A few months ago I went to the movies with my girlfriend and our friend Anastasia to see A Complete Unknown. It was at a cinema I used to go as a kid, ZEA at Pasalimani. How good it is to visit one of the few surviving neighborhood movie theaters in the age of multiplex entertainment! It was just as I remembered it - with a more advanced audio and video system, of course, and minus the psychedelic liquid light projections it used to show during the intermission - it was all that was missing to take you back to the 60's! The movie certainly brought that decade back to life, and featured fantastic music (of course!) and great performances by all the actors, who even sang themselves - now, anyone can imitate Dylan's characteristic singing voice, but Joan Baez must be more difficult, kudos to Monica Barbaro for that! As you may know, the story arc concerns Dylan's coming to New York to conquer the city's folk scene, and culminates with his decision to go electric, betraying all the people who believed in him by following his own muse. I was so familiar with the rock mythology behind it that watching the film was like watching the movie adaptation of a favorite book. Would they be faithful to the story? Which episodes would be included, which would be left out, and which would be invented in order to tie everything together? In the end I left satisfied, and so did the girls, even though they weren't the Dylanophiles that I am.
Soon after I watched the movie, I came across this CD. The Bootleg Series Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965–1966 focuses in this most prolific and revolutionary stage of Dylan's career, covering an incredibly productive 14 month-period during which the artist recorded 3 electric folk rock masterpieces (Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61, and Blonde On Blonde) and shocked the folk music world with his electric performance on the stage of Newport Festival, which provided one of the centerpieces of the movie. Cutting Edge comes in three different editions: The standard one (a.k.a. The Best Of The Cutting Edge) is comprised of 2CDs featuring previously unreleased demos, rehearsals, and outtakes from the sessions that produced the aforementioned albums. The Deluxe Edition (6 CDs) also contains many half-finished rehearsals, false starts and whatnot. That much detail may be too overwhelming for most of us, but it allows one to track the development of certain songs in the studio. The Collectors' Edition (18 CDs) contains everything recorded during those sessions plus some hotel room demos - not sure that anyone sane would ever go through all of it. I already own some of Dylan's Bootleg Series, and always marvel at how he keeps changing his songs, trying out different tempos and arrangements; sometimes the finished product bears only passing resemblance to the original demo. And neither does it stay the same after it's committed to vinyl, Dylan keeps trying on different arrangements live. Before buying this compilation I looked it up at the metacritic website to see what reviewers were saying about it, and came across an unbelievable metascore of 99/100. How can any collections of demos and outtakes be so good? I asked myself, so I bought the CD and delved in. Amazingly, it's almost as good as advertised; I mean there's no escaping the fact that, however great these songs are, there are even better versions of them out there, which most of us are very familiar with. CD 1 opens with a barrage of acoustic demos: ballads "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" and "She Belongs to Me" sound as charming as ever, while the delirious "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" works well as a solo acoustic number - the lyrics, at least, are more discernable - and what a surreal, comedic, ride of a song it is! There are two more ballads included here in acoustic demo form, which weren't used by Dylan but given away to ladies with whom he had affairs with: "I'll Keep It with Mine" to Nico, "Farewell Angelina" to Joan Baez. Another unused song is acoustic blues "California" - though some lyrics were recycled for "Outlaw Blues", a storming electric blues version of which is also included on CD 1. It's no surprise that the electric numbers are the best here; after all Dylan had gathered some fantastic musicians, including Michael Bloomfield (a.k.a. the Jewish blues wunderkind from Chicago) on guitar. He puts in some scorching solos on the (also unused at the time) blues "Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence". Dylan actually adlibs in this song "I got this woman in LA/ she makes the sweat run down my brow/ she's good alright, but she ain't as good/ as this guitar player I've got right now" "Subterranean Homesick Blues", "On the Road Again", "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" are presented in rough-and-ready intense garage rock versions, while "If You Gotta Go, Go Now" (featuring backing vocalist Angeline Butler) has a New Orleans jazz groove that makes it sound like a prequel of The Basement Tapes. This, too, didn't appear in any of Dylan's albums, but it charted in the UK when it was covered by Manfred Mann, and again by Fairport Convention. A charming rendition of "Mr. Tambourine Man" is unfortunately incomplete - if