When “Blood on the Tracks” was released in January 1975, half of the New York City recordings were replaced with the Minneapolis sessions (although with album covers already printed, that studio band went uncredited). Meanwhile, to give the music a subliminal edge, Dylan had the tracks sped up by 2 to 3 percent, shortening the running times by a few seconds and very slightly raising the pitch. Insiders who had heard the original album mourned what they considered to be a push toward pop. A handful of songs from the New York sessions that trickled out on Dylan’s first Bootleg Series compilations suggested they had a point.

Image Dylan’s latest Bootleg Series release is “More Blood, More Tracks.”

“More Blood, More Tracks,” strips away any gloss. In the six-CD package, the takes that appeared on the original album are returned to accurate speed and mixed more austerely, with considerably less reverb around Dylan’s voice and guitar and different balances on band tracks. (The six CDs include all the takes recorded in New York; there are no surviving outtakes from the Minneapolis sessions, but the master tapes are remixed.) The pricey full package also includes a hardcover volume featuring a trove of Dylan lore: a page-by-page reproduction of a spiral notebook of lyrics, full of cross-outs and alternatives. The one-CD version is a well-chosen playlist among many that could traverse the New York sessions.

From the beginning, none of the performances on the complete set is tentative or demo-like. Dylan had clearly thought through the songs beforehand, chosen his guitar strategies and decided where the dramatic peaks were. His first performances in the studio were apparently so incandescent that the engineers didn’t pay attention to the sound of his vest buttons clacking against his guitar — the only distraction in his very first take of “Simple Twist of Fate,” which rises from and falls back to a stoic near-whisper, like a startling rumor being passed along.

The New York recordings, solo or close to it, bring out the solitude in the songs: The singer endlessly wandering, bereft of the woman he loved, wondering what could have been different, coming to terms with it all. Stripped of arrangements that have been familiar for decades, Dylan’s voice comes through as more insistent, while the lyrics land more sharply. The complicated storyline of “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” becomes more immediately comprehensible in a solo performance. And without the Minneapolis band’s organ crescendos, “Idiot Wind” becomes a more private attack, as much plaint as indictment: “You’ll never know the hurt I suffered nor the pain I rise above/And I’ll never know the same about you, your holiness or your kind of love.”