Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Hard Times In New York Town
2. He Was A Friend Of Mine
3. Man On The Street
4. No More Auction Block
5. House Carpenter
6. Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues
7. Let Me Die In My Footsteps
8. Rambling Gambling Willie
9. Talkin' Hava Negeilah Blues
10. Quit Your Low Down Ways
11. Worried Blues
12. Kingsport Town
13. Walking Down The Line
14. Walls Of Red Wing
15. Paths Of Victory
16. Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues
17. Who Killed Davey Moore
18. Only A Hobo
19. Moonshine
20. When The Ship Comes In
21. Times They Are A Changin'
22. Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie
23. Seven Curses
24. Eternal Circle
25. Suze (The Cough Song)
26. Mama You Been On My Mind
27. Farewell Angelina
28. Subterranean Homesick Blues
29. If You Gotta Go Go Now (Or Else You Got To Stay All Night)
30. Sitting On A Barbed Wire Fence
31. Like A Rolling Stone
32. It Takes A Lot To Laugh It Takes A Train To Cry
33. I'll Keep It With Mine
34. She's Your Lover Now
35. I Shall Be Released
36. Santa Fe
37. If Not For You
38. Wallflower
39. Nobody 'cept You
40. Tangled Up In Blue
41. Call Letter Blues
42. Idiot Wind
43. If You See Her Say Hello
44. Golden Loom
45. Catfish
46. Seven Days
47. Ye Shall Be Changed
48. Every Grain Of Sand
49. You Changed My Life
50. Need A Woman
51. Angelina
52. Someone's Got A Hold Of My Heart
53. Tell Me
54. Lord Protect My Child
55. Foot Of Pride
56. Blind Willie McTell
57. When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky
58. Series Of Dreams

Disc 2:

1. Seven Curses
2. Eternal Circle
3. Suze (The Cough Song)
4. Mama You Been On My Mind
5. Farewell Angelina
6. Subterranean Homesick Blues
7. If You Gotta Go Go Now (Or Else You Got To Stay All Night)
8. Sitting On A Barbed Wire Fence
9. Like A Rolling Stone
10. It Takes A Lot To Laugh It Takes A Train To Cry
11. I'll Keep It With Mine
12. She's Your Lover Now
13. I Shall Be Released
14. Santa Fe
15. If Not For You
16. Wallflower
17. Nobody 'cept You
18. Tangled Up In Blue
19. Call Letter Blues
20. Idiot Wind

Disc 3:

1. If You See Her Say Hello
2. Golden Loom
3. Catfish
4. Seven Days
5. Ye Shall Be Changed
6. Every Grain Of Sand
7. You Changed My Life
8. Need A Woman
9. Angelina
10. Someone's Got A Hold Of My Heart
11. Tell Me
12. Lord Protect My Child
13. Foot Of Pride
14. Blind Willie McTell
15. When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky
16. Series Of Dreams

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1968 in Music
• Released on: 1998-11-10
• Number of discs: 3
• Format: Box set

Amazon.co.uk Review
Bob Dylan has always been incredibly prolific, only releasing a fraction of what he records. Such a policy has made him a prime target for bootleggers over the years, finally prompting this sanctioned 1991 triple-disc dive into the Dylan vaults. It consists of rare tracks, unreleased outtakes, early versions of classics ("Times They Are a-Changin'", "Like a Rolling Stone", "I Shall Be Released"), and alternate versions that sometimes cut the originals ("Idiot Wind"). A measure of Dylan's depth is his list of discarded songs ("She's Your Lover Now", "Blind Willie McTell", "Series of Dreams") that would be the crown jewels of most catalogues. These 58 tracks serve as a shadow history of one of our most important artists. --Ben Edmonds

CD Description
Dylan proved to be not only one of the most bootlegged of 20th Century performers, but also one of the first (GREAT WHITE WONDER was one of the releases that turned bootlegging from a pastime into an industry). Over the years, Dylan's legions of fans rabidly traded recordings of live shows, out-takes, demos and other rare material. THE BOOTLEG SERIES attempts to supply the definitive collection of what had been bootlegged material. Its three discs move along chronologically,spanning the length of Dylan's career and providing candid,previously verboten glimpses into his creative process, andconsequently, his musical genius.
The first disc features some intriguing versions of traditional tunes like "He Wasa Friend Of Mine" and "House Carpenter", and some obscure cuts from his "protest" period, such as "Paths of Victory" and "Who Killed Davy Moore?" Disc two finds him in his prime, moving from alternative versions of HIGHWAY 61 material to radically recast tunes from the sublime BLOOD ON THE TRACKS. The gems on the third disc are the eerie ballad "Blind Willie McTell", inexplicably cut from the INFIDELS sessions, and the newest song on this collection, "Series of Dreams", a swirling, surreal look back at a lifetime on the edge. THE BOOTLEG SERIES is a must for any serious Dylan fan.

