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...this is a top groove that all zimm heads and general layabouts need to dig as this is where bob is laying down his alter ego for all to hear...taken from the cynthia gooding radio show broadcast in early '62 bob does some traditional folk tunes and a couple of originals with a fair gusto, obviously enjoying himself, being the centre of attention for a whole hour going out to all in NYC and surroundin burgs...in between the songs cynthia asks some questions about bobs supposed years working on the carnival circuit and his friendship with john lee hooker, bob in turn is evasive and answers with distortion and via changing the subject moves on whilst leaving a hazy memory of some other life lingering in the radio-waves...already at the age of twenty at the begining of his tenure as beat poet/spokesman for a generation/folk saviour he's saying 'i'm not here', what is known is imagined, the real is the imagination of the public who builds the persona after bob has dropped some ambiguous hints, weaving myths that intertwine with dreamworld time, as bobs grip on physical temporal dimensions is not strong (non existant)...a vital document thats a must own for all cool cats...
...spring 1963 and bob drops in on the studs terkel show to chat and play a few songs...dylan tells studs there's a new generation out there that ain't going to take the government line and consume useless goods just to keep the empire going, that theres got to be a better way of living with freedom for all not just the power elite and their lackies...this is a marvellous time capsule of pre-hippy days when the civil rights concerns were paramount and the vietnam dollar building/wasting excercise hadn't got into full effect...bobs calmed down on the myth building which by now was fairly well entrenched and would spread through the coming underground scene of its own accord...a cool hour well worth some ear-time...
...from january '65 to january '66 sees the zimm putting the wild mercury sound down on tape and though not in chronological order it flows mighty fine, a solid listen to some of the alternate takes and first try outs of some of the greatest poetic rock'n'roll to bubble to the surface, every track a winner, not one binner...decent sound quality enhances the groove no end and cats who dig the mind frying electric bob are going to freak at this hours worth of chemical indulgence...dig the crazy stoned vibe as the future is written in the wind and forged on amphetamine tablets...
...all the tunes here have been dotted about on other releases over the years but to grab them all in one double set is a top-class thing to have and the sound is v.good which makes this get another plus (desolation row has some noise in a couple of spots but it's a way cool version so it don't matter too much, the riffing is a bit on the trancy velvets side, another plus)...this compliments the mercury music disk with a great look at the methed out year of 65, BIABH/61 revisited/blonde/dont look back/les crane show, all top quality amped up madness, with the zimm sounding like he's sometimes right in the room, blasting the visionary poetics as fast as the brain waves can spill it out, it's all on fire, blazing into the chemical night...it's a solid gone chrome-metal wall of beatnik urban voodoo, it's 3.A.M back alley barbed wire blues, it's the screaming scrunch of cats on the rampage, heading into uncharted territory where the known becomes lost in the haze of electricity pouring in from the generator of chance and change...cats are urged to rewire the circuits and score a ticket on the flipsville express, one way only as there ain't no return from this wigged out session, rip up the papers and learn another language...
...by mid '65 bob was reaching the first chemical peak that enabled the fruition of the amped electric word explosion that was pouring forth at a heavy rate...this boot is made up from acetates of mixes that only just failed to get the thumbs up for release, a little more chemicals, splicing and tweaking would be required for public consumption of these wild mercury sounds...at 70 minutes it's a cool carnival mirror of one of the all time great wax and the main thrust has got to be the inclusion of an early version of desolation row...sound quality is somewhat rough in places with squeaks and scrapes popping up occasionally but nothing to get hung up about...complete with photo session outtake for the cover this is real happening gone gear...
...half way through bobs momentus electric amphtamine turn on he was travelling outer-spaceways at a speed not calculable on a slide rule of chillicity...wires were stretched and tightened and still nothing snapped and the sounds got heavier...folk music was left to fend for itself as a new untried way of communicating was busy being born...the tunes on this boot are the results of nights spent rushing at altitudes higher than previously known, endurances tested and inky parchment scattered around the NYC studio before the trip to nashville and tomorrow...
...cats in the know with an ear to the ground and certainly a finger on the pulse will want to know the EBBETTS MONO blonde on blonde is worth the bother as at the very least it's part of the essential whole pop-into-rock movement that was bubbling and perculating all over back in '65/'66 with cats on a certain wavelength grooving making pop an artform for the NOW generation (beatles/who/byrds/brian wilson)...the last release of the zimms amphetamine freak trio of joints that came out over the pivitol years of pop becoming its own master, no longer the puppet (some will dispute this with the certainties that most are still deluded and lead by capitalist oppressor, that all pop is no more than mere entertainment, always was always will be), art to be created to put a message in the air, that corruption is rife in the landscape, the older ones wish to enslave the youth to make their empty lives bearable...put this on the deck and turn the volume onto stun and dig the drugged out blues swamp the room, engulf the senses and fill up the void with visions of the gone world, indeed an updated 'coney island of the mind' with the arabian drums beating out a new rythym for tomorrow, for the struggle to control of untold destinies...a wall of sound from beyond the known, deep in the unconcious zapped mind, from the strange world behind the warehouse eyes...
...this manchester gig was for so long misrepresented as the albert hall 26/05 gig has been put out by officialdom and that surely was a welcome day but there's plenty to recommend with this double boot, not least being it didn't generate more revenue for the capitalist state in the form of tax to be wasted by the least qualified to do such things...the presence on this version is seemingly more upfront, the listener is closer to the amped up bard of the rock generation, the zimm is getting mighty close and tangible on these disks...the tension on the second disk is felt more than on the official release, no doubt some conscious tampering by bean counter lackys comes into play as is often the way these days when homogeneity is rife, blandness is the panacea for what ails the world...this must be seen as the real version, the 'counter culture' of the 60s is taking form right here on this night and is dispensed once more on this disk, a gateway to another time, when discovery was the watchword, and a lot of squares discovered they didn't like this noisy zimm, this out of control psychedelic avenger who was inventing the future in the NOW...desolation row was a real place/feeling in manchester for more than one night, the decaying city was passed its prime, and the weirdness was in the air as despondency breeds madness in many forms...quite fitting that the RAH gig was not this performance as the out-to-lunchness here comes not from a swinging capitol city but a forgotten city, where real culture lives or dies, not dictated by whim of fashion or whatever the system has for its latest sale...
