Bob Dylan - Songs For Dwarf Music

Bob Dylan - Songs For Dwarf Music

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

Side A:

1.  Million Dollar Bash

2.  Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread

3.  Please Mrs. Henry

4.  Crash on The Levee

5.  Lo and Behold!

6.  Tiny Montgomery

7.  This Wheels On Fire

Side B:

8.  You Ain't Going Nowhere

9.  I Shall Be Released

10.  Too Much of Nothing

11.  Tears of Rage

12.  Quinn The Eskimo

13.  Open The Door, Homer

14.  Nothing Was Delivered

This is a reconstruction of the 14-song acetate compiled in January 1968 of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes recordings for his music publishing company, Dwarf Music.  Intended for distribution to recording industry insiders in order to shop the songs around for other artists to cover, it was this acetate that was used to create the very first bootleg album, Great White Wonder.  Many believe this specific collection is the closest official word to a vintage, proper Dylan album compiled from the 1967 Basement Tapes recordings.  This reconstruction of that acetate uses the very best sources (namely the Bootleg Series vol 11) uses the correct takes in correct sequence and is presented in a unique mono mix.  As opposed to the overdubbed 1975 Basement Tapes album or even the 2014 Bootleg Series vol 11 box set, this reconstruction is how the material was originally presented and meant to be heard in early 1968.   Note that this is not necessarily an upgrade from my previous Basement Tapes reconstruction Big Pink, even though the sound quality certainly is an upgrade and they share 13 of the same 14 songs; both Songs For Dwarf Music and Big Pink attempt different goals through the same body of music. 

Infamously concluding his electric, amphetamine-fueled 1966 World Tour with a “debilitating” motorcycle accident, Bob Dylan was left to retire from the public eye and become the family-man he allegedly always wanted to be.  But his old desire to make music eventually crept in, which amounted to Dylan placing phone calls systematically to the members of The Hawks, his backing band for his previous tour.  Being on retainer, Robbie Robertson, Garth Hudson, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel—whom themselves were thinking about regrouping and renaming their own outfit into The Band—arrived to Dylan’s Woodstock home in the summer of 1967 and began simply jamming to old country, gospel and traditional standards while the world around them snacked on psychedelic pop.  Hudson recorded the highlights of the proceedings for posterity to two-track tape and the quintet quickly amassed a pile of reels, unsure exactly what to do with them.  The Basement Tapes were born.

But without a new Dylan album or tour on the horizon, manager Albert Grossman needed new product.  Thus the gears eventually shifted and the daily basement jams evolved into demo sessions for new Dylan compositions, intended to be sold to other artists.  Even though Dylan tailor-wrote each serious original for a specific artist, his originals were very different during this period, informed by the structure of the folk standards the quintet had jammed on during the previous months.  Dylan’s lyrics were paired down from the verbose poetics of Blonde on Blonde to be concise, with every singular line being important and justified; many songs became structurally and even thematically similar to sea shanties and drinking songs.  But the most notable characteristics are the full band arrangements, which often included: Dylan’s 12-string acoustic guitar and idiosyncratic voice; Rick Danko’s electric bass keeping the rhythm in Levon Helm's absence, reminiscent of Sun Records' drumless recordings; Richard Manuel’s piano keeping the backbone with Dylan’s acoustic; only Robbie Robertson’s tasteful electric lead guitar and Garth Hudson’s celestial electric organ remained from the previous year’s 'wild mercury sound’.  Remarkably, some of Bob Dylan’s most cherished songs spawned from these sessions and the Basement Tapes set the standard for Dylan’s concise songwriting method and style for his following albums, from John Wesley Harding up to Planet Waves. 

