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Sunday, July 28, 2013

The Laboratory of the Cutting Room Floor: Anticipating Bob Dylan's Another Self Portrait

CBS Records announced this past week the forthcoming August release of Bob Dylan's Another Self Portrait (which contains session material from that original 1970 album as well as its follow-up, New Morning). It's hard to know what to expect. As another instalment in their Dylan Bootleg Series, which takes us again into their vaults to experience unreleased material, CBS is calling Another Self Portrait an opportunity to "give fans a chance to reappraise the pivotal recordings that marked Dylan's artistic transformation as the 1960s ended and the 1970s began." But the record they've chosen is probably the most reviled in Dylan's catalogue. It also shows us the pitfalls of selling goods defined by the iconic name of the artist rather than by the quality of the material within.

When he released Self Portrait, Bob Dylan essentially pulled a fast one on his fans. And the critics largely hated it. In Rolling Stone, critic Greil Marcus opened his epic review by asking, "What is this shit?" What was this shit? Besides the sly joke of the album's title (he performs mostly covers rather than original material), Dylan positioned the two-record set as a riposte aimed at those who wished to hold him to the mantle of being a spokesman of his generation. "I wish these people would just forget about me," Dylan told Rolling Stone in 1984 looking back at Self Portrait. "I wanna do something they can't possibly like, they can't relate to. They'll see it, and they'll listen, and they'll say, 'Well, let's get on to the next person. He ain't sayin' it no more. He ain't given' us what we want,' you know? They'll go on to somebody else." But the record was also aiming to achieve something more. It represented a somewhat daring, yet failed, attempt to conceptually put his music in the context of the American songbook of Tin Pan Alley. So besides including live versions of his own "Like a Rolling Stone" and "The Mighty Quinn" (from the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival), he performed Rodgers and Hart's "Blue Moon", Elmore James's "It Hurts Me Too," plus traditional folk material like "Alberta" and "Little Sadie." Self Portrait doesn't fall apart because the concept is bad. It's that Dylan can't fully commit himself to the concept.

Bob Dylan around 1970
The performances are often so shoddy and poorly arranged that their inclusion seems haphazard. Not only are the recordings from the Isle of Wight horribly sloppy, Dylan's cover of Paul Simon's "The Boxer" (where he painfully attempts to be both Simon and Garfunkel), Gordon Lightfoot's "Early Morning Rain," and The Everly Brothers' "Take a Message to Mary" add nothing to the originals. Unlike on Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Harding, albums in which Dylan's highly subjective voice demanded to be heard and the songs themselves were bold, funny and could nail an epoch, in Self Portrait he disappears into the arrangements. The songs sing the singer – and not very well. With the exception of a few tracks, like "Copper Kettle" and "All the Tired Horses" (where his voice is actually nowhere to be found, but his spirit is), Self Portrait resembles a bootleg album of hastily assembled tracks. (The album's single, "Wigwam," in which Dylan trills over a bed of Muzak that might have been dreamed up by James Last, is Self Portrait's ultimate sick joke.) There is little on the record, in other words, that illustrates what made Bob Dylan one of our most significant songwriters and performers.

So how does one approach songs from the cutting room floor of an album that should have perhaps been left on the cutting room floor? I haven't obviously heard the record yet so I can't say. But the fragments in the teaser trailer CBS put together do illustrate a man tracing the roots of both his musical path and interests. When his near-fatal motorcycle accident in 1966 forced him into semi-retirement, it was as if he also retired from the violent battles with his audience to pull back from redefining himself. So he retreated not only into domesticity, but into one of the fruits that domesticity provides: your own record collection. In the safety of his own living room, he became the audience rather than the performer facing one. Among other things, Self Portrait suffers from the sense that Dylan is playing the songs to himself rather than to the listener. But the samples I've heard on Another Self Portrait, from Eric Anderson's "Thirsty Boots" and Tom Paxton's "Annie's Gonna Sing Her Song," actually reach out to an audience. You hear the threads of what not only came to define the musical territory Dylan had already been mining to that point, but also what would later become the Bob Dylan Theme Time Radio Hour on satellite radio. On that program Dylan, as the host, took us on musical journeys through the history of American music – blues, jazz, show-tunes, rock and folk – using a theme like 'the weather' as the clothes line on which he hung the songs. On Another Self Portrait, he also extends to his listeners the country sound he was immersed in with his previous album, Nashville Skyline, by reminding us (as he had on the irreplaceable The Basement Tapes) that his music was not narrowed by the social protests of the topical song. In his mind, the American songbook is an evolving and expanding catalogue tracing a map of the nation's struggles and triumphs. 


Another Self Portrait could very well be the album that Self Portrait wasn't. It may compare to how Good As I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993) set Dylan up for his series of records (Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft) that brought his voice back to its authentic sound. In those two early Nineties records, Dylan revisited the songs of his youth, earlier versions of the America that would help him come to terms with the country he was living in now. He then set forth to mine his own path with those tracks ("World Gone Wrong," "Black Jack Davey") as skeleton keys for his own ("Not Dark Yet," "High Water (for Charley Patton)"). But we already know that the history that followed those sessions led into the eventual aimlessness that Good As I Been to You got him out of. The only authentic thing about Self Portrait was its portrait of an artist in hiding. What Another Self Portrait might just reveal is more of what Dylan was actually hiding from. 

