I am that kind of nut

---------------------------- [excerpt, Remnick article on Dylan, N. Yorker] -------------- The catalogue is rich in the way that Picasso's was rich.  There's no end to it.





The shelves of Dylan books and bootlegs groan, but this week, if you care, our knowledge of the songs recorded in that golden period [1965-1966] just got deeper. 


Elijah Wald, who has written fine books on Robert Johnson and Josh White, has published "Dylan Goes Electric!:  Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties," which provides a deeply researched and entertaining chronicle of


the culture clash that Dylan sparked from the Newport stage, and his transition from work shirts to leather, from a Gibson Nick Lucas Special to a Fender Stratocaster.





But even more interesting, Dylan's own people, led by his meticulous and devoted manager Jeff Rosen, have put out the twelfth in a series of "bootlegs" on Columbia:  "The Cutting Edge, 1965-1966-bootleg-series-vol-12." 


Depending on your level of fanaticism,


"The Cutting Edge," which covers the 1965-66 period in the studio, comes in a two-CD version, a six-CD version, and an eighteen-CD, three-hundred-and-seventy-nine-track, five-hundred-and-ninety-nine-dollar version that brings the listener every rehearsal, every false start, every giggle and cough, every exchange between Dylan and his musicians and engineers, as well as some in-the-moment interviews conducted in London, Glasgow, and Denver.


The idea is to reveal the artistic process -- or as much of that process as countless spools of studio tape can provide. 


Maybe you've got to be some kind of Dylan nut to listen to all of it. 


I am that kind of nut. 


I've got to think that, soon enough, someone's going to want to listen to everything Kanye West did in the studio for "The College Dropout," "Late Registration," and "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy." 


Wouldn't you have wanted someone to plant a hidden microphone in Bach's church as he rehearsed the performers for the next Sunday's cantata?








------------------------ [end, today's excerpt from "Bob Dylan and the 'Hot Hand'" - written by David Remnick, The New Yorker.  November 9, 2015] ------------------------ {(pictures added here, by Blue Collar Lit)}


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