“Why risk alienating his gigantic audience? But the burst of creativity was remarkable. “A lot of people don’t realize what an incredible risk he took,” says a source close to the Dylan camp. In all, it documents a process that is, in its own way, as dramatic as Dylan’s most public going-electric moment, at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. The Cutting Edge will be available in a six-disc and a two-disc version, as well as a monster limited-edition 18-disc set that includes every single take of every song from the three albums. And it reveals how much fun Dylan was having in the studio, especially during Highway 61 Revisited - he improvises a shout-out to guitarist Michael Bloomfield during a version of “Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence,” and he cracks up uncontrollably at early attempts to deploy the police whistle in the title track. (“The drums are driving me mad,” he says at the end.) It shows how Dylan attempted to record some Blonde on Blonde tracks with future members of the Band before opting for the subtler touch of Nashville musicians: Their “Visions of Johanna” is almost another song altogether (complete with lyric tweaks - “useless and small” instead of “useless and all”), rollicking where the released version is hushed. Tambourine Man” into a folk-rock smash, Dylan himself saw its possibilities, taking a clumsy, abortive stab at recording a drums-and-electric-guitar version. The collection reveals that six months before the Byrds turned “Mr.
0 kommentar(er)
