For an album so roundly trashed upon its original 1970 release, Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait has undergone a remarkable rehabilitation in recent years. In part, that’s because so much more material recorded around this time has been unearthed, leading to last year’s release of Another Self Portrait, a 2CD of unissued tracks from 1969-71. Considering Self Portrait itself had sometimes been dismissed as a collection of outtakes, you had to wonder if there could possibly be any more leftovers from the period.
Turns out there’s not just more – there’s a lot more. No less than 149 acetates of Dylan recordings from the period were discovered by top record dealer Jeff Gold early this year, in a building a couple of blocks from the Greenwich Village home where the singer lived with his family. Bob had rented the ground floor of 124 West Houston Street; more than 40 years later, the executor of the property owner’s estate had found a couple boxes of full 10” and 12” acetates in a closet. Gold now owns the trove, though he’s selling a few of the discs through his website, www.recordmecca.com.
“Dylan has claimed that Self Portrait was a record his fans couldn’t possibly like, and a reaction against the fawning of his following,” Gold told RC in July, just a few days after he made his finds public. “These things paint the story of how a phenomenal amount of effort went into the making of both of these records. The thing that surprised me the most was there would be that many acetates for basically a couple of albums. For Nashville Skyline, there were just a few acetates and an alternate sequence of the album. So the bulk of this stuff – 140 [of the acetates], let’s say” – are from the sessions for Self Portrait and the more warmly received LP of all-original material that followed a few months later in 1970, New Morning. “That astounded me, that there were that many.”
Many of these songs, it should be clarified, are not previously unavailable in any form, but either have different overdubs to the tracks that have been released, lack the overdubs that the common versions boast, or have different mixes to those used on the official albums. For Gold, and many other Dylanophiles, such items have a fascination of their own, for the insight they give into his idiosyncratic recording process if nothing else. Let’s start, however, with the outtakes that have yet to even circulate in any form.
“Two things blew me away right off,” enthuses Gold. “There was one double-sided acetate in the whole batch, and it was of a session for Self Portrait. On that is Bob with a band, clearly live in the studio, doing [Johnny Cash’s] Ring Of Fire and Folsom Prison Blues. I think they’re great – fully realised, rocking versions of both of those songs. I know Greil Marcus [author of the most infamous review slamming Self Portrait] wrote about it in Rolling Stone as something that they’d recorded. But to my knowledge, nobody’s ever heard it. And they’re fantastic!”
There’s also a rendition of Tomorrow’s Such A Long Time – written by Dylan in the early 60s, and first recorded by him as a publishing demo in 1962, though he didn’t release a version until a 1963 gig recording came out on 1971’s Greatest Hits Vol 2 – “done for New Morning. It’s on a couple of these comp acetates of New Morning tracks, just in the middle. It’s kind of got gospelly background vocals. I think it’s really great. It’s so interesting to think that he was essentially covering himself in a radically rearranged version for New Morning.”
Jeff continues: “There’s some alternate versions of If Not For You with drum overdubs, and they’re not the same as the one that came out on Another Self Portrait. There’s a version of Alberta #2 that’s unreleased. There’s [an] Alberta #1 Self Portrait take without overdubs, [and an] extra nine seconds at the beginning which has Dylan giving instructions to the band. The Self Portrait version ends with a clean overdubbed guitar strum which kind of rings out, but this ends as a jam and kind of diffuses. But they must have faded it out, and put in that guitar strum as an ending.”
That’s getting into the kind of minutiae that Beatles outtake collectors have puzzled over for years. It’s sure to light up the online Dylan chat boards, yes. But does it have much value for the more general Dylan fan, or even the average buyer of official specialist collections like Another Self Portrait? In Gold’s view, such overdub editing does reveal a lot about how Dylan and his producer, Bob Johnston, worked together at the time.
