Bob Dylan: 'Another Self Portrait'

Note:  In recent music-related posts I’ve attempted to focus on some kind of subjective response to the music at least as much as any contextual considerations.  In this case, it’s impossible to escape context by the very nature of the album under discussion.

The Overall Package Is Great But Don't Give Up The Day Job, Bob

And so, the regurgitation of Bob Dylan’s hidden back catalogue rolls inexorably onward.  ‘Another Self Portrait’ is the 10th volume in the so-called ‘Official Bootleg Series’ of such recordings.  For those with any interest in the man’s work, the question must arise, will there ever be an end to all this unheard material for us to spend our hard earned on?  In fairness, though, most of these releases have been illuminating documents, often serving to fill in big gaps in Dylan’s recording history or shed new light on his existing back catalogue.  In addition to their often startling musical content, they are generally well researched and packaged with extensive written notes and archive photos.  Certainly, as such a prolific and unofficially bootlegged artist as Dylan moves deeper into his 8th decade, it seems valid to put his musical affairs into some coherent order.

Bob Dylan, 'Self Portrait', 1970.  His Original Cover Image Was Inept But Far More Effective.

Volume 10 may just be the most surprising bulletin from the archives yet, as it provides an opportunity to repair the perceived damage done by Dylan’s much-derided 1970 album, - the original ‘Self Portrait’.  It allows us to appreciate how that deeply flawed piece was, as is acknowledged, Dylan’s attempt to sabotage his unwanted messianic status.  But also, how seriously engaged he actually was with much of the music he made at that time.

It also demonstrates how the records he released during his doomed attempt at some kind of settled family life in Woodstock, might be seen as a musical continuum rather than a series of possibly perplexing, discrete statements.  ‘John Wesley Harding’, ‘Nashville Skyline’, Self Portrait’, ‘New Morning’, ‘The Basement Tapes’, and indeed, the new material on ‘More Bob Dylan Greatest Hits’, now feel like a significant period in Dylan’s artistic development and this new issue helps to tie that together even further.  I’ve always been drawn to those less well-favoured releases, (being habitually suspicious of standard critical accounts), so this is indeed welcome.

The original ‘Self Portrait’ was an over-long ragbag of mismatched, misjudged components although not without its moments of interest, resonance or even beauty.  Dylan himself claimed to have thrown everything at the wall then included it all anyway, regardless of whether or not it stuck.  It features several pieces that might have made it onto its predecessors, - the spartan ‘John Wesley Harding’ or heavily Countrified ‘Nashville Skyline’.  Sadly, most sound like they’d have been second choices on either album.  It also finds room for covers of Paul Simon and Gordon Lightfoot songs, several standards, (his ‘Blue Moon’ is astonishing), and some genuinely interesting folkloric snippets from the songbook of ‘Old Weird America’.  There are extracts from his patchy Isle of White Festival performance, with The Band in dutiful tow, and some bits of instrumental filler, (‘Wigwam’ points the way toward 1973’s soundtrack for the film ‘Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid’, (an album I love).  It includes some truly bizarre arrangements with lush strings and crooned backing vocals and a variety of performance and singing styles, (including that smooth Nashville voice).  That the album opens with something resembling a heavily orchestrated opening title theme, featuring all female voices, (‘All the tired Horses’), underlines that this was far from standard Dylan fare.  I can only imagine what dedicated Bobcats made of it in 1970 [1.].

Dylan Walks Back Into Town.

‘Another Self Portrait’ scores big by reinstating several of the original’s key songs, either as alternative takes or by removing the overdubs that had lent them a faintly ludicrous flavour.  It’s fair to say that, in every case these versions feel fresher, and far more sincere.  Songs like ‘Little Sadie’, ‘Days Of 49’, ‘Alberta #3’ or ‘Belle Isle’, benefit massively from these more committed performances and simpler arrangements featuring Guitarist David Bromberg and pianist Al Kooper.  Dylan sounds engaged with the material and there’s a real sense that he was drawing on his vast knowledge of American folk tradition to find new ways forward in his own art.  This wasn’t a case of co-opting traditional forms for the protest movement, as before, but a humbler process of reintegrating his own practice into the larger tradition that shaped him and the country he travelled, long before he was an entertainment big shot or ‘The Voice of a Generation’.  

If that was an intrinsically conservative impulse, we should hardly be surprised.  Dylan’s own creative trajectory throughout the 60s was famously steep and the period of social and artistic change for which he became a figurehead had already proved unsustainable.  He had effectively burned out around the time of his mysterious motorcycle accident in 1966, and now, so had the decade that spawned his art.  His desire to set up home with his young family in a rural backwater, away from public scrutiny, and explore more rooted musical forms, is understandable. 

