Category Archives: Featured Articles

Here we will display longer, deeper, more thorough posts about different topics, but all related to Johanna’s Visions

Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan albums, Featured Articles, Great albums

Bob Dylan – The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert

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Well, but you see, Columbia’s never offered to do that. They have done that with The Basement Tapes and the Budokan album. But they’ve never offered to put that out as a historical album or whatever. And believe me, if they wanted to do it, they could.
~Bob Dylan to Kurt Loder in 1984

 “I still can’t believe they’ve finally put it out. I just keep staring at my copy.”
~Andy Kershaw (BBC Radio 1 DJ)

14 years ago today… they finally put it out, this surely calls for a celebration!

Baby, Let Me Follow You Down:

From Wikipedia:

Released October 13, 1998
Recorded May 17, 1966
Genre Rock, folk rock, blues rock
Length 95:18
Label Columbia
Producer Jeff Rosen

Live 1966: The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert is a two-disc live album by Bob Dylan, released in 1998. Recorded at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. It is from Dylan’s famous world tour in 1966, having been extensively bootlegged for decades, and is an important document in the development of popular music during the 1960s.

The setlist consisted of two parts, with the first half of the concert being Dylan alone on stage performing an entirely acoustic set of songs, while the second half of the concert has Dylan playing an “electric” set of songs alongside his band The Hawks. The first half of the concert was greeted warmly by the audience, while the second half was highly criticized, with heckling going on before and after each song.

Here are two (of many..) “real” bootleg covers of this concert:

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Continue reading Bob Dylan – The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert →

Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan recording sessions, Featured Articles

Blood On The Tracks – 4th Recording Session

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On the 3th recording session for Blood On The Tracks on September 18th, Dylan only tried 2 takes on Buckets of Rain. The 4th recording session (on  September 19, 1974) was a way more important story….

Here are some quotes, facts & music….

If any of Dylan’s record albums deserve to be singled out as a “masterpiece” (and I’ve avoided this because how can one leave out ‘Blonde On Blonde’? ‘Highway 61 Revisited’? ‘Hard Rain’?), it is the one that most successfully combines conscious, deliberate creation (composition) with spontaneous expression (performance) – 1974’s ‘Blood On The Tracks’
~Paul Williams (Performing Artist 74-86)

..Dylan.. succeeded in producing an album that stoked up his genius quotient nearly ten years after he was thought to have left it by the roadside. And he had done it by reinventing his whole approach to language. Gone were the surrealistic turns of phrase on Blonde On Blonde, gone was the ‘wild mercury sound’ surrounding those mystical words. In their place was a uniformity of mood, a coherence of sound, and an unmistakable maturity to the voice…. He had never sung better.
~Clinton Heylin (Behind The Shades)

 

Albums involved:

ALBUM Release date CODE
Blood On The Tracks 1975-01-17 BOTT
Biograph 1985-11-07 BIO
The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3
(Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991		 1991-03-26 TBS1-3
Blood On The Tracks – Test pressing  Nov 74  BOTT-TP
Jerry Maguire – Soundtrack 1996-12-10 JMS

Studio A, A & R Recording, New York City, New York
September 19, 1974, 7 pm-03am

Produced by Bob Dylan
Engineers: Phil Ramone & Glenn Berger (“Phil & Lenn”)