...this boot marks the end of bobs world tour in the spring of '66, recorded at the royal albert hall in london 26/7th may and sees bob and the band exhausted after months of chemical indulgence, minds being rewired to the limit, the nervous system taken to extremes with amphetamines and visions that had been unseen for centuries appear when in the midst of communal hotel room acid trips...by this time the first half of the year was but a blur, a hazy memory of towns and cities scattered along the lost and never ending hi-ways of the imagination...this tour had turned into some kind of shamanic exercise, each day bringing new plateaus of weirdness, each higher than the last, until it was too hard to know where the beginning ended and the end began, the ripples of madness were ever widening, engulfing everything in sight, the tour became more wobbly, the floors on which existance stood were disappearing from under their feet, the fabric of reality, torn into many hundreds of pieces would never again be the same, the jigsaw of life would never fit together easily anymore, the shapes had been remodeled and the picture was now so very different...travelling high above the radar, journeying ever onwards through the dark midnight, going spaceways to the centre of the mind, the zimm finally touched down in london towne for two sold out gigs, tickets going to every beatnik with the bread, to every would be college poet and a few with enough sense to sneak tape recorders in...both these disks come originally from vinyl sources and as such have the attendant scratch and pops, but the grail in the grooves far outweighs any surface noise concerns...the sound is surpisingly full (couple of dropouts notwithstandin) and dylan comes right out into the room, reaching out across the decades to touch the listener once more with the ghosts of electricty...
...when bob plus his bike and the road went their different ways back in summer '66 it effectively ended bobs wild mercury sound and out there pharmaceutical dabblings to make way for more reflective and downbeat times...tired of being heralded as spokesman for the disaffected NOW generation he went into a small town vibe and let the rock'n'roll madness that was getting wilder every day passby...to pass the time by summer '67 bob was playing some old tunes and writing new songs with the band in the house now known as 'big pink'...these new songs marked a total change in sound with a rootsy lost generation/depression era folk music (non commercial) jamming groove going on, just digging whatever came up and letting the tape capture the moment...some of these songs got sent to old london towne by bobs manager, in the hopes someone would want to record them if bob didn't...at first they were just known as 'the songs on the tape' and as more and more scenesters and underground layabouts heard them they made a copy and in the end they became the (mythical) 'basement tapes'...this set is a mighty fine sounding (true original but cleaned, not tweaked like a lot of reissues both mersh and boot) 4disk blowout that any bobcats and heads will need to get cosy with because in a way this is the end of the 60s as a hyper acid drenched hippy incantation and a return to a more beatnik vibe with the world seen as a place that needs changing but from outside normal channels, it needs to be changed without the realisation that its been changed, lysergic confrontation needed to be seen as the government experiment to subvert thought that had been taking place in the preceeding couple of years...these tapes changed the way and sound of prime movers the fab4 and the stones as evidenced by those combos waxings from '68 onward (white album/beggars/letitbe/bleed) and in wider terms got country rock/laurel canyon poets/pubrock (brinsley schwarz) off and running...the aftermath of these tapes still resounds in this day and age (though in much distorted unconscious way)with 'authentic' roots/world music/americana all vying for a slice of wedge but these are just apparitions fed on, by and for consumption, any life in these was squeezed out many a long year since, so it all sounds the same, a kind of one size fits all digital squeal...the tapes are a well cool lobeful and a good way to start off the day or by reverse a good groove for when the downpresser man is seeming to loom large, as can be the way of the world these days with the nonstop babble of media duplicity trying to wear free thinking cats out of existance...transports heads to a slower world more inkeeping with true vibrations of the spirit...a cornerstone of beat activity along with harry smiths anthology/'on the road'/clellon holmes 'go'/kuchar bros. flicks...on no account should this release be confused with the wax from columbia of the same name (that was indeed nothing more than some record co. slight of hand trickery)...
...the 14 tunes on this wax (the original basement tapes) got every cat who heard it flipping their collective lid, plenty who hadn't been hep enough to grab an earful of the tape soon thought they had when cover versions popped into the hit parade(manfred manns mighty quinn)...the stories that go with them constitute a whole cornerstone on which rock is built, through expansion and mutation of myth...theres some thought this represents the last LP that was owed to the company(columbia)before dylan moved over to a more lucrative deal at MGM and it had been sent to london for the fabs to hear (if the zimm had actually wanted the commercial release this funky rock would headed off in some crazy tangents with every combo getting more messy and lo-fi by the minute)...the fabs did hear the acetates and they were solid behind this new way of doing things, GETTING BACK to the genuine vibe, feeling the spirit...mick and marianne took some tape copies on holiday and grooved for a fortnight, totally sent into another world by the ethereal yet funky jams coming non stop from the speakers...the tin-pan-alley guys heard the sound of cash registers when it was realised there was great songs here (surreal maybe but that didn't matter) that could easily be worked into poptunes for consumption...in los angeles van dyke parks/brian wilson/turtles/byrds/springfield all got cosy with these tapes that were soon in circulation amongst the pop-elite in the centres of hep and cool, they all dug the vibe and were soon working the ethereal funk into various existing ideas and calming down after the earlier years of excess...these acetates would provide a frame of reference for dylan to use and explore for the next few years, up until the '74 tour with the band where he got a rock'n'roll groove rush on with some blazing gigs and some fiery versions of amphetamine era tuneage...
