Bob Dylan –
Eat The Document Soundtrack
(soniclovenoize
reconstruction)
Side A:
1. Tell Me, Momma
2. I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never
Have Met)
3. Ballad of a Thin Man
4. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
Side B:
5. Mr. Tambourine Man
6. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
7. One Too Many Mornings
8. Like a Rolling Stone
My New Year’s
Resolution is to keep this blog updated!
Starting off 2017 is an album that truly never was: the theoretical soundtrack
to the unreleased documentary film Eat The Document, which chronicled Bob Dylan’s
famous 1966 World Tour, backed by what would become The Band. A behind-the-scenes look at a controversial and
confrontational moment in rock history in which Dylan “went electric” to the
great chagrin of his folk-purist audiences, the tour is filled with impassioned
and even spiteful performances, a direct response from the jeers from the audience who
thought he “sold out”. This reconstruction
compiles the soundboard recordings of the actual, full performances only
partially featured on Eat The Document, presented in (mostly) film order,
edited to sound as a continuous performance and effectively becoming a unique Bob
Dylan live album in itself.
Bob Dylan’s famed
“Electric Trilogy”—1965’s Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and
1966’s Blonde On Blonde—proved that rock music could be intellectual by combining
his often abstract poetics into a rock band context. While obviously a success on record, Dylan
slowly tested the waters for a live incarnation of his vision throughout 1965, beginning
with his performance at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25th, backed by the Buttersfield Blues Band--a performance allegedly infuriating Pete
Seeger who attempted to cut all power to the stage! Deciding he needed a formal and relatively
trustworthy backing band for the following tours, Dylan hired Canadian bar-rockers The Hawks to back
him on sporadic gigs throughout 1965. Although The Hawks—who would later re-title themselves to The Band and see their own
success—proved to be an excellent backing band in a live setting, they failed
to accommodate Dylan in the studio. Early sessions for Highway 61 Revisited’ s follow-up in January 1966 proved unusable to Dylan’s standard and he relocated to Nashville
to finish the album; only “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)” from the
January New York sessions made the album.
Regardless,
Dylan regrouped with his road-tested crew, intending to promote his new album
Blond On Blonde with a world tour. Although
the tour went underway in February—before the album was even finished!—two new
faces slipped into Dylan’s entourage by April.
The first was soundman Richard Alderson, who provided the PAs for the
European leg of the World Tour. Personally
invited to make soundboard recordings of that leg of the tour by Dylan (in
exchange for assistance in building Alderson’s dream recording studio),
Alderson ran the sound while taping almost everything on a trusty mono Nagra
recorder. He was no stranger to this,
since he had also recorded Dylan’s set at The Gaslight Café in 1962.
The second
new face was filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker, who was tasked to film Dylan’s tour—onstage
and off—to make a comprehensive document of the turbulent events. Like Alderson, Pennebaker too was no stranger
to Dylan’s inner-circle, as he had recently filmed Dylan’s acoustic European
tour the previous year, eventually released as Don’t Look Back, the penultimate
statement from Dylan’s live acoustic period.
Just like the previous year, Pennebaker filmed behind the scenes: early morning
hangovers in hotel rooms; backstage celebrity jam
sessions; furious audience members; an awkward limo ride with John Lennon. Pennebaker also filmed the live performances themselves,
usually on-stage with the man himself, getting extreme close-ups of a jubilant Dylan
relishing in challenging the audience, their outrage only fueling him to rock
harder. But unlike Don’t Look Back (in which
Dylan himself had little input), Dylan wanted directorial credit and final cut privilege. After a handshake deal, Pennebaker was slated
as cinematographer with the intent of Dylan and his crew editing Pennebaker’s footage
for the ABC Television series ABC Stage 67.
The tour
closed with a pair of shows at The Royal Albert Hall on May 26th and
27th, which were professionally recorded to three-track by CBS
Records for a possible live album, but it never materialized (within the proceeding
50 years, anyways). Exhausted, Dylan retired
to his new home in Woodstock, NY for a temporary break until a motorcycle crash
on July 29th gave him an excuse to retire from the live stage for an
indefinite amount of time. Meanwhile,
Pennebaker and Bob Neuwirth compiled their own edit of the footage, tentatively
called You Know Something Is Happening. This
edit was rejected by Dylan that summer, and he proceeded to create his own edit
of the tour footage with Howard Alk and Gordon Quinn assisting. Influenced by the surrealism movement, Dylan’s cut
of the film relied on no established narrative, featured no complete performances
and was assembled in no specific order. It
was titled Eat The Document, a paraphrased quip by music journalist Al Aronowitz suggesting how to approach the documentary medium itself. Of course, ABC rejected Eat The Document as
being incomprehensible to the general audience and has remained unreleased ever
since.