it was finished, it could have surpassed the final album version. The most interesting moment of the CD is listening to back-to-back versions of "Like a Rolling Stone": Take 5 is typical harmonica-heavy Dylan folk rock, while take 11 is transformed by the introduction of Al Kooper's organ. Al recounts the story in the liner notes: he took his guitar along and invited himself to the recording sessions, hoping to play on the album. When he heard Bloomfield plug in and play, he realized he didn't have a chance himself, so he sat on the sidelines watching the proceedings. At some point, organist Paul Griffin left his place and moved to piano. Kooper had played keyboards before but he wasn't an organist - he didn't even know how to turn on a B-3 Hammond, but the other guy had left it on, so he sat in his place and, out of nowhere, came up with this fantastic melody. Dylan loved it, and changed the song structure to bring the organ to the fore; from that moment on, Kooper stopped being a guitarist and made a career for himself as an organist instead. I was delighted to see that little episode make the cut and get included in the movie. Disc 1 closes with 11-minute epic "Desolation Row". Once again, the sparse instrumentation allows one to focus more on the lyrics. And again, what a lyric - I mean, "they're selling postcards of the hanging" what kind of pop song starts off like that? CD 2 is, if anything, even better than the first. We get, slightly different, full band versions of classic Dylan tracks which mostly appeared on Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde, often backed by The Hawks, soon to become known as The Band. On each track, the band sound spontaneous but tight - even the first takes included here sound like the songs had been well rehearsed beforehand. CD2 doesn't feature many solo demos or abandoned songs - with the exception of "Lunatic Princess" and the fantastic "She's Your Lover Now", both of which are cut short. The latter remains a band favorite although there has never been a full band version of it; the only finished take is a solo piano demo available only in the Collector's Edition of The Cutting Edge. Up-tempo versions of "I Want You" and "Just Like A Woman" are interesting to hear; pity that the latter flounders toward the end. All in all, what a great outpouring of songs, all created in such a short period of time. Listening to these songs again, I appreciate the garage rock intensity of the electric numbers, even though none of them trump the overtly familiar album/single versions; but above all I'm impressed by the quality of the lyrics. All the surrealistic imagery and the ingenious wordplay; no-one else wrote like that at the time, at least not in the world of popular music. Was it Nobel Prize-worthy? Irrelevant! None of it was written with literary prizes in mind, but it sure makes a solid case for young Dylan as a rare songwriting genius. At the film, when everyone is awed by his songs, their reaction seems exaggerated to convince us of the hero's brilliance. I think that's because we grew up with his songs, so we're taking them for granted. But imagine hearing them for the first time, coming out from the mouth of such a young person! Or listening to Jimi Hendrix for the first time, producing all those strange sounds with his guitar, or hearing the incredible sound mélange that was Sergeant Pepper - those were the days, bring me more sixties biopics please! I hear they'll be making four different Beatles films, one from the perspective of each member, now those I want to see! And you know Dylan will be making a cameo to introduce the Fab Four to marijuana - wouldn't it be fun if they cast Chalamet for the role? It'd be like one of those Marvel films where Daredevil makes an appearance at a court room scene of an Avengers movie, in his alter-ego as blind lawyer Matt Murdoch of course. And where's that Arthur Lee biopic I've been waiting for? How can a story like his not move Hollywood filmmakers?
***** for Bob Dylan's 115th Dream Solo Acoustic, Subterranean Homesick Blues Take 1, Outlaw Blues Take 2, On the Road Again Take 4, If You Gotta Go Go Now Take 2, It Takes a Lot to Laugh It Takes a Train to Cry Take 8, Like a Rolling Stone Take 11, Visions of Johanna Take 5, She's Your Lover Now Take 6, Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again Take 13, Tombstone Blues Take 1, Positively 4th Street Take 5, Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? Take 1, Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues Take 3, Highway 61 Revisited Take 3, Queen Jane Approximately Take 5
**** for Love Minus Zero/No Limit" Take 2, I'll Keep It with Mine Take 1, She Belongs to MenTake 1, Farewell, Angelina Take 1, California Take 1, Mr. Tambourine Man Take 3, Like a Rolling Stone Take 5, Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence Take 2, Medicine Sunday Take 1, Desolation Row Take 2, Desolation Row Take 1, Lunatic Princess Take 1, Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat Take 8, One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later) Take 19, Absolutely Sweet Marie Take 1, Just Like a Woman Take 4, Alternate Take, Pledging My Time Take 1, I Want You Take 4
*** for You Don't Have to Do That Take 1, Highway 61 Revisited Take 7 (False Start)