  1. Up To Me
  2. Up To Me
  3. Buckets Of Rain
  4. Buckets Of Rain
  5. Buckets Of Rain
  6. Buckets Of Rain – BOTT & BOTT-TP
    Life is sad
    Life is a bust
    All you can do is do what you must
  7. If You See Her, Say Hello – BOTT-TP
  8. Up To Me
  9. Up To Me
  10. Up To Me
  11. Meet Me In The Morning
  12. Meet Me In The Morning
  13. Buckets Of Rain
  14. Tangled Up In Blue
  15. Tangled Up In Blue
  16. Tangled Up In Blue – BOTT-TP (or 15)
  17. Simple Twist Of Fate
  18. Simple Twist Of Fate
  19. Simple Twist Of Fate – BOTT & BOTT-TP
    ‘Simple Twist of Fate’ is another absolutely extraordinary performance. Where ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ is bright, bouncy, jangly, ‘Simple Twist Of Fate’ is soft and warm and mournful. Dylan’s voice is.. gentle and rounded.
    ~Paul Williams (Performing Artist 74-86)
  20. Up To Me
  21. Up To Me – BIO
    In its own way ‘Up To Me’ is as masterful an achievement as ‘Tangled Up In Blue’, using much the same technique to create a well-crafted juxtaposition of ‘what I know to be the truth’ and what ‘I’m projecting’.
    ~Clinton Heylin (Still On The Road)
  22. Idiot Wind
  23. Idiot Wind
  24. Idiot Wind
  25. Idiot Wind – TBS1-3
  26. You’re A Big Girl Now
  27. Meet Me In The Morning
  28. Meet Me In The Morning
  29. Meet Me In The Morning
  30. Meet Me In The Morning
  31. Meet Me In The Morning
  32. Meet Me In The Morning
  33. Tangled Up In Blue
  34. Tangled Up In Blue
  35. Tangled Up In Blue

“[The real] wonder is in the spaces, in what the artist’s left out of his painting. To me, that has always been the key to Dylan’s art. To state things plainly is the function of journalism; but Dylan sings a more fugitive song: allusive, symbolic, full of imagery and ellipses, and by leaving things out, he allows us the grand privilege of creating along with him. His song becomes our song because we live in those spaces. If we listen, if we work at it, we fill up the mystery, we expand and inhabit the work of art. It is the most democratic form of creation”
~Peter Hamill (liner notes to BOTT)

 

Musicians: 

  • Bob Dylan (guitar, vocal)
  • Tony Brown (bass)

Related articles @ JV:

References:

-Egil

Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan recording sessions, Featured Articles

Blood On The Tracks – Second Recording Session

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Bob Dylan’s second recording session for Blood On The Tracks continued on  September 17, 1974. Another important day in the studio.

Here are some quotes, facts & music….

We cut the entire album in one day like that. Now that blew my mind. I was 19-years-old and trying to learn how to make art. The style of the time was set by guys I was working with like Paul Simon, who would take weeks recording a guitar part only to throw it away. I thought that was the way one was supposed to do it: one note at a time and a year to make an album. Dylan cut the whole thing in six hours on a Monday night. I was confused. It was like the floor, barely built under my young soul, was being ripped apart, board by board.
Then Dylan came back in on Tuesday, and recorded most of the album again.
~Glenn Berger (Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks: The Untold Story)

Albums involved:

ALBUM Release date CODE
Blood On The Tracks 1975-01-17 BOTT
Biograph 1985-11-07 BIO
Blood On The Tracks – Test pressing  Nov 74  BOTT-TP
Jerry Maguire – Soundtrack 1996-12-10 JMS

 

Studio A, A & R Recording, New York City, New York
September 17, 1974, 7 pm-01am

Produced by Bob Dylan
Engineers: Phil Ramone & Glenn Berger (“Phil & Lenn”)

  1. You’re A Big Girl Now
  2. You’re A Big Girl Now – BIO & BOTT-TP
    You’re A Big Girl Now was pain personified, that pain remaining red raw when he cut the exquisite New York version originally intended for the album (only released ten years later, on Biograph).
    ~Clinton Heylin (from “Still On The Road”)
    –
    Dylan complains in the Biograph notes about “stupid and misleading jerks” (i.e. critics) who have suggested this song is “about my wife”.
    ~Paul Williams (Performing Artist 1974-86) 
  3. Tangled Up In Blue
  4. Unidentified Song
  5. Blues
  6. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
  7. Shelter From The Storm – JMS
    This first run-through on the seventeenth has no bass accompaniment, possibly because he was showing Brown the song.  Taking a pause to work on other songs, he only returned to ‘Shelter’ later the same evening, wisely deciding the sixth verse added very little to the song.
    ~Clinton Heylin (from “Still On The Road”)
  8. Shelter From The Storm
  9. Buckets Of Rain
  10. Tangled Up In Blue
  11. Buckets Of Rain
  12. Shelter From The Storm
  13. Shelter From The Storm
  14. Shelter From The Storm – BOTT & BOTT-TP
    That word-perfect fifth take survived all the reconfigurations the album underwent, emerging as on of it’s real highlights. And though Dylan went on to perform it a number of different ways – almost always effectively – the nature of the song remained fixed. ~Clinton Heylin (from “Still On The Road”)
  15. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
  16. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go – BOTT & BOTT-TP