...very nice distillation of basement jams that didn't feature the zimm who was out playing checkers at the general store quite often when the mood took him, because the old boys frequenting the place didn't know he was a counter cultural ambassador, they had no inkling he was the spokeman for disenchanted youth, the latest casuality of the amphetamine wail come to lay low in dullsville...the grooves here are loose and funky, relaxed in a reefer haze, kicking the gong around...these joints kind get lost buried in the basement tape extravaganza, but extracted they constitute a solid rock'n'roll gospel vibration from some other place as yet uncharted, a place consisting of the past remolded into tributaries of lazy motion, trickling into the ether to be caught in the imagination of any passing vagabond, any beatnik layabout looking for a new way of viewing the world around them...if this had been released instead/before 'big pink' there would been plenty cats scratching the noggin trying figure out which way was up, this is psychedelic but not in any accepted mind tripping way, this is a transportation device for inner vibrating into another plateau of existance...
...when bobs GWW dropped in berkeley, calif.back in '69 no one really knew what had been set in motion, a parallel record industry was born almost overnight...originally appearing in a blank gatefold sleeve, two disks with white labels, no writing, it immediately sold out, every hep cat on the scene knew this had to be something to do with dylan, no one else had ever said 'i'm not here' more vociferously than dylan over the past decade, yet all the time making sure those that needed to know knew he certainly was here, this double biscuit had just got to be by dylan even though not through regular record co.retail, this was dylan being liberated from himself by hipster chancers from los angeles (the place for entertainment bread hustle)...it's not impossible that the zimm instigated the whole bootleg phenomena in rock (common in jazz/blues for collectors are the pirate copies/homages) himself when he allowed the 'big pink' song demos out into the unguarded market back in late '67, as he does like the idea of a parallel line of recordings when there's more than one 'bob', in fact now there are multiple bobs reflected back by his audiences idea of who he is...the disk that came to be known as the 'great white wonder' was made up of tunes from the then unheard tapes made at bonnie beechers pad back in '61 and the basement tapes supplied a few with still more from 'another side'/'times'/'highway'/j.cash tv show/broadside office int.w/pete seeger, every track solid gold nuggets of bobness, this was the single most desireable object in rock'n'roll in late '69, every layabout, hooligan, cat on the block wanted a copy and wanted it bad, it became a jones to acquire this wax and that jones was soon satisfied (up to a point) with copies/variations all appearing within weeks and months (there's got to be over 50 variations of this, many more due to the easy technology at every layabouts pad nowadays)...what we got here is a straight dub from one of the original los angeles pressing and as such is mighty fine in the hi-fi directions for the time, in fact this must set the benchmark for rock'n'roll boots, just the right amount of hazy scuzz giving it that illicit desirability...in all probability the track choice was limited to what the cats in LA had to hand, but it vibes well and plays as good as it should and bob modeled his self-portrait wax on its karmic qualities of 'keeping it all together'/'letting go with the flow...this is a heavy groove and should be played only when all memory is forgot, a cats got to dig its 1969 for the first time and dylans moving outside the law to get the word out...
...this one has the near complete show (it cuts off suddenly at the end) from a couple of different sources, audience tapes which is okay as it gives the gig a more immediate appeal, the listener becomes the tape machine taking in the zimm groove and disseminating the experience...this was bobs first live gig for real since the retirement a few years earlier and he showed up late in a white suit and done a set of lounge country crooning that had cats divided as to its worth, again questions were asked as to what dylan was trying to put across, plenty die-hards weren't willing to think the impossible thought that dylan was mortal and he was singing in a style that fitted the way he saw life, living as a family guy, no longer the supposed spokesman, no longer sending out messages to the grateful, no longer the bard telling the young the truth that had been witheld for so long, coded missives that only cats in the know could comprehend...here he's playing the role of entertainer, rough and ready maybe but entertainer all the same...the band supply the backing and occasionally they give the sound some crunch though the amphetamine spark of the 1966 tour has long since vanished into the byways of woodstock, this much more the 'get back' groove the fabs were kicking around and what the zimm himself had instigated back in the basement of the big pink house in late '67...as with all dylan moves up till the rollin thunder blowout the country lounge period of '68/'70 holds many interesting turns and has provided many myths (also the time period of the appearance of the GWW boot which sparked some renewed interest) which have wove their way into the rock tapestry...