Uneaten documents
of the 1966 Tour eventually leaked out over time, beginning with bootleg copies
of Alderson’s acetate recordings.
Reputation grew of the confrontational tour, which even led to a
legendary misappropriation of a legendary show. The Manchester Free Trade Hall show on May 17th
featured a legendary jeer—calling Dylan a “Judas”, in which Dylan responds “You’re
a liar!” and tells the band to “Play it fucking loud!” The initial bootlegger intentionally mislabeled
the show as being at the Royal Albert Hall so the records could be
stealthy pressed as the album Royal by Albert Hall. The bootleg’s fame had grown so much that an
official recording sourced from CBS’s multitracks was scheduled in the 90s, even
perpetuating its mythos by retaining the incorrect venue location as the Royal
Albert Hall! While this pristine stereo mix
of the show was scrapped by Dylan, a bootleg sourced from a leaked
Sony Records DAT tape appeared in 1995 as Guitars Kissing & The
Contemporary Fix. An official remixed rawer version that featured more of the room ambience was finally approved by
Dylan and released as The Bootleg Series Vol 4 in 1998.
Pennebaker’s
footage itself was scarcely seen aside from bootleg videos and private showings
of Eat The Document until Martin Scorsese’s 2005 biopic No Direction Home. Unlike Eat The Document, No Direction Home
featured complete performances and even featured the entire Judas/Liar
affair. Finally, the 36-CD box set The
1966 Live Recordings was released in 2016, containing all of Alderson’s
surviving soundboard tapes as well as the three shows professionally recorded
to three-track by CBS (as well as a handful of audience tapes to represent the
missing shows). Due to the sudden availability
of audio recordings paired with the No Direction Home footage, some online sleuths—notably
members of the Expecting Rain forums—were able to piece together what specific performances
were originally featured on Eat The Document, a task that was previously impossible
due to Dylan & Alk’s abstract film editing techniques. For the first time in fifty years, we are
able to piece together an actual soundtrack to this film that never was!
All recordings
on this reconstruction are taken from The 1966 Live Recordings, all being
Alderson’s fantastic mono soundboard recordings. The tracks are presented in the order as seen
in Eat The Document, with the exception being that “Mr. Tambourine Man” is
moved up to open Side B as a sort of acoustic intermission, and “Like a Rolling
Stone” is moved down to end the album and create a finale. Side A opens with the energetic Liverpool 5/14/66
performance of “Tell Me, Momma”, which was also featured on The Band’s 2005
anthology A Musical History. This is followed
by the driving Cardiff 5/11/66 take of “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We
Never Have Met)”. While the film
features a montage of three performances of “Ballad of a Thin Man” (from
Newcastle, Cardiff and Glasgow), here we will use the entire Newcastle 5/21/66 performance
in which Dylan truly accuses the audience itself to be the flabbergasted Mr.
Jones. Concluding the side is the anguished
Belfast 5/6/66 performance of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.”
Side B
begins with what we now know as the serene Newcastle performance of “Mr. Tambourine
Man”, which merges into the rollicking Liverpool “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down.” Next is the dusty Belfest performance of “One
Too Many Mornings”; since the recording was incomplete, a patch is used from Sheffield
5/16/66 to create a full take of the song which luckily includes a large amount
of booing from the audience, followed by Dylan’s taunting. After an audience member requests his biggest
hit, Dylan obliges and the album concludes with the powerful Liverpool “Like a Rolling Stone”. The resulting album not only fills in the ambiguity
left from Eat The Document, but creates a hair-raising live record filled with
some of the highlights from his 1966 Tour, worthy of a theoretical release in March
1967 (a place surely taken by Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits). Although as an imaginary soundtrack to a film that was never released, it's a bit of a stretch... but when you got
nothing, you got nothing to lose.
Sources
used:
The 1966
Live Recordings (2016 Columbia Records)
flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR and Goldwave -->
flac encoding via TLH lv8
*md5, artwork and tracknotes included
*md5, artwork and tracknotes included