The first collection of demos was compiled by Hudson (who was acting as impromptu producer) in October 1967, a set of ten songs from Reels 8 & 9, sequenced in the order they were recorded (although “Tiny Montgomery” from Reel 4 was stuck in-between): Million Dollar Bash / Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread / Please Mrs. Henry / Crash on the Levee / Lo and Behold! / Tiny Montgomery / This Wheel’s On Fire / You Ain’t Going Nowhere / I Shall Be Released / Too Much of Nothing.  It was this original tape that secured the initial covers of the Basement Tapes material, including Flatt & Scruggs take on “Crash on the Levee”, Brian Auger & The Trinity’s take on “This Wheel’s On Fire”, The Byrds take on “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” and Peter, Paul & Mary’s take on “Too Much of Nothing.”

With The Byrds and Peter, Paul & Mary charting with Dylan originals, Albert Grossman asked for more songs.  A second, five-song tape was compiled in January 1968 with the best songs from Reels 10 & 13 that included: Tears of Rage / Quinn The Eskimo / Open The Door, Homer / Nothing Was Delivered / Get Your Rocks Off.  Eventually the final song was dropped, and the remaining four songs were tagged onto the end of the previous 10-song reel, creating the final 14-song acetate that lead to Manfred Mann’s take on “Quinn The Eskimo” charting as well as The Byrds take on “Nothing Was Delivered”.  It was this 14-song configuration that made the most rounds in the inner circles, arriving not only in the hands of both music industry professionals and curious musicians, but in the hands of Jann Wenner who famously published an article about the great unreleased Bob Dylan album in Rolling Stone.   It also arrived in the hands of Ken and Dub who pressed their own  vinyl run of the material (coupled with recordings from 1961) and sold their wares under-the-counter to drooling Dylan fans starving for the originals of his currently-charting originals otherwise were unavailable to the general public.  Eventually dubbed The Great White Wonder, this was the first bootleg record. 

The mythology of The Basement Tapes grew throughout the 60s and 70s, largely due to the notoriety of those specific Dylan songs he never released, Wenner’s Rolling Stone article and the emergence of bootleg recordings.  Meeting the demands for an official document of the Basement Tapes recordings, Robbie Robertson with Levon Helm (who did not appear in the Basement Tapes sessions until the 14-song acetate was completed) compiled and then overdubbed a double album of the recordings in 1975.  While a great listen, the inherent faults of the album (anachronistic overdubs, poor sound quality of some source material, inclusions of unrelated Band material, exclusion of “I Shall Be Released” and “Quinn the Eskimo”) did not quench many Dylan fans’ thirst for the vintage Basement Tapes recordings.  Since then, a number of bootlegs including A Tree With Roots and The Genuine Basement Tapes offered a more vintage anthology of the available material.  Both sets were finally trumped by the official 6-CD box set The Bootleg Series vol 11: The Basement Tapes Complete, remastered (mostly) from the master reels, presented as a modern centralized stereophonic mix.  The epic box set was everything a Basement Tapes aficionado would desire, but it lacked one thing: a remastered reproduction of that original fourteen-song acetate for Dwarf Music, the recording that started it all, what many Dylan fans believe is the true missing Dylan album from 1967. 

Recreating the original 14-song acetate—what  I have titled here as Songs For Dwarf Music—is a much easier task than it appears to be.  All the source material is available on Bootleg Series vol 11 at the highest sound quality possible.  The one kink is that it is in stereo with an overly-centered vocal track, while the original acetate is in mono.  Furthermore, I propose the Basement Tapes were meant to be heard in mono all along for a few reasons:

1) All of the tapes were tracked live to two-track tape, with Dylan’s acoustic and vocal in one track and all of the remaining instruments in the other track.  The end result, if mixed to stereo, is a difficult listen, akin to the awkward mixes of early Beatles albums in which the vocals are trapped in one channel and instruments in the other.  The logical solution is to make a final mix in mono and I believe that was Hudson’s intention while recording it. 

2) Any compilation of this material would have been used for industry insiders and played mainly in corporate offices, professional locations with no concern for stereophonic setups. 

