From January 1965 through March 1966 Bob Dylan recorded three fiery, trailblazing, universally acclaimed albums: ?Bringing It All Back Home,? ?Highway 61 Revisited? and ?Blonde on Blonde.? The next installment of his archival Bootleg Series ? ?The Cutting Edge 1965-1966: The Bootleg Series Vol. 12″ (Columbia/Legacy) ? unearths a trove of previously unreleased material from those recording sessions.
It includes demo versions, rehearsals and alternate takes of some of Mr. Dylan?s most celebrated songs, on the way to forging what he would famously call ?that thin, that wild mercury sound? with ?Blonde on Blonde.? The collection will be released Nov. 6.
The recordings ? live in the studio, without overdubs ? reveal Mr. Dylan and his musicians constantly reshaping the songs, changing tempos, keys, melodies and lyrics. Among the finds are a previously unreleased take of ?She?s Your Lover Now,? versions of ?Mr. Tambourine Man? with drums that were recorded before the Byrds made their hit folk-rock arrangement, and radically different approaches to songs like ?Visions of Johanna,? ?Desolation Row,? ?One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)? and ?It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.?
The album will be available in multiple configurations. ?The Best of the Cutting Edge 1965-66: The Bootleg Series Vol. 12? culls the material for a two-CD (or three-LP) set. The more extensive six-CD ?deluxe edition? includes a full disc dedicated to the recording sessions for ?Like a Rolling Stone,? from its initial version ? a waltz ? through the version that was officially released and on through nearly a dozen further attempts. It also includes the four separate tracks of the four-track master recording, with one or two instruments each.
For Dylan completists, 5,000 copies of an exhaustive, limited-edition 18-CD ?Collector?s Edition? are to be sold through
www.bobdylan.com for $599. It will include every note of the 1965-66 sessions along with mono singles, hotel-room recordings and a few frames of film snipped from a print of ?Don?t Look Back,? the Dylan documentary filmed in 1965 by D.A. Pennebaker.
