The Only Bob Dylan Bootleg I Own

Despite having numerous live Dylan recordings stored away on my computer, the only Bob Dylan bootleg I own in a physical format is a mysterious CD entitled Bob Dylan and the Never Ending Tour Band. It claims to have been “Recorded in Florida, USA, in November 1992”, but Bobsboots.com reveals that the show really took place in Pentange, Luxembourg on 21st February 1993. Bob is credited as "The Irresistible Maestro Bob Dylan" (a title I really wish he had used for his stage introduction back in the day).

Had I simply downloaded this show, I probably would have listened to it once and then forgotten about it forever. However, there’s something about owning music on physical media that forces me to devote a little more time to it than I might otherwise. I've been listening to this CD every so often for a while, and over time I’ve come to enjoy it a lot.

Early 1993 was a time of transition for Bob Dylan. The previous year had seen him add multi-instrumentalist and pedal steel extraordinaire Bucky Baxter to the band, bringing a variety of new textures to what had previously been a hard rocking garage band sound. There was also increasingly prominent Grateful Dead influence: not only had Bob hired a second drummer (originally Charlie Quintana, who was then replaced by Winston Watson in September 1992) to play alongside the soon-to-leave Ian Wallace, but by the end of '92 he was also stretching the songs out with ever-expanding instrumental jams.

This particular trend would continue into 1993, and arguably become the defining feature of the year's performances. Just looking at some of the track times on the back of this CD gives you a taste of what was going on: ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ (11:32), ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again’ (10:38), ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ (9:11). These songs were being stretched to the limit, and sometimes beyond.

I initially found the long track times and endless jamming off-putting, but over time I’ve come to see that that there was a certain logic to it. A possible explanation for it can be found in the Winston Watson documentary Bob Dylan Never Ending Tour Diaries: Drummer Winston Watson’s Incredible Journey. At one point Winston is talking about band chemistry, remarking that real bands are people who grow up playing music together for years. How do you replicate that kind of chemistry when you’ve been hired to play with people you’ve never met before? Winston explains that, when you’re being paid, that chemistry just has to happen.

I think that these long jams were Dylan’s way of making sure that it did happen – and it worked. Within a year, the John Jackson /Bucky Baxter/Tony Garnier/Winston Watson line-up had evolved into one of the tightest, most cohesive bands Bob would ever play with. Early 1993 shows like this one were simply the first tentative steps towards getting to that point.

Another interesting aspect of this show is Bob’s general onstage demeanour. He seems laser-focused, as if he knows exactly what he’s doing onstage and what he’s hoping to achieve. The difference from a couple of years earlier is remarkable; where 1991 often found Bob looking lost and engaging in strange between-song patter, this 1993 show finds him silent and stern, completely locked into the task at hand. You definitely get the sense that he’s hearing a sound in his head that he wants the band to reproduce – they aren’t quite there yet, but they will be.

Dylan is also doing interesting this with his voice. Playing around 100 shows every year had taken a swift and dramatic toll on Bob’s vocal chords, and Bob appears to have concluded that, if he was going to continue doing this, he needed to find a new way to sing. Here, we find him pushing himself beyond the limits of his range, using the melody of a song as a jumping off point from which to experiment. Once again, the fruits of this new approach would be revealed long-term, with the vocal renaissance of 1994-5. Dylan was playing the long game.

But what about the performance itself? Well, there’s not much particularly noteworthy about this show – it’s good, but perhaps best listened to in the context of what came afterwards. It does, however, contain my all-time favourite version of the Australian folk song ‘Jim Jones’ from Dylan’s 1992 album Good as I Been to You, with Bucky Baxter’s accordion giving the song even more of a nautical flavour than it already possesses. You can listen to it here.

I'm very fond of this show, even though there are many NET performances I would listen to ahead of it. As a physical object, it feels like a possession, a souvenir of an age (that I’m too young to have experienced) where CDs like this would have been like gold dust, a rare document of a Bob Dylan show that had taken place in some faraway country. I’m grateful to live in a time where live recordings are much more accessible, but that doesn’t stop discs like Bob Dylan and the Never Ending Tour Band from having a strange aura of magic about them.

The Changing Face of 'Idiot Wind'

When I was originally getting into Bob Dylan back in 2013, one of the first things I did (being blissfully unaware of Spotify at the time) was go to the library and take out a bunch of Dylan CDs. If I remember correctly, I came home with Blood on the Tracks, Good as I Been to You, Together Through Life, and Tempest – a pretty random selection, but one that offered a sampling of three distinct periods in Dylan’s career. I loved Tempest, and liked parts of Good as I Been to You and Together Through Life (my appreciation for them would grow over time), but the one that made the strongest impression was Blood on the Tracks, and one song in particular: 'Idiot Wind'.