Bob Dylan & The Band, 'The Basement Tapes', 1967/75

‘The Basement Tapes’ that he’d recorded with The Band in Woodstock in 1967 [2.] showed there was a rich seam of sounds and imagery to be found within the old music and ‘Nashville Skyline’ demonstrated that Dylan was capable of finding deeper value in an unfashionable, ‘down home’ style.  This new archival release underlines that by including unreleased and alternative takes from both those sets.  Unfortunately, nothing he’d yet tried in Woodstock could shake off the burdensome public profile and weight of expectation on Dylan’s shoulders.  If the combination of inferior versions, eccentric material and deliberately contrary artistic choices on ‘Self Portrait’ couldn’t do it, what would?

Bob Dylan, 'Nashville Skyline', 1969

Yet, we can now see that Dylan didn’t throw everything at the wall.  ‘Another Self Portrait’ features numerous unreleased cuts from the original sessions and I think the inclusion of pretty much any of them would have made the original album stronger.  To my ear his rendition of the traditional ‘Spanish Is The Loving Tongue’ is amongst the most sensitive things he ever recorded, whilst ‘Annie’s Going To Sing Her Song’, ‘Railroad Bill’, ‘Thirsty Boots’, ‘This Evening So Soon’, ‘These Hands’ and ‘Tattle O’Day’ all benefit from strong performances with Bob in fine voice.  ‘House Carpenter’ is a familiar folk standard that he attacks with a swing and totally inhabits.

Just four months after ‘Self Portrait’ appeared, Dylan released ‘New Morning’, an album that, (despite an overtly religious ending), has always been among my favourites from his discography.  It was essentially cut from the same cloth of ongoing recording sessions as its predecessor but is everything that record wasn’t.  Whilst still stylistically varied, this one hangs together as a unit and, above all, sounds like a Bob Dylan album.  It’s pervaded by a strongly reflective, Gospel sensibility and, for me, is the strongest distillation of Dylan’s search for a cleaner, more honest mode of existence.  The motivation behind it seems genuine and personal.

Bob Dylan, 'New Morning', 1970

Hence, it is the inclusion of alternative and unreleased items from that album on this new collection that possibly fascinate me most of all.  The two dramatically different versions of ‘I Went To See The Gypsy’, are terrific, - not better than the album version, just different.  ‘Sign On The Window’ is a song I would happily have played at my funeral and has always felt like one of the purest, most reflective things Dylan ever did.  Strange then, to discover that he once contemplated kitting it out with lush orchestration, prominent organ stabs and a cascading harp.

In a similar fashion, we can hear how the joyous title track on ‘New Morning’ actually benefitted from the omission of the forceful horns and superfluous string section featured in this arrangement.  There’s nothing actually wrong with the slow paced version of ‘If Dogs Run Free’ here but pleasingly, I now find that the choice of the eccentric scat-jazz version on the finished album is fully justified.  It really comes to life there.  The same is essentially true of ‘Time Passes Slowly’, - a song that migrated from the two dramatically different versions featured here to the final album version’s almost crystalline evocation of a simple life well spent.

Ultimately, I find ‘Another Self Portrait’ fulfills it’s brief admirably.  It provides us with a wealth of evidence that, as the 1960s rolled over into the 70s, Bob Dylan was actually retooling both his art and his entire way of life, not just raking up disappointing scraps from a prolonged sabbatical.  If ‘Self Portrait’ was a dismissive diversion tactic in the midst of that period, the music here proves that, had Dylan chosen, it might have been a much stronger and wholehearted, condensed statement.  We can also see how the material that coalesced into ‘New Morning’ was subsequently refined and pared back to achieve the simple beauty it eventually achieved.

Dylan Attempts To Mend Some Fences

I think that, for all its inherent strengths and weaknesses, an important reason I've stuck with Bob Dylan’s music over the years is its consistent ability to fuse art with the unfolding drama of one man’s life without excessive recourse to autobiography.  Amongst the woods of upstate New York he may have shed his previous social engagement, or subsequent drug-fuelled electricity, but was in search of something more cleansing and infused with personal integrity.  I never fail to be moved by the following lines from ‘Sign On The Window’.  They cut through the merely trite to illustrate not only Dylan's state of mind but a more universal impulse also:

“Build me a cabin in Utah

Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout

Have a bunch of kids who’ll call me 'Pa'

That must be what it’s all about

That must be what it’s all about” [3.].

[1.]:  Dylan Aficionado, Greil Marcus famously began his review of 'Self Portrait' with the words, "What's this shit?".  'Self Portrait No. 25', New York, Rolling Stone Magazine, June 1970.

[2.]:  Bob Dylan & The Band, 'The Basement Tapes', CBS Records, 1975.  This extensive catalogue of original and traditional material was recorded in the basement of 'Big Pink', (The Band's house in Woodstock), following Dylan's bike crash.  Originally attended as demos. for other artists to sing, it has since been cited as a milestone in Dylan's discography and major influence on Folk Rock on both sides of The Atlantic.  The official double album released in 1975, (with memorable artwork), is only a small selection of the material recorded in 1967.

[3.]:  Bob Dylan, 'Sign On The Window', Published: Big Sky Music, 1970.