...bobs entry into the '70s was typically a dylan move, giving the customer what they weren't expecting and they sure weren't expecting 'self portrait', possibly the zimms most perplexing move up until that time, more alienating than his electric jaunt back in the mind fryiny daze of 65/6, more off putting than going to record in nashville, home of reactionary gun toting hicks, the natural enemy of draft dodging hippys and lefty student layabouts...what was dylan doing with this hodge podge of what seemed like studio leftovers from the bottom shelf of a long lost dusty cupboard, full of failed experiments...the whole thing gets underway with a fake gospel lounge groove with lady vocalists asking how's any riding (writing) going to get done, dylan ain't even on the track, he's kind of getting into an andy warhol groove, just lending his name to product, is he taking money under false pretenses? not being on his own record, or is he saying, again, that he's not what his audience thinks he is, that they don't need him, they can get along without him, he's got confidence they can make it and he wishes them well...more lounge and bluesy folk ditties follow on, this is dylan in the natural groove, going wherever the vibes take him, be they las vegas neon lights or pre-war pre-urban folk from some dark hollow...this is dylan spinning disks on a juke box from the twilight zone, from a time long past, from generations that bought the amerikkkan myth of blind obidience to the new colonial masters, to the feudal barons of the new world, from the generation that was sending its children to kill for capitalism, dylan was singing te songs of the enemy, not the songs of resistance he 'should have' been singing...maybe the goverment had replaced him with a doppelganger (the same as the fabs had done when macca 'died') to stop the anti war/civil rights movement from entering a new decade and renewing the effort to spread some sanity across uncle sams autocracy, certainly the FBI had investigated him, along with countless others who spoke off different things, who spoke of righteous times to come..dylan was singing country and sounding relaxed and happy with the situation, was he being serious or was this some kind of code that needed to be cracked for the whole picture to come alive, was dylans message now so important for the hippy generation and so potentially dangerous to the consumer society that bob had to cloak it in the sounds of the enemy to disguise it but he had confidence that the heads would break through and get the message...but dylan wasn't supposed to be writing message songs anymore (he denied he ever wrote a message song at all) so there couldn't be any message to decode, therefore where was he at? what did he want to get across, was he just passing time looking for another better label deal, keeping hot tunes and poetry ramblings for these better days to come...the live tracks from the '69 I.O.W festival give this more weight as dylans answer to the 'great white wonder' boot that had recently appeared (then promptly rebooted a couple more times in as many months), but could he really be bothered about a bootleg of poor quality when he'd allowed all those big pink tunes to be sent out to london and L.A in late '67/8...was dylan legitamising the boot by giving it a companion so a cat could have choice...if dylan hadn't been replaced by a double then maybe he was turning into a patriot and selling out to the machine or maybe his children had been kidnapped by C.I.A warriors and he had to tow the patriot line to sway the hippy/yippie rabble to give up ideas of bombing banks and army recruitment centres...what did dylan hope to achieve with this wax (a double), what would dylan gain from this move to squaresville, had all the rewiring of his circuits back in the amphetamine hazy daze finally knocked all the fight out of him, was he now just a shell, a backwoods hick with dreams of vegas casinos and lounge appearances...was dylan trying to tell the NOW generation to be careful, the government was going to kill them through recreational drugs and mindless entertainment, he was giving them an injection of cuboidness to innoculate them for the coming struggle to free themselves of the downpressor man...was this the true desolation row from where the new beginning was going to come, was this disk a place to look out from or a window to look into...was dylan sneering and saying his audience deserved nothing more, they didn't understand what he was saying for the whole decade so now they could listen to the music they really wanted only were too 'hip' to admit to the 'liberal' society they wanted to belong to, they had made him do this, they had inflicted this upon their very own god, they destroyed their own creation, he showed them to look further or don't look at all, stay oblivious to the world around them, it no longer mattered to dylan...this wax is certainly more than it seemed or indeed it seems more than it is, a continuing circle that goes round with the changing seasons, it never stays long in any one place, continuing its journey to the very end of who knows where...
...after the success in underground scenes of the zimms GWW and variations a flood of boots containing early tapes of bob hit the head shops and were duely picked up by layabouts and a few left over folkies...this early '70s wax came about via the TMOQ label and is made up of tracks from the minnesota hotel tapes from december '61(minnesota hotel being in actuality the apartment of bonnie beecher who let just about any vagabond crash there) as indeed many boots at that time were and a couple of tracks taped at broadside magazines office(63)...bob lays down an energetic performance exploding with affirmed glee as he comes on like railroad hobo entertaining fellow transients with hard luck tales of life lived out rough...some noise associated with tapes dubbed more than once and aged wax is apparent though better than it could be, all in all a boss time can be had and held...
...bobs rolling thunder revue jaunt around the northeast of uncle-sams-autocracy in the winter of 1975 was another one of those excercises in 'getaway' madness that the zimm gets a kick out of every now and then('66 tour blasted on speed/big pink sojourne behind a haze of reefer/self portrait, a brain closet clearing proposition)...this time the idea was based around a kind of travelling minstral show that would just pull into town and set up in a empty auditorium and play a show lasting as long as it would (about 3 hours)...various cats came along for the ride including ramblin' jack elliot/david blue/bob neuwirth/roger mcguinn/mick ronson/ronnie blakely and two queens of the folk scene baez and mitchell, all dropping in here and there along the way, some riding the bus, others just grooving on a nights fun...everyone would get to sing a few numbers with dylan coming on stage about a third of the way in and vibing up the audience and then dueting with joan b.,who in turn would sing some tunes solo (sometimes outstaying her welcome as the audience felt they were being teased, that dylan should have stayed on stage once he'd appeared, this being not an unwarranted assumption), with bob reappearing for the remainder of the evening...the whole escapde was a ramshackle, rag-tag freakout that for the first part (nov/dec.75) was a friendly groove all fuelled on mysterious chemicals, including according to legend animal tranques (bought along by david blue) so the whole party were getting weird and shaking it up, getting into funky abandom, reaching out that little bit extra, communicating in new and different tongues...mick ronson, no stranger to madness after 'kickin it around' with bowie and reed and iggy got the revue into wearing makeup, getting a bit glam to off set the cheese cloth and denim squareness that was rife across the rock universe, the eventual outcome of which came about with the minstral white face parade that surprised more than a few liberal onlookers at first glance...as with dylans other weird scenes its been captured by the audience in all the funky glory that is befitting such high moments of cultural endevour, the so called amatuer is left to document the times through murky tapes and multi generational vinyl pressings...the tapes of the revue are mostly rough and funky but eminently listenable once the sloppy editing over the years is gotten used to, though of course most only feature the zimm portions of the three hour shows and these rehearsal tapes from january/april '76 are pretty funky in places but well worth getting into...each disk documents a different aspect of the show with the first a run through, gettin the overall vibe, the second just bob and a couple of cats (including scarlet rivera on ethereal space fiddle), third is a revue rehearsal with all concerned grooving it up with the last disc coming from various times towards the end of the tour...songs from all periods are given a run through, protest/amphetamine poetry/country bumkin, all get the mystic thunder vibe smeared over them, pushing the tunes into a universal language, the wheel of life turning, renewing itself with fresh and different skin...