3) In 1967, mono was the standard anyways; it would take a couple more years for stereo to become the predominant format

But how would have these mono mixes have been prepared in 1967?  Luckily we have fairly decent audio samples of “Million Dollar Bash” and “Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread” sourced from John Peel’s copy of the original acetate.  Using those mixes as a guideline, we can take the correct tracks from BS11 and split the left and right channels into separate tracks.  From there, the right channel (Dylan’s vocal/acoustic track) is reduced in volume by 28 dBs and the two tracks are remixed to mono.  The result is a mono mix with Manuel’s piano driving the song and Hudson’s organ up front in the mix, right behind Dylan’s voice.  This matches the levels found on John Peel’s copy of the acetate, which was how Hudson originally mixed the songs.  Making the assumption that all 14 songs were mixed this way, we apply these settings to all 14 songs (with the exception of “I Shall Be Released” which was already mixed with both channels at an equal volume on BT11; I instead created a mono fold-down that seemed to match the instrumental balance of the other 13 tracks). 

What songs should be included?  Luckily there is a lot of documentation that clarifies which takes were used and in what order, and we will follow that template (for better or for worse).  Side A of my reconstruction begins with take 2 of “Million Dollar Bash”, followed by take 2 of “Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread”, “Please Mrs. Henry”, take 2 of “Crash on the Levee”, take 2 of “Lo and Behold!”, “Tiny Montgomery” and “This Wheel’s On Fire”.  Side B begins with take 2 of “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” followed by take 2 of “I Shall Be Released”.  Take 1 of “Too Much of Nothing” was used on the acetate (as opposed to take 2 featured and overdubbed on the 1975 Basement Tapes album) and Peter, Paul and Mary’s cover version logically reflects that arrangement.  Likewise, take 1 of “Tears of Rage” (as opposed to take 3 on the 1975 Basement Tapes album) and take 1 of “Quinn The Eskimo” (as opposed to the superior take 2 on Biograph and The Essential Bob Dylan) were both featured on the original acetate.  This reconstruction concludes with takes 1 of “Open The Door, Homer” and (regrettably) take 1 of “Nothing Was Delivered”.  While I don’t totally agree on these take selections (notably for “Nothing Was Delivered” and “Quinn The Eskimo”) we will concede to present an accurate artifact. 

The final touch is the cover art, inspired by the blank, generic Emidisc sleeve that often housed these type of acetates, featuring only a typewritten title and tracklist, with some tracks even mistitled!  Also included are scans of three (of the reported eight) copies of the actual acetate disc labels as well as a tapebox scan of the master reel of Hudson’s initial 10-song configuration from October 1967.  So while BT11 is an amazing document of the entire Basement Tapes, presented here is what the genuine article was originally meant to be, if anything at all.  

Sources used:

The Bootleg Series vol 11: The Basement Tapes Complete

flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR and Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8

* md5 files, track notes and artwork included

 

Bob Dylan - Infidels (original mix)

Bob Dylan – Infidels

(original mix by soniclovenoize)

Side A:

1.  Jokerman

2.  Someone’s Got A Hold Of My Heart

3.  Neighborhood Bully

4.  License To Kill

5.  Blind Willie McTell

Side B:

6.  Man of Peace

7.  Foot of Pride

8.  I and I

9.  Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight

Bob Dylan, what the hell were you thinking?  This is what we asked him all through the 1980s.  Coming off a trilogy of non-secular music that is frankly off-putting and of little inventive substance, Bob Dylan returned to the studio in 1983 with Dire Straits mastermind Mark Knopfler as producer to mark Dylan’s comeback album to secular music.   Infidels was intended  as a return to his idiosyncratic poetic acrobatics and interesting song structures with a lean, meat-and-potatoes rock band production (in contrast to his overproduced slew of post-Desire albums)…  Or so we thought. 

What we got instead was stereotype mainstream early 80s mixing and some of Dylan’s best songs of the decade left on the cutting room floor, mostly due to Knopfler’s early exit from the album, leaving Dylan to finish it himself and make rather disastrous creative choices.  Infidels could have been the best album of his post-Desire era and, while admittedly not a masterpiece, could have been on par with his much stronger albums John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline or Desire (or at least certainly superior to New Morning, Planet Waves or Street Legal anyways).   But after all these years, can Infidels be saved?   I believe it can.  This is a reconstruction of the album that Infidels could have been, utilizing alternate “drier” rough mixes and the early tracklist of the album.  And yes, it includes the unreleased full-band version of “Bind Willie McTell” which is a 50% improvement in itself. 

