Bob Dylan - The Best of the Cutting Edge 2CD (2015) [email protected] Beolab1700
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Bob Dylan - The Best of the Cutting Edge 2CD
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Artist...............: Bob Dylan
Album................: The Best of the Cutting Edge 2CD
Genre................: Folk/Rock
Source...............: CD
Year.................: 2015
Ripper...............: EAC (Secure mode) / LAME 3.92 & Asus CD-S520
Codec................: LAME 3.99
Version..............: MPEG 1 Layer III
Quality..............: Insane, (avg. bitrate: 320kbps)
Channels.............: Joint Stereo / 44100 hz
Tags.................: ID3 v1.1, ID3 v2.3
Information..........:
Posted by............: Beolab1700 on 07/11/2015
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Tracklisting
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The Best of the Cutting Edge
CD 1
Love Minus Zero / No Limit (Take 2, Acoustic)
I’ll Keep It with Mine (Take 1, Piano Demo)
Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream (Take 1 & 2, Solo Acoustic)
She Belongs to Me (Take 1, Solo Acoustic)
Subterranean Homesick Blues (Take 1, Alternate Take)
Outlaw Blues (Take 2, Alternate Take)
On the Road Again (Take 4, Alternate Take)
Farewell, Angelina (Take 1, Solo Acoustic)
If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Take 2, Alternate Take)
You Don’t Have to Do That (Take 1, Solo Acoustic)
California (Take 1, Solo Acoustic)
Tambourine Man (Take 3 with Band, Incomplete)
It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry (Take 8, Alternate Take)
Like a Rolling Stone (Take 5, Rehearsal (Short Version))
Like a Rolling Stone (Take 11, Alternate Take)
Sitting On a Barbed Wire Fence (Take 2)
Medicine Sunday (Take 1)
Desolation Row (Take 2, Piano Demo)
Desolation Row (Take 1, Alternate Take)
CD 2
Tombstone Blues (Take 1, Alternate Take)
Positively 4th Street (Take 5, Alternate Take)
Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window (Take 1, Alternate Take (Short Version))
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues (Take 3, Rehearsal)
Highway 61 Revisited (Take 3, Alternate Take)
Queen Jane Approximately (Take 5, Alternate Take)
Visions of Johanna (Take 5, Rehearsal)
She’s Your Lover Now (Take 6, Rehearsal)
Lunatic Princess (Take 1)
Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat (Take 8, Alternate Take)
One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later) (Take 19, Alternate Take)
Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again (Take 13, Alternate Take)
Absolutely Sweet Marie (Take 1, Alternate Take)
Just Like a Woman (Take 4, Alternate Take)
Pledging My Time (Take 1, Alternate Take)
I Want You (Take 4, Alternate Take)
Highway 61 Revisited (Take 7, False Start)
All tracks previously unreleased except for:
Disc 1, Track 2 originally from Biograph (Columbia LP CSX 38830, 1985)
Disc 1, Track 8 originally from The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3: Rare and Unreleased (Columbia CD C3K, 47382, 1991)
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“I’ll do this one more time and if I can’t do it, we’ll do another song. I’ll do any song as good as I can do it the first time.” Bob Dylan says these words once his first solo take of “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” breaks down after a minute.
Dylan’s definition of “good” is fluid, of course.
Sometimes, a first take satisfied him — “Maggie’s Farm” and “Gates of Eden” are two prime examples — but often he’d find he could do a song better or at least do it differently, swapping out words, speeding up the tempo, and changing the feel, occasionally radically transforming his song.
Sometimes, these radical transformations are the versions that found their way to the finished record, so they’re now seen as etched in stone but The Cutting Edge 1965-1966, the 12th volume of The Bootleg Series, shows Dylan didn’t enter the studio with posterity in mind when he went to cut Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde: he was making music of and for the moment.
Familiarity hasn’t necessarily dulled the impact of these three records, all written and recorded within a span of 14 months — a period of time when Dylan also filmed Don’t Look Back, electrified the Newport Folk Festival, and was declared a Judas at the Royal Albert Hall — but they have made them seem inevitable, works carved out of granite whose fates were preordained. The gift of The Cutting Edge is that it makes this, the greatest run of creativity in Dylan’s career and perhaps in rock & roll in general, once again seems wild, nervy, and quicksilver, upending expectations and undercutting conventions. Within one of the three sets of liner notes, Bill Flanagan calls these six discs of outtakes, alternates, and rehearsals “work tapes,” which is technically true, but undersells how this music crackles as it shape-shifts, sometimes soaring, sometimes stumbling, but always feeling fiercely alive. If it’s difficult to claim that a solo “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” and a locomotive “Visions of Johanna” recorded with the Band are superior to the versions on Home and Blonde, they’re nevertheless magnificent in their own right while also shedding light on how Dylan worked; with producer Tom Wilson, the singer/songwriter wasted no time, while Bob Johnston allowed Bob to twist and test his songs, letting him discover the soul that lay within. Along the way, Dylan was truly fearless — he’d goose a tempo to see if it gave a ballad life, he’d let Mike Bloomfield and Robbie Robertson run wild; the fact that he abandoned a song as wonderful as “She’s Your Lover Now,” possibly because it never quite withstood such stress tests, speaks volumes — and among the many gifts The Cutting Edge has to offer is that it illuminates these three great records while also illustrating that they were just mere snapshots in time. By breaking down the barriers that separated these three albums, The Cutting Edge shows how for Dylan during this blinding, brilliant peak his music was a living thing, evolving from song to song, take to take, where the quest itself was as transcendent as the final destination.
The Best of the Cutting Edge
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