...this is a top groove that all zimm heads and general layabouts need to dig as this is where bob is laying down his alter ego for all to hear...taken from the cynthia gooding radio show broadcast in early '62 bob does some traditional folk tunes and a couple of originals with a fair gusto, obviously enjoying himself, being the centre of attention for a whole hour going out to all in NYC and surroundin burgs...in between the songs cynthia asks some questions about bobs supposed years working on the carnival circuit and his friendship with john lee hooker, bob in turn is evasive and answers with distortion and via changing the subject moves on whilst leaving a hazy memory of some other life lingering in the radio-waves...already at the age of twenty at the begining of his tenure as beat poet/spokesman for a generation/folk saviour he's saying 'i'm not here', what is known is imagined, the real is the imagination of the public who builds the persona after bob has dropped some ambiguous hints, weaving myths that intertwine with dreamworld time, as bobs grip on physical temporal dimensions is not strong (non existant)...a vital document thats a must own for all cool cats...
...spring 1963 and bob drops in on the studs terkel show to chat and play a few songs...dylan tells studs there's a new generation out there that ain't going to take the government line and consume useless goods just to keep the empire going, that theres got to be a better way of living with freedom for all not just the power elite and their lackies...this is a marvellous time capsule of pre-hippy days when the civil rights concerns were paramount and the vietnam dollar building/wasting excercise hadn't got into full effect...bobs calmed down on the myth building which by now was fairly well entrenched and would spread through the coming underground scene of its own accord...a cool hour well worth some ear-time...
...from january '65 to january '66 sees the zimm putting the wild mercury sound down on tape and though not in chronological order it flows mighty fine, a solid listen to some of the alternate takes and first try outs of some of the greatest poetic rock'n'roll to bubble to the surface, every track a winner, not one binner...decent sound quality enhances the groove no end and cats who dig the mind frying electric bob are going to freak at this hours worth of chemical indulgence...dig the crazy stoned vibe as the future is written in the wind and forged on amphetamine tablets...
...all the tunes here have been dotted about on other releases over the years but to grab them all in one double set is a top-class thing to have and the sound is v.good which makes this get another plus (desolation row has some noise in a couple of spots but it's a way cool version so it don't matter too much, the riffing is a bit on the trancy velvets side, another plus)...this compliments the mercury music disk with a great look at the methed out year of 65, BIABH/61 revisited/blonde/dont look back/les crane show, all top quality amped up madness, with the zimm sounding like he's sometimes right in the room, blasting the visionary poetics as fast as the brain waves can spill it out, it's all on fire, blazing into the chemical night...it's a solid gone chrome-metal wall of beatnik urban voodoo, it's 3.A.M back alley barbed wire blues, it's the screaming scrunch of cats on the rampage, heading into uncharted territory where the known becomes lost in the haze of electricity pouring in from the generator of chance and change...cats are urged to rewire the circuits and score a ticket on the flipsville express, one way only as there ain't no return from this wigged out session, rip up the papers and learn another language...
...by mid '65 bob was reaching the first chemical peak that enabled the fruition of the amped electric word explosion that was pouring forth at a heavy rate...this boot is made up from acetates of mixes that only just failed to get the thumbs up for release, a little more chemicals, splicing and tweaking would be required for public consumption of these wild mercury sounds...at 70 minutes it's a cool carnival mirror of one of the all time great wax and the main thrust has got to be the inclusion of an early version of desolation row...sound quality is somewhat rough in places with squeaks and scrapes popping up occasionally but nothing to get hung up about...complete with photo session outtake for the cover this is real happening gone gear...
...half way through bobs momentus electric amphtamine turn on he was travelling outer-spaceways at a speed not calculable on a slide rule of chillicity...wires were stretched and tightened and still nothing snapped and the sounds got heavier...folk music was left to fend for itself as a new untried way of communicating was busy being born...the tunes on this boot are the results of nights spent rushing at altitudes higher than previously known, endurances tested and inky parchment scattered around the NYC studio before the trip to nashville and tomorrow...
...cats in the know with an ear to the ground and certainly a finger on the pulse will want to know the EBBETTS MONO blonde on blonde is worth the bother as at the very least it's part of the essential whole pop-into-rock movement that was bubbling and perculating all over back in '65/'66 with cats on a certain wavelength grooving making pop an artform for the NOW generation (beatles/who/byrds/brian wilson)...the last release of the zimms amphetamine freak trio of joints that came out over the pivitol years of pop becoming its own master, no longer the puppet (some will dispute this with the certainties that most are still deluded and lead by capitalist oppressor, that all pop is no more than mere entertainment, always was always will be), art to be created to put a message in the air, that corruption is rife in the landscape, the older ones wish to enslave the youth to make their empty lives bearable...put this on the deck and turn the volume onto stun and dig the drugged out blues swamp the room, engulf the senses and fill up the void with visions of the gone world, indeed an updated 'coney island of the mind' with the arabian drums beating out a new rythym for tomorrow, for the struggle to control of untold destinies...a wall of sound from beyond the known, deep in the unconcious zapped mind, from the strange world behind the warehouse eyes...
...this manchester gig was for so long misrepresented as the albert hall 26/05 gig has been put out by officialdom and that surely was a welcome day but there's plenty to recommend with this double boot, not least being it didn't generate more revenue for the capitalist state in the form of tax to be wasted by the least qualified to do such things...the presence on this version is seemingly more upfront, the listener is closer to the amped up bard of the rock generation, the zimm is getting mighty close and tangible on these disks...the tension on the second disk is felt more than on the official release, no doubt some conscious tampering by bean counter lackys comes into play as is often the way these days when homogeneity is rife, blandness is the panacea for what ails the world...this must be seen as the real version, the 'counter culture' of the 60s is taking form right here on this night and is dispensed once more on this disk, a gateway to another time, when discovery was the watchword, and a lot of squares discovered they didn't like this noisy zimm, this out of control psychedelic avenger who was inventing the future in the NOW...desolation row was a real place/feeling in manchester for more than one night, the decaying city was passed its prime, and the weirdness was in the air as despondency breeds madness in many forms...quite fitting that the RAH gig was not this performance as the out-to-lunchness here comes not from a swinging capitol city but a forgotten city, where real culture lives or dies, not dictated by whim of fashion or whatever the system has for its latest sale...