Dylan recorded a bulk of material for his supposed comeback album throughout April and May of 1983, new originals, random covers and aimless jams alike.  At the conclusion of the sessions, Dylan and Knopfler had compiled a rough mix of an album that contained nine songs: “Blind Willie McTell”, “Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight”, “Foot of Pride”, “I and I”, “Jokerman”, “Neighborhood Bully”, “License To Kill”, “Man of Peace” and “Sweetheart Like You.”  Knopfler’s story was that he was forced to leave the sessions early because of touring obligations and offered to create a final mix of the album upon his return.  Dylan declined, insisting that his label needed the final mix immediately and he choose to create the final mix himself with the studio’s house engineer.  It was at this point in time that “Foot of Pride” and “Blind Willie McTell”, the later unanimously hailed as one of the best songs of Dylan’s career let alone the decade, was dropped from the album and replaced by inane “Union Sundown”.  Dylan also helped himself to additional now-antiquated production giving the whole album the slick 1980s rock 'gleam' that makes Infidels sound incredibly dated.  He also rerecorded vocals for a number of tracks, specifically giving “Jokerman” a new vocal that sounds as if Dylan is falling asleep at the mic.  Why he did this, no one knows; some believe Dylan made artistic choices that were intentionally counter-intuitive and contrary to his inner circle’s recommendations.  Some believe he's mad.  Either way, that was the Infidels that was released, without Knopfler’s valuable final input. 

The first step in my reconstruction is to fix the dated 80s production and utilize alternate mixes for all of the songs.  We are lucky enough to have excellent quality rough mixes of almost all the serious contenders for the album, taken from the bootleg Outfidel Intakes, which apparently received a recent 24-bit remaster by a fan using CEDAR mastering software (kudos to their fantastic job).  These mixes all lack the overdubs Dylan and Knopfler made, as well as the annoying mixing techniques Dylan oversaw himself in June.  They are all straight-forward basic tracks with a rather drier, grittier and often more upfront vocal track.  While the typical 80s-rock sound is inescapable for Infidels no matter how you cut it (it was recorded with the Dire Straits guitar sound and a reggae rhythm section!), these mixes allow the songs to breathe and is closer to Knopfler’s alleged original intent for the sound of the album. 

Next we sequence the tracks utilizing the stronger songs that were cut from the released version, replacing the weaker ones.  While we don’t have the specific track order, we do know what songs were on the original tracklist.  If we make the assumption that the songs were in the same basic order as on the officially released album, then we are left with the seven Infidels tracks (minus “Union Sundown”) that require “Blind Willie McTell” and “Foot of Pride” to fill in the gaps to make two sides of an LP.  If the fantastic full-band electric version of “Blind Willie McTell” (as opposed to the longer, acoustic version found on The Bootleg Series 1-3) is placed on side A and “Foot of Pride” on side B, we are left with two 23-minute sides.  This must be more than a coincidence!  Thus “Foot of Pride” effectively replaced “Union Sundown” on side B, and the band-take of “Blind Willie McTell” is a powerful closer to side A.  I believe this was Knopfler’s original tracklist. 

One final adjustment made that admittedly was not on Knopfler’s theoretical rough mix is a result of my own creative license, and that is the replacing of the clichéd dullard “Sweetheart Like You” with the slightly more interesting fan favorite “Someone’s Got A Hold Of My Heart”, another Why-was-this-left-off-the-album!?-track.  It was not on Knopfler’s rough running order, presumably because Dylan never thought it was finished; the fact that the song was later rewritten several times and completely simplified into Empire Burlesque’s atrocious “Tight Connection To My Heart” seems to validate this assertion.  But I hear nothing wrong with this basic-rock alternate version used here (as opposed to the dismal radio-friendly version found on The Bootleg Series 1-3) but it keeps a better momentum for side A and is a great upgrade to the trite “Sweetheart Like You”, a song that truly deserved to be dropped from the album. 

