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Bob Dylan left many a jewel in the studio. Some were re-recorded for later albums, others were abandoned for good.

All the songs on this list have been officially released at a later date.. they might not be the best version of the song.. I will point out.. but at least he eventually put a version out.

some remarks:

I’ve decided to include “New York versions” from the famous Blood On The Tracks sessions in 1974

Songs from the “Greatest Hits 2 recording sessions” in 1971 included on GH2.. are ruled out

I choose to include “the real” “When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky”… even though a vulgar version was released on “Empire Burlesque”

..and again: lists are FUN – MAKE LISTS NOT WAR

My list:

To resolve is nothing more than letting go. Do You think Rembrandt ever finished a painting?

-Dylan, to Allen Ginsberg, October 1977 I didn’t think I recorded it right

– Dylan to Kurt Loder (1984)

A legendary must-have bootleg-version.. song. On my “top 200 best Dylan songs” list this sits firmly as number 5.

BTW – Clinton Heylin argues that Dylan was in fact thinking og “Blind Willie Johnson”.. and not “Blind Willie McTell”… I think maybe he’s right.

Available & recommended versions:

Studio A, Power Station, New York City, New York – May 5, 1983.

Released on “The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3” – 1991

Fantastic acoustic version, but… not the best..

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Released on “The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3” – 1991 Fantastic acoustic version, but… not the best.. – Studio A, Power Station, New York City, New York – April 18, 1983.

The date here is not certain

This is the “electric” version known to collectors for many years. Check out the bootleg: “Rough Cuts – Infidels outtakes”

This is my fav version.

Acoustic version:



Electric version:



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If you’ve heard both versions, you realize, of course, that there could be a myriad of verses for the thing. It doesn’t stop… Where do you end?… It’s something that could be a work continually in progress.

– Dylan to Paul Zollo, 1991

The original released version: Sound 80 Studio – Minneapolis, MN – 12/27/74

Blood On The Tracks (1975)

Okay… This is cheating.. as he didn’t leave the song out of the coming album… BUT he left the best version out 🙂

Alt version1: Columbia Studio A, New York – 09/19/74

The Bootleg Series 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991 (1991)

The Bootleg Series 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991 (1991) My Fav: Alt version2: (organ version): Columbia Studio A, New York – 09/16/74 – overdubbed Oct 8

similar to Bootleg Series vol 2 but different take – softer with subtle organ

Not released – New York Sessions bootleg

(organ version): Columbia Studio A, New York – 09/16/74 – overdubbed Oct 8 similar to Bootleg Series vol 2 but different take – softer with subtle organ Not released – New York Sessions bootleg Rolling Thunder Revue II version (1976)

Live at Hughes Stadium, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado – 05/23/76

Hard Rain (1976)

“.. he recast it the following month as the centerpiece of the 1976 Revue, ready to twist the blade on his ‘sweet lady’”

– Clinton Heylin (Still On The Road)

Alt version 1:





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Alt version 2:

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Pain sure brings out the best in people, doesn’t it?

– Dylan, She’s Your Lover Now

This one is many “Blonde On Blonder’s” fav Dylan outtake..

On January 21, 1966 @ Studio A, Columbia Recording Studios, NYC Dylan tried this song 19 times. It was the only song he tried this day, he would never return to it..

None of the 19 cuts were complete… he never nailed it.. but the one on “The Bootleg Seriers 1-3” came close…

Bootleg series version

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Then, in the summer of 1980, a revelation for Dylan collectors: an acetate (recording of studio pressing) turned up entitled ‘Just a little glass of water No. 89210’… which turned out to be a full-length ‘She’s Your Lover Now’ sung by Dylan alone at the piano.

~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan Performing Artist I: The Early Years 1960-1973 )

Solo piano version

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4. Red River Shore

Jim Dickinson (one of my many Memphis heroes) always claimed “Red River Shore” was the best song they cut on the Time Out Of Mind Sessions, and was glad to see it finally released on Tell Tale Signs

Also according to Dickinson Dylan said: “Well, We’ve done everything on that one except call the symphony orchestra…..”