“What’s going on wasn’t really clear ’til I got home and started transferring these things, listening to them, ‘inventorying’ them,” he explains. “You begin to figure out, he’s doing basic tracks in Nashville for Self Portrait, and basic tracks in New York for New Morning. Dylan’s living in New York, and Bob Johnston is going back to Nashville, doing overdubs, mixes, and [track] sequences. Since there’s no internet [to send them on], these are rough drafts. Bob Johnston’ll send in three different mixes of something, and Dylan, in New York, is listening to them, probably in this studio [in Houston Street]. And saying, ‘Yeah, I like this mix,’ or in some cases, ‘Get rid of these overdubs.’ They’re adding to overdubs, or subtracting from them, as per Dylan’s instruction. And there are multiple mixes of things.
“Another Self Portrait, which I think is incredible, gives you a taste of that, where you’re listening to some tracks without the overdubs. Some of these [acetates] have other tracks we haven’t heard – without overdubs, or [with] some, but not all, of them. Like All The Tired Horses doesn’t have the bass or strings on it, and it sounds really different. It differs from the one on Self Portrait, and from the one on Another Self Portrait.
“So, I think Johnston’s experimenting with these things and sending ’em to Dylan. Dylan in some cases is writing his notes on the sleeves about which versions he likes, [and] what he doesn’t like or likes about certain things. Probably calling Johnston on the phone. Johnston’s cutting some more acetates, taking Dylan’s comments into account, and sending them back to Dylan.”
Kind of like what happens today routinely and instantaneously between musicians/ producers in different cities (or even different continents) over the internet? “I would agree with that exactly,” responds Gold. “It’s a conversation between these two, and it’s something I never heard of before [involving] this many acetates. I think it stems from the fact that, virtually always, the producer and the artist are in the same room when they’re mixing. Or in the same city, at least. So the artist can come in and say, ‘Yeah, I like that, no, I don’t like that.’ In this case, they’re half a continent away. So this is the dialogue, the rough drafts, that are traded between them.
“From that standpoint, I think it’s super-interesting. And super-unusual. It probably doesn’t exist for any other Dylan record, or many by anyone. Because, typically, the artist and the producer are in the same place.
“People say, ‘Well, why didn’t Bob keep ’em?’ These are just like rough drafts. In today’s world, you’d get a file of a mix you didn’t like. You’d email the producer about what you wanted changing, and you’d delete it. When where you and I were in college, you’d write a report, mark up the rough draft on your typewriter, retype it, throw the rough draft away. So these things were just tools Dylan was using to get to the stage where he had a record that was releasable. At that point, these became superfluous.” And, in at least some cases, possibly not even in existence elsewhere; Gold speculates that while the multitrack masters of the songs are probably still in Columbia’s tape library, Johnston’s original unused mixes may reside only on these acetates.
To illustrate the Dylan-Johnston dialogue, Gold elaborates, “There’s three versions of Wigwam. One has no vocals; one has barely discernible, very low vocals; and there’s the one on the record. So they contemplated releasing it as an instrumental, which then makes me think, ‘Hmm, maybe the intoning on the Self Portrait record, consisting of wordless la-las, wasn’t meant to be a vocal. It was just him humming before he had a lyric for it, and he decided he liked the humming.’ In fact, on a couple of the acetates, it’s labelled as New Song #1.
“So it really screws around with your thinking. Instead of him kind of scatting, it becomes entirely possible that he’d written a new song, [and] he didn’t have a lyric for it. And somebody said, ‘Hey, that sounds pretty good.’ But Bob Johnston at least was contemplating putting it out without a vocal.”
The handwritten notes on the acetate sleeves, adds Gold, reveal that probably at least 10 different running orders were considered for Self Portrait. “Dylan’s drawn arrows, circled things, crossed things out, adjusting the sequence. What certainly appears to be the case is that maybe he’s at some point happy with Side One and Two, but Three and Four aren’t working for him. So he’ll call Bob Johnston – this is all my inference – and say, ‘I need a new [Side] Three and Four in this order.’ And so they’re sending him replacement discs just for those sides.”