Is Infidels truly a good Dylan album?  Honestly, we are unsure because its praise is grounded solely in its historical context rather than the quality of the actual material: it’s not a Christian Dylan album and it’s not complete shit.  But my presented original mix reconstruction will hopefully demonstrate that it could have been a highlight of his later career—if you don’t completely loathe 1980s mainstream rock that is, which Infidels certainly is and always be.  But now it can be a bit less of that, for what it’s worth, and we can hear the songs for what they are, rather than just hearing the time that they existed in. 

Sources used:

Bob Dylan – Outfidel Intakes (bootleg)

flac --> wav --> editing in Audacity & Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8
*md5, artwork and tracknotes included

Bob Dylan - Big Pink

Bob Dylan - Big Pink

(soniclovenoize Basement Tapes reconstruction)

Side A:
1.    Odds and Ends
2.    Million Dollar Bash
3.    Lo and Behold!
4.    This Wheel’s On Fire
5.    I Shall Be Released
6.    Please Mrs. Henry
7.    Too Much Of Nothing
Side B:
8.    Tears Of Rage
9.    Yea! Heavy and A Bottle Of Bread
10.    Crash On The Levee
11.    You Ain’t Goin Nowhere
12.    Quinn The Eskimo
13.    Open The Door, Homer
14.    Nothing Was Delivered

This is the Bob Dylan album that never was: his Basement Tapes, organized into a singular, cohesive album as it would have existed in 1967.  I’ve used all the original recordings that do not have the extra overdubs found on the official release from 1975, and I’ve remixed this into true stereo.  This will be nothing you haven’t heard before (although they are all my own unique stereo mixes), but this is presented as the presumed album that chronologically would have appeared between Blonde On Blonde and John Wesley Harding. 

Throughout the first half of the 1960s, Bob Dylan had evolved from an acoustic troubadour into amphetamine-fueled rocker, culminating by his 1966 Tour, backed by The Hawks.  He had encompassed the ever-changing social and musical dynamics of the 1960s and now the ears of the public were turned to Bob Dylan in a time of Brian Wilson’s symphonic pop and The Beatles neo-psychedelic rock.  Ready to hear Dylan’s next triumphant move, they instead heard the sound of a motorcycle crash, putting Dylan out of commission and forcing him into hiding in Woodstock, New York.   

By the summer of 1967, when psychedelic music was running rampant, Dylan was slowly joined by members of The Hawks—now known simply as The Band—and began recording basement jams of folk standards as Dylan recuperated from his crash.  The jams quickly evolved into original Bob Dylan compositions, initiating a completely new era of Dylan’s songcraft, both lyrically and compositionally.  Gone were the protest refrains, surrealist verses, heavy subject matter and epic song-lengths that had dominated his work in the previous six albums.  The songs were more concise, lyrically free-form and nonsensical, the arrangements Americana—the complete opposite of the music being played outside that basement studio in Woodstock, New York, which The Band called The Pig Pink.  What’s more, the recordings pioneered the Lo-Fi Movement: sonic clarity was abandoned to capture the laid-back mood and atmosphere and the performances were even sloppy at times! 

But the hundreds of songs that Dylan and The Band produced at this time remained unheard to the general public aside from bootlegs and the inner-circle of music publishing brokers.  It wasn’t until the end of 1967 when Dylan released his subdued and stripped folk album John Wesley Harding, which echoed all the musical components he had developed in the basement of The Big Pink earlier that year.  Brilliant as it was, the album was an entirely different set of songs; absent were the Big Pink classics, apparently reserved for other artists through a collection of 14 of Dylan’s Big Pink songs circulated as a publishing demo tape for his own Dwarf Music.

