Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

I was wondering if there are bootlegs in circulation of the New York sessions for Blood on the Tracks?

try some of these:

http://blogs.shareminer.com/?query=bob+dylan+blood+tracks&siteid%5B%5D=1&siteid%5B%5D=2&siteid%5B%5D=3&siteid%5B%5D=6

www.mp33pm.co.uk/2007/05/blood-on-tracks-bob-dylan-two-versions.html

I can't vouch for this, JB, but it came out of a Google search "blood on the tracks bootlegs" and mentioned the NY sessions.

That's it Mark, thanks a ton!!!

I've always been baffled by the praise for this record. I mean, it's okay. But nowhere near Dylan in his prime (Blonde on Blonde, etc.) Totally overrated IMO.

This beats Blonde on Blonde for me, by far. It would be tough for me to choose between this and Highway 61 Revisited, though.

Bob is from my home town.

Oh BOTT is soooooo good!
I do have some outtakes from it. PM me John & we'll talk.

Post motorcycle crash Dylan, save his work with the Band, pales in comparison to his earlier work.

Blood was rah-rahed by Rolling Stone writers and such in the mid 70s, who simply could not accept that Dylan was no longer DYLAN. But R.S. had already gone from being a hip underground 'zine to an establishment rag by the time Blood came out, well on its way to being as irrelevant as it is now.

Well I didn't read RS in 1974, mostly because it preceded by birth by over ten years. It is the simply the best breakup album i've ever heard, so utterly confessional, even if he denies it. With some of those lines, he just absolutely nails it.

I do like listening to Highway 61 and trying to decipher everything he's saying. But this album is just the "corkscrew to my heart" without all the guesswork.

No problemo, John. We already respectfully disagree. I love Highway 61, but IMO Blonde on Blonde is his high water mark (and whoa, are there some great songs on it about the pain that can follow in love's wake.)

And like a few writers, I think the Band did some work that was every bit as good as Bob's best, if not even better. George Harrison might have agreed. He loved Bob, but was a maniac for the Band, too.

I mean this respectfully too, Glenn, but maybe we're placing too much emphasis on "best". I think people like Dylan don't write songs with the goal of winning their best critical rating yet, they just write songs. An excellent album like BOTT gets shortchanged when all we can do is compare it to entirely different works and timeframes, and if it comes up short based on that frame of reference, we're forced to conclude, "Nope, not good enough, dismissed." I think Dylan was/is still Dylan, just not 22 years old anymore. The BOTT period is one of my favorites...although the earlier period was killer, it would have been a masquerade for him to recycle cryptic, sarcastic, nonsense lyrics in a more mature phase of his life when that politically-charged wordplay no longer resonated for him. What he did come up with is unlike anyone else's music, and maybe even richer than his 60's period in that it is more transparent--the poetry is less mind-blowing and more personal. I'm also a big fan of the "Desire" album. I dunno, it just seems like some artists are held hostage by what they were inspired to produce when they were kids...but everyone evolves, and you just can't write "I Am The Walrus" over and over again.

I hear your, Mark, though I don't think it had to do with what resonated for him. Everything in his life changed when he fell off of that bike. He was nearly killed. And up until that moment, he was truly living on an amphetimine-fueled edge that could have killed him, and probably would have if something else big hadn't happened first.

What it (that previous life) did do, though, was help him produce what came first. He may have been able to operate on that level again (and not necessarily write the same kinds of songs, just work with the same intensity), but not without risking his life again. And, well, he had kids, hadn't been touring for years, etc., etc.

Like I said, I'm not the first to say it, but I think Music From Big Pink, The Band, and to a very slightly lesser extent Stage Freight are as majestic as any LPs released by anyone, and Bob certainly was at his best live with the group that made them.

Nothing he did in the 70s touches them, BOTT or otherwise.

I'm in a Dylan nutty town. There are people here who'd swear even his worst albums are genius. You know the type, every once great act has them, people who can seemingly will a higher quality into any of their hero's releases, at least for themselves, because, well, they're nutty.

I'm with you all the way on The Band. Same with your last paragraph...case in point, I haven't heard it yet, but I truly doubt there is going to be anything from McCartney's newest release that I am going to be thrilled about, despite a lot of "the old college try" raves from the faithful.

But some of that 60's intensity of Dylan's was really just quick, off-the-cuff songwriting. But it was timely, and it moved mountains, changed the social-political landscape. Nothing after the accident did that, for sure. But I still think some of his best songwriting really did happen in the 70's.

Even so, I don't expect to hear another "Please Crawl Out Your Window" from anyone anymore. And that's a bummer.

Hell, I like Planet Waves a lot (Ahhhh The Band years). Dylan is a very interpretive & personal thing. Can't really say which is best. It's like "Which Rickenbacker do you like more?"