all of the Bob Dylan bootleg albums, and I searched long and hard (though it was rare that I would find one in a major record store after that big treasure trove from long ago). On one of my early trips to the semi-annual Record Convention in Hillsborough, NC, I found rack after rack of bootleg albums right up front. I picked up a lot of them then and at future Conventions – something like 40 in all (and several were two-album sets). One day when I was going through them, I realized that I had purchased recordings of two live Dylan concerts that took place during the same month. I started getting a lot more particular then and basically quit buying anything that looked like a latter-day concert.
It was probably an impossible task anyway: There are over 500 of them according to one article that I read many years ago. As I mentioned above, most bootleg albums are concerts that were recorded clandestinely by a member of the audience. The quality of the recordings depended to some extent on where they were sitting and how noisy the people nearby were. The Grateful Dead famously started setting aside an area near the stage for bootleggers to place microphones so that the quality would be better. However, concert albums are almost certainly a minority of Dylan boots; the songs are mostly demos, practice sessions, alternate takes in the studio, etc. Some songs are live performances all right, but from the applause, many sound like they were played for an audience of a few dozen people. Also, Bob Dylan more than anyone else I can think of wrote and recorded dozens of songs that he never released on an album, and not just back in the 1960’s either; that is the gold in the Dylan boots. (If you are interested in learning more, the definitive source on Dylan bootleg albums is www.bobsboots.com).
The main reason I got the John Birch Society Blues album is due to the history of Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Early pressings of the album included “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” and three other wonderful songs that I got to know on bootleg albums as I bought them: “Gambling Willie’s Dead Man’s Hand”, “Rocks and Gravels”, and “Let Me Die in My Footsteps”. The fact that the latter song is omitted was even mentioned on the album’s liner notes. When the John Birch Society song became controversial, Columbia Records pulled back the albums and reissued them with the familiar song set that we know today. Those first few albums with the alternate songs are worth a fortune today: A 1998 record pricing catalogue that I have called Records values them at $10,000 to $15,000 in mono and $15,000 to $20,000 in stereo (though the catalogue recommends actually playing the album before ponying up that kind of cash).
Another amazing Dylan rarity is one of his first singles, “Mixed Up Confusion”; it is surely Dylan’s first electric song and was released in December 1962. It was only on the market for a few months before being pulled and becoming yet another song that never got on an album. If Columbia had stuck with it, the folk-rock movement could have been launched several years earlier.
One last Dylan story, and then I’ll move on: I was walking through a big record show (I think it was one in San Francisco that featured many non-record items also – one item that I remember is a wrapper for Beatles bumble gum that was all ripped up and priced at $20). I saw a copy of Highway 61 Revisited – the album that has “Like a Rolling Stone” on it – and I could not for the life of me tell any difference between that album and the one that I own. I then turned to the vendor and said, “Okay, I give up; why is this album worth $125?” It turns out that some copies of the album have an alternate take of “From a Buick 6”; the only way to tell is to look for a “-1” at the end of the number that is printed on the vinyl disc itself.
(April 2012)