And what was Dylan doing listening to these discs in a ground floor apartment of an [at that time] iffy neighborhood anyway? “I certainly know an awful lot about Dylan, read endless books on him, and never heard of any reference to this [place] at all,” Gold confesses. “I don’t know, but I could certainly see how [when] he’s living [nearby] on Macdougal Street with his wife and his kids, as a musician, he’d probably want a quiet space where he could go, write songs, and work stuff out.”
Is it possible he even recorded there, as well as listening to acetates and writing songs? “I’ve never heard any reference to tapes made outside the studio during that period, but this one guy wrote in his blog about helping Dylan carry amps into the space.” Whether or not he had instruments there, however, it’s virtually certain none of these acetates were recorded in Houston Street, as “it’s clear that it’s all done in a recording studio, and that these are the basic tracks, in some cases with embellishments, in some cases not”.
If Dylan needed to get away from Sara and their kids to get on with some work, that doesn’t mean that his wife wasn’t welcome in playing a supporting role in his music-making. On an acetate where Bob covers Simon & Garfunkel’s The Boxer, Gold reveals, “He says something like, ‘Hey Sara, when I nod, turn the page for me.’ So the song’s been out a very short time when he decides to cover it, and he’s clearly reading the lyrics from sheet music or something like that. And Sara’s there turning the page for him.”
What are the chances the world will get to hear these acetates, or at least a selection of the most interesting tracks? For a compilation titled Another Another Self Portrait, perhaps? Jeff Gold is well acquainted with Dylan’s management, having been the one who discovered the unknown tape (in the basement of famed music journalist Ralph J Gleason while doing work for the late writer’s estate) that led to the release of Bob Dylan In Concert: Brandeis University 1963. As a Dylan memorabilia expert, he was also involved in the authentication of the electric guitar Bob played at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, which sold for nearly a million dollars last year, as well as some original Dylan manuscripts.
“I can understand why people would want to hear it,” he acknowledges about the newly discovered material. “But it’s not my decision. I’m friendly with Dylan’s management, and in touch with them intermittently. So I made transfers of everything and just handed them over. I felt morally obliged to give them the stuff. It’s [Dylan’s] decision what happens to the music on here, not mine.”
And with so much other unreleased material from the same era having recently gone to market, it’s unlikely another cache of somewhat secondary material from the same motherlode will go to market soon. “I feel like Another Self Portrait was an extremely generous box set,” Gold adds. “Two CDs of just unbelievable quality outtakes. I was blown away when I heard it. I think this stuff adds to it, but it doesn’t in any way measure up to the level of stuff that’s on there. I wouldn’t presume to guess what they would want to do, but I’d be surprised if they want to revisit an area that they mined so deeply and so recently.”
For now, Gold will “keep most of these, or very many of them. Dealing in rock memorabilia is my business, and I can pay for them by selling some.” He could pay for more than that by selling all of them, of course, but says: “I don’t really want to get into this, because for me it’s about love of music and not money.” He does allow that if a figure were to be put on individual discs, “that it’s the one with the Johnny Cash covers that’s probably the most valuable.”
Writing in early July, a few of the acetates were on sale via his website, ranging in price from $1,750 to $7,500.
But at least they’ll be conscientiously preserved rather than thrown into a skip from a third-floor window – which almost happened, as the executor of the owner’s estate didn’t find the boxes until his fourth and final pass to clear the building of its contents. “I knew I couldn’t afford to keep ’em all together, but someday somebody’s gonna write a book about this stuff, or more than one,” notes Gold, who’s been photographing the acetates as well as arranging for high-quality digital transfers. “And it’ll be very valuable for them to have a visual and textual inventory of everything.”
Could any more such unsuspected Dylan rarities show up in Gold’s travels? He’s followed up many false trails over the years; Jeff estimates that twice annually he’s contacted by people under the false belief that they own the rare original pressing of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan with four withdrawn tracks. “I’m never shocked by what turns up. You have to put yourself into the mix and be willing to get on a plane when something sounds interesting, and you just never know what you’re gonna find. Plenty of times, it’s been a waste of time. But my attitude is, if you don’t go, you don’t get.”
