I had just listened to several songs from Tempest, Bob Dylan’s newest album (review to come), when I clicked the ‘shuffle’ button to choose my next Random Weekend selection.
And there was Bob again, 36 years earlier, performing a song that didn’t make it onto any of his 35 studio albums.
According to the Bootleg Series liner notes, Dylan performed ‘Seven Days’ only five times, during his celebrated Rolling Thunder tour. One of those is captured here in stirring fashion.
Volume 7 of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series is the companion soundtrack to Martin Scorsese’s excellent Dylan documentary No Direction Home.
The album, like the film, traces Dylan’s development as an artist from his earliest days through his electric phase, culminating with the famous “Royal Albert Hall” concert where an angry fan yelled out “Judas!”
Today’s Random Weekends selection is a track from Volume 3 of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series.
Before the Dylan-philes jump down my throat about the incorrect lyrics I’ve included below, understand that I have just included the “official” lyrics to this song posted on Dylan’s own website. He obviously changed them quite a bit when recording the track, but I like to offer both in order to explore the contrast.
Before he went electric; before the motorcycle accident; before “Judas!,” The Band and The Dead; before he found Jesus, Mark Knopfler and Alicia Keys… Bob Dylan put out his first album of original material.
The 22-year-old had released his self-titled debut a year earlier, but that album featured only two originals among a slew of folk and blues covers. 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was its mirror image — two covers and eleven originals by a new voice that would revolutionize folk music.
A couple of days ago I was expressing my shock that Bringing it all Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Help! and Rubber Soul were all released in 1965.
Well, in 1966, add Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and The Beatles’ Revolver to the mix (not to mention Simon & Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.
I grew up in the wrong decade, man!
Meet Me In Montauk 