...this boot marks the end of bobs world tour in the spring of '66, recorded at the royal albert hall in london 26/7th may and sees bob and the band exhausted after months of chemical indulgence, minds being rewired to the limit, the nervous system taken to extremes with amphetamines and visions that had been unseen for centuries appear when in the midst of communal hotel room acid trips...by this time the first half of the year was but a blur, a hazy memory of towns and cities scattered along the lost and never ending hi-ways of the imagination...this tour had turned into some kind of shamanic exercise, each day bringing new plateaus of weirdness, each higher than the last, until it was too hard to know where the beginning ended and the end began, the ripples of madness were ever widening, engulfing everything in sight, the tour became more wobbly, the floors on which existance stood were disappearing from under their feet, the fabric of reality, torn into many hundreds of pieces would never again be the same, the jigsaw of life would never fit together easily anymore, the shapes had been remodeled and the picture was now so very different...travelling high above the radar, journeying ever onwards through the dark midnight, going spaceways to the centre of the mind, the zimm finally touched down in london towne for two sold out gigs, tickets going to every beatnik with the bread, to every would be college poet and a few with enough sense to sneak tape recorders in...both these disks come originally from vinyl sources and as such have the attendant scratch and pops, but the grail in the grooves far outweighs any surface noise concerns...the sound is surpisingly full (couple of dropouts notwithstandin) and dylan comes right out into the room, reaching out across the decades to touch the listener once more with the ghosts of electricty...
...when bob plus his bike and the road went their different ways back in summer '66 it effectively ended bobs wild mercury sound and out there pharmaceutical dabblings to make way for more reflective and downbeat times...tired of being heralded as spokesman for the disaffected NOW generation he went into a small town vibe and let the rock'n'roll madness that was getting wilder every day passby...to pass the time by summer '67 bob was playing some old tunes and writing new songs with the band in the house now known as 'big pink'...these new songs marked a total change in sound with a rootsy lost generation/depression era folk music (non commercial) jamming groove going on, just digging whatever came up and letting the tape capture the moment...some of these songs got sent to old london towne by bobs manager, in the hopes someone would want to record them if bob didn't...at first they were just known as 'the songs on the tape' and as more and more scenesters and underground layabouts heard them they made a copy and in the end they became the (mythical) 'basement tapes'...this set is a mighty fine sounding (true original but cleaned, not tweaked like a lot of reissues both mersh and boot) 4disk blowout that any bobcats and heads will need to get cosy with because in a way this is the end of the 60s as a hyper acid drenched hippy incantation and a return to a more beatnik vibe with the world seen as a place that needs changing but from outside normal channels, it needs to be changed without the realisation that its been changed, lysergic confrontation needed to be seen as the government experiment to subvert thought that had been taking place in the preceeding couple of years...these tapes changed the way and sound of prime movers the fab4 and the stones as evidenced by those combos waxings from '68 onward (white album/beggars/letitbe/bleed) and in wider terms got country rock/laurel canyon poets/pubrock (brinsley schwarz) off and running...the aftermath of these tapes still resounds in this day and age (though in much distorted unconscious way)with 'authentic' roots/world music/americana all vying for a slice of wedge but these are just apparitions fed on, by and for consumption, any life in these was squeezed out many a long year since, so it all sounds the same, a kind of one size fits all digital squeal...the tapes are a well cool lobeful and a good way to start off the day or by reverse a good groove for when the downpresser man is seeming to loom large, as can be the way of the world these days with the nonstop babble of media duplicity trying to wear free thinking cats out of existance...transports heads to a slower world more inkeeping with true vibrations of the spirit...a cornerstone of beat activity along with harry smiths anthology/'on the road'/clellon holmes 'go'/kuchar bros. flicks...on no account should this release be confused with the wax from columbia of the same name (that was indeed nothing more than some record co. slight of hand trickery)...
...the 14 tunes on this wax (the original basement tapes) got every cat who heard it flipping their collective lid, plenty who hadn't been hep enough to grab an earful of the tape soon thought they had when cover versions popped into the hit parade(manfred manns mighty quinn)...the stories that go with them constitute a whole cornerstone on which rock is built, through expansion and mutation of myth...theres some thought this represents the last LP that was owed to the company(columbia)before dylan moved over to a more lucrative deal at MGM and it had been sent to london for the fabs to hear (if the zimm had actually wanted the commercial release this funky rock would headed off in some crazy tangents with every combo getting more messy and lo-fi by the minute)...the fabs did hear the acetates and they were solid behind this new way of doing things, GETTING BACK to the genuine vibe, feeling the spirit...mick and marianne took some tape copies on holiday and grooved for a fortnight, totally sent into another world by the ethereal yet funky jams coming non stop from the speakers...the tin-pan-alley guys heard the sound of cash registers when it was realised there was great songs here (surreal maybe but that didn't matter) that could easily be worked into poptunes for consumption...in los angeles van dyke parks/brian wilson/turtles/byrds/springfield all got cosy with these tapes that were soon in circulation amongst the pop-elite in the centres of hep and cool, they all dug the vibe and were soon working the ethereal funk into various existing ideas and calming down after the earlier years of excess...these acetates would provide a frame of reference for dylan to use and explore for the next few years, up until the '74 tour with the band where he got a rock'n'roll groove rush on with some blazing gigs and some fiery versions of amphetamine era tuneage...