I had never heard anything like 'Idiot Wind' before. In hindsight, I think this was the first time I had heard a song that was angry. The voice was hissing, spitting and snarling, soaked in sarcasm and contempt. What was this? More than anything I had heard up to that point, 'Idiot Wind' felt real, almost frighteningly so. Listening to it almost felt uncomfortable, as though I were intruding on a private conversation.

At the time, I had no idea about the convoluted backstory to this song and the album as a whole, and even less of an idea about the existence of studio outtakes and live versions of 'Idiot Wind' that cast the song under a new light altogether. But now that I am aware of all of that, I find the way this song evolved over time absolutely fascinating, to the point where I now hear each version as complementing the others, with all of them telling a larger story when considered as a whole. My own personal 'Idiot Wind series' is comprised of a) the album version b) a studio outtake recorded at the earlier New York sessions, commonly known as ‘the organ version’ thanks to Paul Griffin's haunting keyboard work c) the live performance from Fort Collins in 1976, which was featured as the final track of the Hard Rain album, and d) a live performance from 5th May 1992 in San Francisco.

The atmosphere of the album track is one of bitterness and recrimination, but the ‘organ version’ could not feel more different. This take has a peacefulness about it, as if the narrator has taken a walk after an argument with their spouse and, now that the initial anger has died down, is staring thoughtfully at the stars, thinking it all over. There’s a surprising tenderness in this version of the song – even the “you’re an idiot, babe” line is softer here, sometimes directed inwards, sometimes outwards, sometimes both – coupled with a deep sadness and confusion. He can see it’s all slipping away, but he doesn't know what to do about it. He's scared. This really hits home in a verse that didn’t make it onto the album, which is gut-wrenching in its portrayal of the narrator's bewilderment and fear:


Figured I’d lost you anyway

Why go on, what’s the use?

In order to get in a word with you

I’d have had to come up with some excuse

And it just struck me kind of funny...

The Fort Collins/Hard Rain version of 'Idiot Wind' once again offers us another mood altogether. It still feels like the same narrator from the previous two versions, but now he’s in a totally different frame of mind. He knows his marriage is broken beyond repair, and now he’s taking a perverse, drunken glee in demolishing what’s left of it. Of all of the performances of the song I’ve heard, this one is  the most unsettling. It has a self-destructive quality about it: it makes me think of things spectacular moments of destruction like a star imploding, or the death throes of some enormous sea creature. This is the end of the road set to music.

Except it wasn’t the end of the road. Sixteen years later, Bob unexpectedly returned to this song and this character, unveiling a new arrangement in Melbourne on 2nd April 1992, which remained in the setlist for the next several months and arguably peaked during May of that year. For a long time, my favourite performance of Idiot Wind from this period was the spectacular rendition from San Jose, but this has recently been knocked off the top spot by the version from 5th May in San Francisco, which has the added bonus of Jerry Garcia sitting in on electric guitar.

I often think that Garcia might have been the best sideman Dylan never had. As Andrew Muir remarked in One More Night: Bob Dylan’s Never Ending Tour, the Grateful Dead frontman was “one of the few who could walk onto Dylan’s stage and instantly be in tune to what was going on and able to add, almost immediately, something to the overall sound.” Jerry certainly does that here; just the way his guitar dances around Dylan’s vocal on the lines “What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good/ You find out when you reach the top, you’re on the bottom” is enough to make me wish he had joined Dylan’s band full time.

Dylan, meanwhile, brings an amazing range of emotion to his performance, everything from regret to paranoia to despair. This is still the same narrator from the earlier versions, but we now find him a shell of his former self, haunted by his past actions but still too proud to apologise, and perhaps knowing deep down that it’s far too late for that anyway. All he can do is keep arguing the same old points even though he knows he’s wrong, his every word another shovelful of dirt on the burial mound of this relationship. In the liner notes for his 1993 album World Gone Wrong, Dylan referred to this period of his Never Ending Tour as “The One Sad Cry of Pity Tour”, and that description suits this haunting version of 'Idiot Wind' down to the ground.

All of this speaks to Dylan’s extraordinary ability to rework his songs over the years, not just through rearrangement (apart from changing the key, the rearrangements to Idiot Wind have been relatively minimal) but also through dramatic interpretation. This skill is reminiscent of artists like Duke Ellington or Frank Sinatra, who were frequently able to infuse their old songs with new meaning and gravitas years after originally recording them. It remains to be seen if the story of 'Idiot Wind' is truly over for good, or if there is still a chapter yet to be written.