Customer Reviews

Mark Wilder and Tim Geelan. How dare you?
This collection is of course indispensable, outstanding, mind boggling! However the best bits on volume 1 have been rendered unlistenable by the addition of phoney 1991 digital reverb by Mark Wilder and Tim Geelan. Did you chaps never bother to listen to the records around that period? Bob Dylan, Freewheelin', Times, Another Side? They were dry as a bone. What were you thinking?? Why didn't you add a few break beats while you were at it? Were your ego's so big that you had to put your little stamp on these important recordings? Oh dear. I demand a remix

The cornerstone of my Dylan collection
This box set of The Bootleg Series volumes 1-3 is the cornerstone, heart, and soul of my personal Bob Dylan collection. The 58 tracks on these CDs were, are, and always will be a Dylan fan’s dream come true; prior to 1991, fans were forced to go deep underground in wild efforts to come up with bootlegged copies of this type of never-released Dylan material (and there is a lot of it). The tracks in this box set cover Dylan’s first thirty years as a performer, stretching from 1961 to 1991. The variety of material here is incredibly diverse in style as well as format. Among these rare and previously unreleased songs can be found folk music, satirical protest songs, rock & roll as Dylan defined it, blues, a tinge of country, and more; there are demos, early live coffeehouse performances, concert performances, home recordings, rehearsal tapes, outtakes, and alternate takes, and concert performances. Some of the songs are incomplete: Suze (The Cough Song) ends after Dylan starts coughing, another song ends when Dylan stops and says his voice is gone, and a few seem to end in midstream for no obviously discernible reason. In one track, you hear a dog barking in the background intermittently. One is not a song at all; Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie is a poem Dylan wrote in honor of Guthrie, giving us seven minutes of spoken words from this normally reticent musical legend.

Among the most amazing things about these recordings is the knowledge that Dylan rejected many of these songs for his albums. These are songs the vast majority of singers can only hope to match once in their lives, yet Dylan often held songs back because he didn’t feel they were quite right or performed the way they needed to be performed. The list of such outtakes is too long to list here, but several of them are, to me, some of the best songs Dylan ever wrote and recorded: Farewell, Angelina; She’s Your Lover Now; Nobody ‘Cept You; You Changed My Life; Need a Woman; Foot of Pride; Blind Willie McTell; and Series of Dreams (which did find its way on to the Greatest Hits Volume 3 collection). Without a doubt, though, the most amazing and most mysterious song of Dylan’s career is Angelina, a breathtaking work of art unlike anything else Dylan has written or performed. Some of the alternate takes here are fascinating as they differ significantly from the released versions, especially If Not For You and When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky. I could write a paragraph about every one of these 58 tracks, but luckily John Bauldie has already taken care of this for me in the booklet that accompanies the CDs. This booklet features not only a number of fascinating pictures and a list of the musicians playing on each song; it includes a fairly definitive description of the history of every single track. The back of the box is itself a treasure trove of information, listing the recording date of each track and identifying its source (and, if it is an outtake, it lists the album it was cut from).

As great a songwriter and musician as Bob Dylan is, this collection gives you insight into the man that cannot be found in his studio recordings and concert performances. Bob Dylan has dropped and forgotten more amazing songs than most performers will ever even look at. I really can’t say enough about this collection and how truly amazing it is. I’ve owned this box set for twelve years now, and the music is just as fascinating and awe-inspiring today as it was back in 1991. These are recordings no Dylan fan can do without.

If you're a Dylan fan, you need to own this,
This 3-cd collection of outtakes basically sums up Bob Dylan. It's spans 30 years from his folk beginnings, to his rock star days, his religous phase and finally into the recent present with Dylan still writing classic poetic songs. The music on this collection is great, some of it outstanding. I find it hard to beleive that songs like "Let Me Die In My Footsteps" and "Series Of Dreams" were left off albums. None of the music is filler, the songs which are on other albums already are stripped down versions here and are all the better for it. Gone are the terrible 80's disco sounds in "When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky" and we can see what a great rocker it is. We also get many rare recordings such as Dylan and George Harrison practicing "If Not For You" which Harrison would use a few months later on his masterpiece "All Things Must Pass" LP. Yes, it's all here, this is a Dylan collection which you'll return to again and again, it's just full of surprises.