Album Pairings
Bob Dylan and Joan Baez at the 1963 March on Washington. Photo: US Information Agency National Archives and Records Administration.
The concept of "pairing," where one identifies flavors that go well together, commonly applies to food and drink. Music is just the same, working with whatever is going on in front of you, like Italians singing beautifully to each other from balconies during the COVID lockdown, Americans trying to do the same thing poorly after watching a viral clip online, or looking up the tune to "Sweet Little Sixteen" by Chuck Berry while writing "Surfin' USA." In Album Pairings, I note the charms of a great album, then recommend particular activities to pair such albums to. All album pairings have been tested first-hand by the author, but that does not necessarily promise the same level of joy for the reader. Also included are hypothetical bad pairings, because no album or song works in every context and, if paired poorly, can ruin both song(s) and event at hand. Such well-known examples include humming "Achy Breaky Heart" during a triple bypass surgery or playing "MacArthur Park" by Richard Harris anywhere, at any time, for any reason, ever.
BOB DYLAN - THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 12: THE CUTTING EDGE 1965-1966 (2015)
“It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up. That's my particular sound. I haven't been able to succeed in getting it all the time. Mostly, I've been driving at a combination of guitar, harmonica and organ, but now I find myself going into territory that has more percussion in it and [pause] rhythms of the soul.” - Bob Dylan, interviewed by Ron Rosenbaum in Playboy Magazine, 1978.
Bob Dylan's been getting bootlegged for half a century. In fact, the first ever prominent rock bootleg was a Dylan double album called The Great White Wonder in 1969. For a fan, owning unlicensed Dylan recordings is as much a rite of passage as debating a lyric (“just what DID he mean by ‘Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee/ They're throwing knives into the tree?’ I think it's about the lumber industry”) or ripping on his slapdash last-minute output ("Wiggle Wiggle"), then running to his defense as soon as a non-listener brings up a well-trod point ("You just don't get it; he's TRYING to sing like that," counters the fan.)
Dylan never cared if people owned contraband material, but his label Columbia Records sure did, which is why for over three decades they've released official The Bootleg Series box sets. While the first release (Bootleg Series 1-3) focused on cut gems from Dylan's entire career up to '91, every other album has quartered off a specific section of time- be it a concert, tour, or creative period- and packaged it as a story and persona. Here's Dylan's country phase where he's crooning softly with Johnny Cash. Here's Dylan's divorce album, all sighs and snarls in open E tuning. Here's Dylan's growling, old-man riverboat captain with a Vincent Price mustache phase, subtitles needed but not included.
Over eighteen discs (!), The Cutting Edge focuses on the most celebrated moment in Dylan's career. In a little over a year, Dylan recorded three albums considered by many to be his absolute best: Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. These releases altered the course of popular music and made Dylan a global icon. Our common conception of Dylan- the unmistakable nasal swooping voice, the wiry fro, the cool glasses and organ sounds- is rooted in this period. It is to Dylan's image as the Campbell's Soup exhibit is to Warhol or committing professional suicide is to Kanye West.
It also contains some of the greatest pop songwriting of the 20th century, up there with Gershwin, Porter, Wonder, King, Lennon and McCartney. In them sit an entire range of human emotions. With brave leaps of language influenced by the Bible, advertising, French surrealism, and the folk tradition, and with music indebted to the American umbrella of blues, rock & roll, folk, gospel and traditional pop, these three albums created an entire new branch of song. When we say a song is "Dylanesque," we mean its sound and lyrics owe their very existence to Robert Allen Zimmerman's catalog.
The Cutting Edge pulls the curtain back and reveals the process behind these albums. What we find is something unlike most other musicians of his or subsequent generations. In the 1960's, there was a growing interest in using the "studio as an instrument." A cliche now, but at the time it was a startling development in mainstream music. Titans like The Beatles and the Beach Boys were spending their studio time tweaking and fine-tuning sounds on tape, knowing full well none of this music could be performed live as a quartet, if at all. When you hear "God Only Knows" or "Tomorrow Never Knows" (weirdly compatible statements), there's an affected and fashioned grandeur, no part left to chance. Recorded music had moved from a play to a film, from approximating a live stage performance to the space-and-time-defying feats of film, and never really came back.
"I don't think I knew you could do an overdub until 1978,"
- Bob Dylan,1985.
Dylan has always viewed a song as a baseline text meant for transformation, even subversion. A song is never finished. He once wrote, "A song is like a dream, and you try to make it come true. They're like strange countries that you have to enter." It's not a coincidence that Dylan chose to cover Frank Sinatra for three entire consecutive albums in his 70's: their working style was the same. Left on their own, they never tried to develop a recorded piece through studio editing and effects, but to suss out its meaning through multiple, wildly different performances. I watched Dylan perform when he was 78 years old, and he was still subverting expectations with each song, turning folk-rock tune "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" into an atmospheric, arena-filling show-stopper. The first take of that classic sits on The Cutting Edge, and it's a bare acoustic. Dylan sounds like a man walking through the song's hallways, still impressed at its construction, slightly bewildered he himself is responsible for its designs.
For a casual listener, The Cutting Edge often pushes the limits of completion into exhaustion. Even for more serious fans it can occasionally seem like overkill. For instance, do you have it in yourself to listen to sixteen takes of "Like a Rolling Stone?" The one we all know is take three. There were thirteen more. It fills up an entire disc, and then there's four extra tracks, each an isolated sound channel from the penultimate version's master recording. First, guitar, second, vocals and guitar, third, piano and bass, and fourth, organ and drums. Does that interest and not scare you? If so, welcome aboard. If not, stay far, far away; this ship is headed for even more dangerous waters. The comedian Patton Oswalt once famously ranted about why the Star Wars prequels didn't work for him."I don't care where the stuff I love comes from!" he yelled, "I just love the stuff I love!" Some people like to dig deeper, obsess, parse through all the bones like a paleontologist. Others just want to see the whole T. Rex when it's glued together.
If you're of the former category, this is an invaluable record of the creative process. It shows us how the sausage gets made, and allows us to taste some pretty tasty scraps. There are four different takes of "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Lot to Cry," in different tempos, keys, moods (plaintive, aggressive, and goofy), lyrics, and even titles; originally this blues number was called "Phantom Engineer." The evolution of "Visions of Johanna" is startling. Considered by some to be Dylan's masterpiece, he struggled to find the proper tone from Autumn of '65 to Spring of '66. All the recordings are fantastic, but that "thin wild mercury sound" gets nearer and nearer with each new take.
The real conundrum is where you can listen to this music. Columbia Records recently put five discs on streaming services. However, the exhaustive eighteen disc version is nowhere to be found and they only made 5,000 physical copies, which includes nine 7" singles, a huge coffee table book, and a strip of film from a 16mm version of the 1967 documentary Don't Look Back. I found one used on eBay, weighing 15 pounds and selling for the price of $1,800 dollars. As this is a family paper, I would be remiss to truthfully give my recommendation of how to find this music while breaking neither your bank or the law, so I will instead offer this paradox: If it's officially sanctioned, is it really a bootleg? As Dylan himself sang, "to live outside the law, you must be honest." Yo ho ho, mateys.
PAIRS WELL WITH:
Active listening
Headphones
Education
Dylan scholarship and writing
Evading the FBI and Columbia Records
PAIRS POORLY WITH:
Non-Dylan fans.
Social events with non-Dylan fans
Saving time and money
Explaining to everyone why you dropped almost two grand on recorded music in 2021 during a pandemic
Article by Shane Kimberlin