8.31.2005
The song of a poet
The strangest thing about the new, official release of Bob Dylan's Gaslight Tapes isn't that they are being sold exclusively at Starbucks for the next couple of months, but that this collection only includes 10 of the 17 tracks that commonly make up the best bootleg versions of this material.
The Gaslight Tapes were recorded, according to the best guess of those who might know, at the Gaslight Cafe in October 1962 at two shows Dylan played there during the down time while working on his second album, The Freewheeling Bob Dylan. As such, they show how Dylan was developing both as a performer and as a songwriter between the time of his post-pubescent debut and its infinitely more assured followup. What the now-official version of Live at the Gaslight 1962 doesn't do is offer the complete picture of those performances. The 10 tracks on the official release omit Dylan's recordings of "No More Auction Block," "Black Cross," "Motherless Children," "Kindhearted Woman Blues," "See That My Grave is Kept Clean," "Ain't No More Cane" and his own "Ballad of Hollis Brown."
There seems to be no rhyme or reason for the selection. The earliest known takes of "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" and "Don't Think Twice" are obvious keepers, of course, but why omit the nearly-as-powerful "Hollis Brown?" And the official tracklist includes Dylan's interpretations of standards like "Moonshiner" and "Barbara Allen," so why skip his takes of tunes by Leadbelly, Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson? My bootleg version includes all 17 tracks, and does so with room to spare on one CD. A side-by-side comparison of "Hard Rain" and "Don't Think Twice" finds that while the Sony version might have slightly better noise reduction and a tiny bit of reverb might have been added to Dylan's vocal (though even that is hard to tell), there is little appreciable difference between the two, and certainly no flaws that would render the omitted tracks unsuitable for release.
Perhaps in the end it must be chalked up to the whims of the ever enigmatic Dylan, who has always chosen when and how to officially unearth treasures. From the first Bootleg entry (on which the version of "No More Auction Block" from these recordings already has seen official release) through to the concurrent release of the new Bootleg collection which serves as the soundtrack to the Martin Scorsese film No Direction Home, Bob puts out what Bob wants to when Bob wants to... inscrutable as always. Would we have him any other way?
The Gaslight Tapes were recorded, according to the best guess of those who might know, at the Gaslight Cafe in October 1962 at two shows Dylan played there during the down time while working on his second album, The Freewheeling Bob Dylan. As such, they show how Dylan was developing both as a performer and as a songwriter between the time of his post-pubescent debut and its infinitely more assured followup. What the now-official version of Live at the Gaslight 1962 doesn't do is offer the complete picture of those performances. The 10 tracks on the official release omit Dylan's recordings of "No More Auction Block," "Black Cross," "Motherless Children," "Kindhearted Woman Blues," "See That My Grave is Kept Clean," "Ain't No More Cane" and his own "Ballad of Hollis Brown."
There seems to be no rhyme or reason for the selection. The earliest known takes of "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" and "Don't Think Twice" are obvious keepers, of course, but why omit the nearly-as-powerful "Hollis Brown?" And the official tracklist includes Dylan's interpretations of standards like "Moonshiner" and "Barbara Allen," so why skip his takes of tunes by Leadbelly, Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson? My bootleg version includes all 17 tracks, and does so with room to spare on one CD. A side-by-side comparison of "Hard Rain" and "Don't Think Twice" finds that while the Sony version might have slightly better noise reduction and a tiny bit of reverb might have been added to Dylan's vocal (though even that is hard to tell), there is little appreciable difference between the two, and certainly no flaws that would render the omitted tracks unsuitable for release.
Perhaps in the end it must be chalked up to the whims of the ever enigmatic Dylan, who has always chosen when and how to officially unearth treasures. From the first Bootleg entry (on which the version of "No More Auction Block" from these recordings already has seen official release) through to the concurrent release of the new Bootleg collection which serves as the soundtrack to the Martin Scorsese film No Direction Home, Bob puts out what Bob wants to when Bob wants to... inscrutable as always. Would we have him any other way?
