New music
As Bob Dylan recently – and aptly – observed ‘I Contain Multitudes’. The songwriter’s catalogue is now so vast, so packed with layers, diversions, and reinventions, that it can be difficult to know where to begin. After all, the deep cuts are often as rewarding as his iconic moments – sometimes even more so.
Take 1997 album ‘Time Out Of Mind’. His feted return, the record was Dylan’s first of original material in seven years, and became a Grammy award-winning success. Pivoting his sound once more, it was his last production collaboration – with Daniel Lanois – and boasted a unique, atmospheric sound, and a series of lyrics that meditated on ageing, heartbreak, death, and the state of the world.
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A recent box set unearthed a huge range of bonus cuts, demos, experiments, and more. Acclaimed Memphis pianist Jim Dickinson was hired for the sessions, which became a labyrinth of sound.
“I haven’t been able to tell what’s actually happening. I know they were listening to playbacks, I don’t know whether they were trying to mix it or not! Twelve musicians playing live—three sets of drums,… it was unbelievable.. two pedal steels. I’ve never even heard two pedal steels played at the same time before! … I don’t know man, I thought that much was overdoing it, quite frankly”.
The incredible flood of creativity meant that some excellent songs weren’t used – such as a potent cult classic ‘Red River Shore’. A beautiful paean to love lost, it’s a kind of Western romance, once that lingers on what-could’ve-been.
Bob Dylan’s opening lines are:
Some of us turn off the lights and we lay
Up in the moonlight shooting by
Some of us scare ourselves to death in the dark
To be where the angels fly
Rich in detail and suggestion, it was left on the cutting room floor. Jim Dickinson was astonished – after all, most songwriters would rank it as a career-best achievement.
He revealed in 2008: “I personally felt was the best thing we recorded. But as we walked in to hear the playback, Dylan was walking in front of me, and he said, ‘Well, we’ve done everything on that one except call the symphony orchestra.’ Which indicated to me that they’d tried to cut it before.”
“I was only there for ten days, and they had tried to cut some songs earlier that didn’t work. If it had been my session, I would have got on the phone at that point and called the fucking symphony orchestra.”
“But the cut of ‘Red River Shore’ was amazing. You couldn’t even identify what instruments were playing what parts. It sounded like ghost instruments. And the song itself is really remarkable. It’s like something out of the Alan Lomax songbook, a real folk song.”
Re-visit ‘Red River Shore’ below.