Musicians: 

  • Bob Dylan (guitar, vocal)
  • Tony Brown (bass)
  • Paul Griffin (organ)

Related posts on JV:

References:

-Egil

Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan recording sessions, Featured Articles

Blood On The Tracks – First recording session

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Bob Dylan started recording Blood On The Tracks September 16, 1974.
The event needs to be acknowledged.

Here are some quotes, facts & music….

When Dylan began work at A&R one Monday afternoon in September he seemed unusually keen to get on with the recording process. The songs themselves were no more than 2 months old, and he was still excited by the new approach to language he had uncovere.
Even behind closed studio doors he was determined to get the songs out of his system as quickly, and with as much impact, as possible
~Clinton Heylin (The Recording Sessions)

From Wikipedia:

Dylan arrived at Columbia Records’ A&R Recording Studios in New York City on September 16, 1974, where it was soon realized that he was taking a “spontaneous” approach to recording. The session engineer at the time, Phil Ramone, later said that he would “go from one song to another like a medley. Sometimes he will have several bars, and in the next version, he will change his mind about how many bars there should be in between a verse. Or eliminate a verse. Or add a chorus when you don’t expect”. Eric Weissberg and his band, Deliverance, originally recruited as session men, were rejected after two days of recording because they could not keep up with Dylan’s pace. Dylan retained bassist Tony Brown from the band, and soon added organist Paul Griffin (who had also worked on Highway 61 Revisited) and steel guitarist Buddy Cage. After ten days and four sessions with the current lineup, Dylan had finished recording and mixing, and, by November, had cut a test pressing on the album. Columbia soon began to prepare for the album’s imminent release, but, three months later, just before the scheduled launch, Dylan re-recorded several songs at the last minute, in Minneapolis’ Sound 80 Studios, utilizing local musicians organized by his brother, David Zimmerman. Even with this setback, Columbia managed to release Blood on the Tracks by January 17, 1975.

Albums involved:

ALBUM Release date CODE
Blood On The Tracks 1975-01-17 BOTT
The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3
(Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991		 1991-03-26 TBS1-3
Blood On The Tracks – Test pressing  Nov 74  BOTT-TP

 

Studio A, A & R Recording, New York City, New York
September 16, 1974, 6 pm-midnight.

Produced by Bob Dylan
Engineers: Phil Ramone & Glenn Berger (“Phil & Lenn”)