After almost a decade of bootlegging what was known as Dylan’s unheard masterpieces, 1975’s The Basement Tapes was the official word from the mouth of the man himself, a 2LP collection of selected Big Pink basement recordings.  But was a true representation of these basement tapes really what the public received?  Most of the material was slightly altered with new overdubs for a more “releasable” sound; the songs were mixed to duophonic fake stereo; Dylan’s tracks were interspersed with The Band’s originals that were never recorded during the Big Pink Sessions; and die-hard fans noticed the lack of some of Dylan’s most classic recordings. 

This is an attempt to rectify those errors and omissions, and recreate what never was … What if the material recorded during the original Big Pink Sessions had been an actual official album, released in 1967, in-between Blonde On Blonde and John Wesley Harding?  I have assembled the best of the 1967 basement tapes, remixed them into true stereo and created a cohesive album, the Dylan masterpiece that never was. 

*md5 file, artwork, and track notes included.

How does one create an album that never was, to choose 12 or 14 from a list of hundreds of recordings?  This is a daunting task for anyone, especially when this is a Bob Dylan album.  It’s impossible to know what this man had intended so many years ago—we don’t know what he’s intending at any given time in the present!  But we do have a big clue that serves as a starting point and how to construct a 1967 album of Big Pink material.

Our first clue is in the form of the 14-song Dwarf Music demo.  These were the songs shopped around in the fall if 1967 to music publishers, in the hopes to sell the songs as hits for other artists.  The tracklist was: Million Dollar Bash; Yea! Heavy and A Bottle Of Bread; Please Mrs. Henry; Crash on The Levee; Lo and Behold!; Tiny Montgomery; This Wheel’s On Fire; You Ain’t Goin Nowhere; I Shall Be Released; Tears Of Rage; Too Much Of Nothing; Quinn The Eskimo; Open The Door, Homer; Nothing Was Delivered.  These 14 songs are pretty much the core of the quality Dylan originals from the Big Pink Sessions, which is further supported by their inclusion on The Basement Safety Tape, two reels of backup stereo masters.  If there was ever an album planned for this material, this was it, or something close to it.

Although the track selection itself is rather strong, the problem is the sequencing.  The majority of the “nonsense songs” (“Lo and Behold!”, “Yea! Heavy and A Bottle Of Bread”, etc.) are grouped together as the first half of the album, while the more refined “serious” songs (“I Shall Be Released”, “Too Much Of Nothing”, etc.) are grouped together at the end of the album.  My reconstruction attempts to spread the fun songs amongst the serious songs to add an element of balance.  Also note that the track “Odds and Ends” was used as the opening number, effectively replacing “Tiny Montgomery” in the running order due to time constraints and quality control (It was also appropriately excluded from the Basement Safety Tape stereo reels).  Notice that thus we have alternate versions of “Too Much Of Nothing” and “Nothing Was Delivered.”  Finally, two 20-minute sides were constructed as per industry standards at the time. 

Sources used for my set were the remastered, pitch-corrected and cleaned-up versions taken from the A Tree With Roots bootleg box set and the Complete Basement Safety Tape.  They are all the original recordings, minus the extraneous overdubs The Band had recorded in 1975.  All tracks existed in their master stereo 2-track form with both tracks panned hard and left.  For my recreation, I chose to create a more palatable stereo remix: the track 1 (vocal/guitar/piano) is panned at 1 o’clock and the remaining track 2 (bass/organ/drums/lead guitar) is panned at 9 o’clock.  The effect is a vocal track mostly centered--but slightly to the right--so that the reverb appears to move into the right channel, with the remaining instruments panned to the left.  The mix becomes cleaner and more enjoyable, giving space and atmosphere non-existent on the originals, albeit a less dense mix since they are minus the later-day overdubs.   This benefits “I Shall Be Released” and “Quinn The Eskimo” the most, as they were never released in stereo form whatsoever. 

This album’s reconstruction allows the listener a better insight to the attitude and stripped-down demeanor of the original sessions, offering a concise and cohesive package of the sessions which can fit nicely into Dylan’s discography.  Artwork is included.  Enjoy, and “there was no more to tell…"