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66 of 70 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The cornerstone of my Dylan collection, 14 April 2003
This box set of The Bootleg Series volumes 1-3 is the cornerstone, heart, and soul of my personal Bob Dylan collection. The 58 tracks on these CDs were, are, and always will be a Dylan fan’s dream come true; prior to 1991, fans were forced to go deep underground in wild efforts to come up with bootlegged copies of this type of never-released Dylan material (and there is a lot of it). The tracks in this box set cover Dylan’s first thirty years as a performer, stretching from 1961 to 1991. The variety of material here is incredibly diverse in style as well as format. Among these rare and previously unreleased songs can be found folk music, satirical protest songs, rock & roll as Dylan defined it, blues, a tinge of country, and more; there are demos, early live coffeehouse performances, concert performances, home recordings, rehearsal tapes, outtakes, and alternate takes, and concert performances. Some of the songs are incomplete: Suze (The Cough Song) ends after Dylan starts coughing, another song ends when Dylan stops and says his voice is gone, and a few seem to end in midstream for no obviously discernible reason. In one track, you hear a dog barking in the background intermittently. One is not a song at all; Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie is a poem Dylan wrote in honor of Guthrie, giving us seven minutes of spoken words from this normally reticent musical legend.Among the most amazing things about these recordings is the knowledge that Dylan rejected many of these songs for his albums. These are songs the vast majority of singers can only hope to match once in their lives, yet Dylan often held songs back because he didn’t feel they were quite right or performed the way they needed to be performed. The list of such outtakes is too long to list here, but several of them are, to me, some of the best songs Dylan ever wrote and recorded: Farewell, Angelina; She’s Your Lover Now; Nobody ‘Cept You; You Changed My Life; Need a Woman; Foot of Pride; Blind Willie McTell; and Series of Dreams (which did find its way on to the Greatest Hits Volume 3 collection). Without a doubt, though, the most amazing and most mysterious song of Dylan’s career is Angelina, a breathtaking work of art unlike anything else Dylan has written or performed. Some of the alternate takes here are fascinating as they differ significantly from the released versions, especially If Not For You and When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky. I could write a paragraph about every one of these 58 tracks, but luckily John Bauldie has already taken care of this for me in the booklet that accompanies the CDs. This booklet features not only a number of fascinating pictures and a list of the musicians playing on each song; it includes a fairly definitive description of the history of every single track. The back of the box is itself a treasure trove of information, listing the recording date of each track and identifying its source (and, if it is an outtake, it lists the album it was cut from). As great a songwriter and musician as Bob Dylan is, this collection gives you insight into the man that cannot be found in his studio recordings and concert performances. Bob Dylan has dropped and forgotten more amazing songs than most performers will ever even look at. I really can’t say enough about this collection and how truly amazing it is. I’ve owned this box set for twelve years now, and the music is just as fascinating and awe-inspiring today as it was back in 1991. These are recordings no Dylan fan can do without.
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~ Bob Dylan
~ Bob Dylan
~ Bob Dylan
See all 58 tracks on this disc