...very nice distillation of basement jams that didn't feature the zimm who was out playing checkers at the general store quite often when the mood took him, because the old boys frequenting the place didn't know he was a counter cultural ambassador, they had no inkling he was the spokeman for disenchanted youth, the latest casuality of the amphetamine wail come to lay low in dullsville...the grooves here are loose and funky, relaxed in a reefer haze, kicking the gong around...these joints kind get lost buried in the basement tape extravaganza, but extracted they constitute a solid rock'n'roll gospel vibration from some other place as yet uncharted, a place consisting of the past remolded into tributaries of lazy motion, trickling into the ether to be caught in the imagination of any passing vagabond, any beatnik layabout looking for a new way of viewing the world around them...if this had been released instead/before 'big pink' there would been plenty cats scratching the noggin trying figure out which way was up, this is psychedelic but not in any accepted mind tripping way, this is a transportation device for inner vibrating into another plateau of existance...
...when bobs GWW dropped in berkeley, calif.back in '69 no one really knew what had been set in motion, a parallel record industry was born almost overnight...originally appearing in a blank gatefold sleeve, two disks with white labels, no writing, it immediately sold out, every hep cat on the scene knew this had to be something to do with dylan, no one else had ever said 'i'm not here' more vociferously than dylan over the past decade, yet all the time making sure those that needed to know knew he certainly was here, this double biscuit had just got to be by dylan even though not through regular record co.retail, this was dylan being liberated from himself by hipster chancers from los angeles (the place for entertainment bread hustle)...it's not impossible that the zimm instigated the whole bootleg phenomena in rock (common in jazz/blues for collectors are the pirate copies/homages) himself when he allowed the 'big pink' song demos out into the unguarded market back in late '67, as he does like the idea of a parallel line of recordings when there's more than one 'bob', in fact now there are multiple bobs reflected back by his audiences idea of who he is...the disk that came to be known as the 'great white wonder' was made up of tunes from the then unheard tapes made at bonnie beechers pad back in '61 and the basement tapes supplied a few with still more from 'another side'/'times'/'highway'/j.cash tv show/broadside office int.w/pete seeger, every track solid gold nuggets of bobness, this was the single most desireable object in rock'n'roll in late '69, every layabout, hooligan, cat on the block wanted a copy and wanted it bad, it became a jones to acquire this wax and that jones was soon satisfied (up to a point) with copies/variations all appearing within weeks and months (there's got to be over 50 variations of this, many more due to the easy technology at every layabouts pad nowadays)...what we got here is a straight dub from one of the original los angeles pressing and as such is mighty fine in the hi-fi directions for the time, in fact this must set the benchmark for rock'n'roll boots, just the right amount of hazy scuzz giving it that illicit desirability...in all probability the track choice was limited to what the cats in LA had to hand, but it vibes well and plays as good as it should and bob modeled his self-portrait wax on its karmic qualities of 'keeping it all together'/'letting go with the flow...this is a heavy groove and should be played only when all memory is forgot, a cats got to dig its 1969 for the first time and dylans moving outside the law to get the word out...
...this one has the near complete show (it cuts off suddenly at the end) from a couple of different sources, audience tapes which is okay as it gives the gig a more immediate appeal, the listener becomes the tape machine taking in the zimm groove and disseminating the experience...this was bobs first live gig for real since the retirement a few years earlier and he showed up late in a white suit and done a set of lounge country crooning that had cats divided as to its worth, again questions were asked as to what dylan was trying to put across, plenty die-hards weren't willing to think the impossible thought that dylan was mortal and he was singing in a style that fitted the way he saw life, living as a family guy, no longer the supposed spokesman, no longer sending out messages to the grateful, no longer the bard telling the young the truth that had been witheld for so long, coded missives that only cats in the know could comprehend...here he's playing the role of entertainer, rough and ready maybe but entertainer all the same...the band supply the backing and occasionally they give the sound some crunch though the amphetamine spark of the 1966 tour has long since vanished into the byways of woodstock, this much more the 'get back' groove the fabs were kicking around and what the zimm himself had instigated back in the basement of the big pink house in late '67...as with all dylan moves up till the rollin thunder blowout the country lounge period of '68/'70 holds many interesting turns and has provided many myths (also the time period of the appearance of the GWW boot which sparked some renewed interest) which have wove their way into the rock tapestry...