Kevin Courrier is a freelance writer/broadcaster, film critic and author (Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of ZappaRandy Newman's American Dreams33 1/3 Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask ReplicaArtificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles Utopian Dream). Courrier teaches part-time film courses to seniors through the LIFE Institute at Ryerson University in Toronto and other venues. His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism. 

15 comments:

  1. The analogy between Self-Portrait and Good as I Been to You/World Gone Wrong would have made more sense if the review had mentioned the (terrific) records Dylan made in the 70s after Self Portrait: New Morning, Blood on the Tracks, Desire, etc. The Time Out of Mind/Love and Theft material was not the second flowering of the 'authentic voice'; at most the third, possibly the fourth if you like the Evangelical material more than I do.

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  2. It's the wonderfully sloppy performances at the Isle of Wight.

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  3. I've never understood the negative knee-jerk reaction to Self Portrait. Just because Greil Marcus uttered his right-on assessment at the time doesn't mean the rest of us have to subscribe to it. In fact Greil Marcus is falling over himself now trying to distance himself from his original comments. Self Portrait is full of beautiful, memorable performances, in respect both of Bob Dylan's voice and the musical arrangements. It is actually the album of Bob's that I still play the most and that means the most to me.

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    1. Yes, I've never understood the controversy. One of my favorite albums, too.

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  4. Sorry, I lost the thread of your nonetheless insightful article whith the last sentences, which sessions eventually led him back to aimlessness? Dylan has seemed lost during periods, but he is not now and he was not during the mid seventies (even if his luck failed him badly and got him in a desparate rut around 78). The anology between at least World Gone Wrong and Self Portrait (that suffered from conflicting motivations is obvious in retrospect and you are right to point it out. Let's wait for the results of Another Selfportrait and see if that one makes more sense than the final product that we got back then... Judging by what we were able to hear up to now the potential was great during those confusing days around 70, he was just searching for a new starting point, just when his singing abilities were at their peak... Cause he sure sounds gorgeous, something we already knew while listening to Copper Kettle and made us only more furious how this project went nowhere, as if we were to judge... Something he hid away from yes...

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  5. I love the Mighty Quinn from Isle of Wight.

    Looking forward to this release, and more Bootleg Series to come, especially the gospel years. Saved is a very underrated album.

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  6. Early morning rain is lovely as it is

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  7. Some Dylan material is lacking compared to other Dylan material but I belive all of it is authentic and meaningful. Most of Dylan's poorer material is more interesting than most other artists prominent material.

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  8. You know, I'd be kind of tempted not to start speculating until I'd actually heard the new material.

    And, please, don't buy into Dylan's "Self Portrait" mythology. He changes his story whenever it suits him (and quite right too, it's his story!)

    By all accounts (and I've not heard it yet either) some of the material is revelatory.

    Greil Marcus has heard it, and he's done a 100% about-turn.

    And The Isle Of Wight concert was ramshackle good times fun....it just didn't satisfy those with preconceptions.

    Give the old goat credit. He keeps us guessing & he keeps us interested.

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  9. Recordings that have slipped out from this era show Dylan hadn't lost it, and that he was making some good music indeed. Self Portait failed because of poor song selection, dreadful production and mixing and audience expectations.

    I expect the clean versions that will be on the new release will be revelatory. Also, he picks up some stuff from New Morning. The If Not for You with violin, for example, has leaked out and is wonderful. Looking forward to this more than most, because it shows a different side of Dylan and actually a different voice.

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  10. Kevin Courrier responds: Judging from the many comments here, I've clearly touched a nerve. Let me try and address some of the more pertinent remarks. First, I didn't "buy into" a mythology around Self Portrait, I wrote about how I feel about the record - just like many of you have. Since I'm a critic, I responded to what I heard and also suggested reasons why I found the album sloppy and shapeless (even when the idea of the record was interesting and there are songs on it that I actually like). We don't have to agree on it. As for the 'aimless' period that follows, I admit to Blood on the Tracks being one of his great Seventies albums, but after that, the work becomes horribly erratic - even he admits that in Chronicles. (The Eighties is even worse.) I was attempting to say that Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong put him in touch again with the music that speaks authentically to him. From that, I tried to imagine how Another Self Portrait could turn out to resemble those later records (since Another Self Portrait shares the common idea of finding your voice in cover versions). As for the results, who knows? We won't know what to make of the record until it's released.

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    1. Which just goes to show what a pointless exercise this is...until then.

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  11. Kevin Courrier responds: Phil, I don't think it's a pointless exercise. My piece is about how the Bob Dylan Bootleg Series is putting out a CD from an album that many hated when it first came out (which is unusual considering the others in the series). So I was clearly being speculative about what it might be like based on that and the few songs I've already heard. Besides, Phil, fan sites seem to enjoy speculating on all things Dylan all the time before anything comes out. Cheers, Kevin.

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  12. Pretty Saro is haunting. I can't get it out of my head.

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  13. The really important thing is that the production is handled as beautifully as all the previous Bootleg series releases. The music will be fascinating, lets hope we hear the construction\deconstruction of some of the original albums content. Forty plus year old music and I'm 45. Who cares what the music sounded like then, lets hear how it sounds today.

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