  1. If You See Her, Say Hello
  2. If You See Her, Say Hello – TBS1-3
    —
    I once read a book of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s letters to some girl, and they were extremely private and personal, and I didn’t feel there was any of myself in those letters, but I could identify with what he was saying. A lot of myself crosses over into my songs. I’ll write something and say to myself, I can change this, I can make this not so personal, and at other times I’ll say, I think I’ll leave this on a personal level, and if somebody wants to peek at it and make up their own minds about what kind of character I am, that’s up to them. Other times I might say, well, it’s too personal, I think I’ll turn the corner on it, because why do I want somebody thinking about what I’m thinking about, especially if it’s not to their benefit.
    ~Bob Dylan to Scott Choen (SPIN), 1985
  3. You’re A Big Girl Now
  4. You’re A Big Girl Now
  5. Simple Twist Of Fate
  6. Simple Twist Of Fate
  7. You’re A Big Girl Now
  8. Up To Me
  9. Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts – BOTT-TP
    —
    The one challenge left now was to see if he could record this epic fifteen-verse narrative with a similar minimum of fuss. Which it appears he did. And again it came first. On day one of the sessions at the old Studio A in New York (now known as A&R Studios) – before the band called up to lend a hand had even arrived – Dylan had cut the song in a single take, making it the first song to be assigned to the album. Nor did he feel throughout the New York sessions the slightest need to return to the song.
    ~Clinton Heylin (Still On The Road)
  10. Simple Twist Of Fate
  11. Simple Twist Of Fate
  12. Simple Twist Of Fate
  13. Call Letter Blues
  14. Meet Me In The Morning – BOTT & BOTT-TP
  15. Call Letter Blues – TBS1-3
    The one song cut on the sixteenth with the sound of deliverance was one of those prototypical blues tunes Dylan had been playing at the afternoon session. “Call Letter Blues” , when released on “The Bootleg Series”, took most fans by surprise.  Rather than being a previously unknown song in it’s own right, it was in fact “Meet Me In The Morning” with an alternate set of lyrics.
    ~Clinton Heylin (The Recording Sessions) 
  16. Idiot Wind
  17. Idiot Wind
  18. Idiot Wind
  19. Idiot Wind
  20. Idiot Wind
  21. Idiot Wind – BOOT-TP (overdubbed version)
    If you’ve heard both versions [of ‘Idiot Wind’], you realize, of course, that there could be a myriad of verses for the thing. It doesn’t stop… Where do you end?… It’s something that could be a work continually in progress.
    ~Bob Dylan to Paul Zollo, 1991
  22. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
  23. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
  24. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
  25. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
  26. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
  27. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
  28. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
  29. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
  30. Tangled Up In Blue – TBS1-3
    This version suggest he quickly abandoned any idea of putting a band behind the song/s. A second guitar (Weissberg’s?) picks out the parts of the melody Dylan’s scratchy rhythm has left unsaid, while Tony Brown’s bass underpins the clack-clack of the singer’s jacket-buttons. But something ain’t right. Weissberg recalled how ‘Bob  … seemed a bit ill at ease in the studio, as though he wanted to get it over with.’ Having hurried through the song, he knew he’d have to return to it.
    ~Clinton Heylin (Still On The Road) 

Musicians:

  • Bob Dylan (guitar, vocal)
  • Charles Brown III (guitar)
  • Barry Kornfeld (guitar)
  • Eric Weissberg (guitar)
  • Thomas McFaul (keyboards)
  • Tony Brown (bass)
  • Richard Crooks (drums).

Related posts on JV:

References:

-Egil

Bob Dylan, Bob Dylans's best songs, Featured Articles, The Best Songs

Bob Dylan’s best songs – If You See Her, Say Hello – #56

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So, I kick off my journey through “Bob Dylan top 200 songs” (my list of Bob Dylans 200 greatest songs) with number 56.
Why not start at number 1… or number 200 ? No particular reason, “I just happen to feel this way”.
I will publish posts in this category on and off, with no spesific frequency.

If You See Her, Say Hello – #56

New York Version 1

Outtake from original studio sessions for Blood On The Tracks
Alt version1: A&R Studios,  19  September 1974, Columbia A&R Studios, NYC
Musicians: Bob Dylan: Guitar, Vocals, Charles Brown III: Guitar, Eric Weissberg: Guitar, Barry Kornfield: Guitar
Not released – New York Sessions bootleg
–
This version is similar to Bootleg Series vol 1-3 version, but different take – softer and shorter without the harmonica solo before the last verse.

Short history – “The making of “Blood On The Tracks”:

The original “New York Sessions” for Blood On The Tracks took place from 16-25 of September 1974 in NYC. A test pressing of the album was made, but Dylan was not comfortable. He took the album “home” to Minnesota and played it for his brother – David Zimmerman. David told Bobby that the album was not “radio friendly”, and they put together a band with local musicians  at Sound 80 Studio in Minneapolis on 27 & 30 December. These two sessions ended up replacing half of the albums original New York takes… And one of the unlucky ones was “If You See Here, Say Hello”.. The released Blood On The Tracks version was recorded on December 30.

Why Do I Like the original “New York” version better ?

Continue reading Bob Dylan’s best songs – If You See Her, Say Hello – #56 →