...bobs entry into the '70s was typically a dylan move, giving the customer what they weren't expecting and they sure weren't expecting 'self portrait', possibly the zimms most perplexing move up until that time, more alienating than his electric jaunt back in the mind fryiny daze of 65/6, more off putting than going to record in nashville, home of reactionary gun toting hicks, the natural enemy of draft dodging hippys and lefty student layabouts...what was dylan doing with this hodge podge of what seemed like studio leftovers from the bottom shelf of a long lost dusty cupboard, full of failed experiments...the whole thing gets underway with a fake gospel lounge groove with lady vocalists asking how's any riding (writing) going to get done, dylan ain't even on the track, he's kind of getting into an andy warhol groove, just lending his name to product, is he taking money under false pretenses? not being on his own record, or is he saying, again, that he's not what his audience thinks he is, that they don't need him, they can get along without him, he's got confidence they can make it and he wishes them well...more lounge and bluesy folk ditties follow on, this is dylan in the natural groove, going wherever the vibes take him, be they las vegas neon lights or pre-war pre-urban folk from some dark hollow...this is dylan spinning disks on a juke box from the twilight zone, from a time long past, from generations that bought the amerikkkan myth of blind obidience to the new colonial masters, to the feudal barons of the new world, from the generation that was sending its children to kill for capitalism, dylan was singing te songs of the enemy, not the songs of resistance he 'should have' been singing...maybe the goverment had replaced him with a doppelganger (the same as the fabs had done when macca 'died') to stop the anti war/civil rights movement from entering a new decade and renewing the effort to spread some sanity across uncle sams autocracy, certainly the FBI had investigated him, along with countless others who spoke off different things, who spoke of righteous times to come..dylan was singing country and sounding relaxed and happy with the situation, was he being serious or was this some kind of code that needed to be cracked for the whole picture to come alive, was dylans message now so important for the hippy generation and so potentially dangerous to the consumer society that bob had to cloak it in the sounds of the enemy to disguise it but he had confidence that the heads would break through and get the message...but dylan wasn't supposed to be writing message songs anymore (he denied he ever wrote a message song at all) so there couldn't be any message to decode, therefore where was he at? what did he want to get across, was he just passing time looking for another better label deal, keeping hot tunes and poetry ramblings for these better days to come...the live tracks from the '69 I.O.W festival give this more weight as dylans answer to the 'great white wonder' boot that had recently appeared (then promptly rebooted a couple more times in as many months), but could he really be bothered about a bootleg of poor quality when he'd allowed all those big pink tunes to be sent out to london and L.A in late '67/8...was dylan legitamising the boot by giving it a companion so a cat could have choice...if dylan hadn't been replaced by a double then maybe he was turning into a patriot and selling out to the machine or maybe his children had been kidnapped by C.I.A warriors and he had to tow the patriot line to sway the hippy/yippie rabble to give up ideas of bombing banks and army recruitment centres...what did dylan hope to achieve with this wax (a double), what would dylan gain from this move to squaresville, had all the rewiring of his circuits back in the amphetamine hazy daze finally knocked all the fight out of him, was he now just a shell, a backwoods hick with dreams of vegas casinos and lounge appearances...was dylan trying to tell the NOW generation to be careful, the government was going to kill them through recreational drugs and mindless entertainment, he was giving them an injection of cuboidness to innoculate them for the coming struggle to free themselves of the downpressor man...was this the true desolation row from where the new beginning was going to come, was this disk a place to look out from or a window to look into...was dylan sneering and saying his audience deserved nothing more, they didn't understand what he was saying for the whole decade so now they could listen to the music they really wanted only were too 'hip' to admit to the 'liberal' society they wanted to belong to, they had made him do this, they had inflicted this upon their very own god, they destroyed their own creation, he showed them to look further or don't look at all, stay oblivious to the world around them, it no longer mattered to dylan...this wax is certainly more than it seemed or indeed it seems more than it is, a continuing circle that goes round with the changing seasons, it never stays long in any one place, continuing its journey to the very end of who knows where...
...after the success in underground scenes of the zimms GWW and variations a flood of boots containing early tapes of bob hit the head shops and were duely picked up by layabouts and a few left over folkies...this early '70s wax came about via the TMOQ label and is made up of tracks from the minnesota hotel tapes from december '61(minnesota hotel being in actuality the apartment of bonnie beecher who let just about any vagabond crash there) as indeed many boots at that time were and a couple of tracks taped at broadside magazines office(63)...bob lays down an energetic performance exploding with affirmed glee as he comes on like railroad hobo entertaining fellow transients with hard luck tales of life lived out rough...some noise associated with tapes dubbed more than once and aged wax is apparent though better than it could be, all in all a boss time can be had and held...
...bobs rolling thunder revue jaunt around the northeast of uncle-sams-autocracy in the winter of 1975 was another one of those excercises in 'getaway' madness that the zimm gets a kick out of every now and then('66 tour blasted on speed/big pink sojourne behind a haze of reefer/self portrait, a brain closet clearing proposition)...this time the idea was based around a kind of travelling minstral show that would just pull into town and set up in a empty auditorium and play a show lasting as long as it would (about 3 hours)...various cats came along for the ride including ramblin' jack elliot/david blue/bob neuwirth/roger mcguinn/mick ronson/ronnie blakely and two queens of the folk scene baez and mitchell, all dropping in here and there along the way, some riding the bus, others just grooving on a nights fun...everyone would get to sing a few numbers with dylan coming on stage about a third of the way in and vibing up the audience and then dueting with joan b.,who in turn would sing some tunes solo (sometimes outstaying her welcome as the audience felt they were being teased, that dylan should have stayed on stage once he'd appeared, this being not an unwarranted assumption), with bob reappearing for the remainder of the evening...the whole escapde was a ramshackle, rag-tag freakout that for the first part (nov/dec.75) was a friendly groove all fuelled on mysterious chemicals, including according to legend animal tranques (bought along by david blue) so the whole party were getting weird and shaking it up, getting into funky abandom, reaching out that little bit extra, communicating in new and different tongues...mick ronson, no stranger to madness after 'kickin it around' with bowie and reed and iggy got the revue into wearing makeup, getting a bit glam to off set the cheese cloth and denim squareness that was rife across the rock universe, the eventual outcome of which came about with the minstral white face parade that surprised more than a few liberal onlookers at first glance...as with dylans other weird scenes its been captured by the audience in all the funky glory that is befitting such high moments of cultural endevour, the so called amatuer is left to document the times through murky tapes and multi generational vinyl pressings...the tapes of the revue are mostly rough and funky but eminently listenable once the sloppy editing over the years is gotten used to, though of course most only feature the zimm portions of the three hour shows and these rehearsal tapes from january/april '76 are pretty funky in places but well worth getting into...each disk documents a different aspect of the show with the first a run through, gettin the overall vibe, the second just bob and a couple of cats (including scarlet rivera on ethereal space fiddle), third is a revue rehearsal with all concerned grooving it up with the last disc coming from various times towards the end of the tour...songs from all periods are given a run through, protest/amphetamine poetry/country bumkin, all get the mystic thunder vibe smeared over them, pushing the tunes into a universal language, the wheel of life turning, renewing itself with fresh and different skin...
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