Recorded @ Criteria Studios, Miami, Florida, January 1997

Finally released on: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 – Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989–2006 (2008)

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“I couldn’t quite grasp what [‘Caribbean Wind’] was about, after I finished it. Sometimes you write something to be very inspired, and you won’t quite finish it for one reason or another. Then you’ll go back and try and pick it up, and the inspiration is just gone. Either you get it all, and you can leave a few little pieces to fill in, or you’re trying always to finish it off. Then it’s a struggle. The inspiration’s gone and you can’t remember why you started it in the first place. Frustration sets in.”

– Dylan, to Cameron Crowe

It is a song that both musically and lyrics wise went through considerable changes… for the worse…

Available versions:

Rundown Studios, Santa Monica, CA – April 7, 1981 Released on “Biograph” boxset in 1985

Good version.

Caribbean Wind [1981] by Bob Dylan on Grooveshark

Studio 55, LA – March 31, 1981 circulating and available on many bootlegs (Genuine Bootleg series vol.1, Hard To Find, Vol1, ..)

Great version.



Fox Warfield Theatre, San Francisco November 12, 1980 The only live version he ever did… and it is phenomenal.

BEST version..





Check out my post: Bob Dylan’s best songs – Caribbean Wind

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I don’t think of myself as Bob Dylan. It’s like Rimbaud said, ‘I is another.’

~Bob Dylan (Biograph liner notes) In its own way ‘Up To Me’ is as masterful an achievement as ‘Tangled Up In Blue’, using much the same technique to create a well-crafted juxtaposition of ‘what I know to be the truth’ and what I’m projecting’.

~Clinton Heylin (Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. 2, . 1974-2008 )

A&R Studios, September 19, 1974



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Of the virtues, I suppose I think integrity is the most essential. Not dignity – a thief can have dignity.

~Bob Dylan (to Barbara Kerr, Feb 1978)

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‘Dignity’, which describes so resourcefully the yearning for a more dignified world, would have been the album’s [Oh Mercy] ideal opening track. It scorches along musically, declaring its allegiance to the timeless appeal of the blues, while sounding, above all things, fresh. Its lyric, meanwhile, though ‘Dylanesque’ in that it sounds like no-one else’s work and sounds like a restrained, mature revisit to a mode of writing you might otherwise call mid-1960s Dylan, is fully alert and freshly itself, admits of no leaning on laurels, and has the great virtue that while not every line can claim the workaday clarity of instructional prose, the song is accessible to anyone who cares to listen, and offers a clear theme, beautifully explored, with which anyone can readily identify.

~Michael Gray (The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia )

Officially we now have 5 different versions available:

# released Album 1 1994 Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Volume 3

Brendan O’Brien remixed version 2 1995 MTV Unplugged

Live version 3 2000 The Best of Bob Dylan, Vol. 2

Touched By An Angel version* 4 2008 The Bootleg Series Vol. 8

Piano demo version 5 2008 The Bootleg Series Vol. 8

Tell Tale Signs version2

* First released on the album “Touched By An Angel: The Album” – TV Series soundtrack compilation (1998)

BEST version – Touched By An Angel version

..the unadulterated version… the incomparably best version.

~Michael Gray (The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia )

Check out my post: Bob Dylan’s best songs: Dignity

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8. If You See Her Say Hello – New York version

“.. If You See Her Say Hello has been written down with the ink still wet from last night’s tears..”

~Clinton Heylin (“Still On The Road”)

Outtake from original studio sessions for Blood On The Tracks

Alt version1: A&R Studios, 19 September 1974, Columbia A&R Studios, NYC

Musicians:

Bob Dylan (guitar, vocal)

Tony Brown (bass)

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9. Lay Down Your Weary Tune

I wrote that on the West Coast, at joan Baez’s house. She had a place outside Big Sur. I had heard a Scottish ballad on an old 78 record that I was trying to really capture the feeling of, that was haunting me. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I wanted lyrics that would feel the same way.

~Bob Dylan (Biograph liner notes) Dylan not only demonstrates but openly discusses his fascination with music as a mysterious force in .”Lay Down Your Weary Thne,” a breakthrough piece, one of his most powerful devotional songs (alongside “What Can l Do for You?” and, more ambiguously, “Mr. Tambourine Man”) and also one of his earliest abstract, impressionistic writings.

~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan Performing Artist I: The Early Years 1960-1973 )

Studio A, NY, October 24, 1963

Lay Down Your Weary Tune [#] by Bob Dylan on Grooveshark

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Live @ Carnegie Hall 1963



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Dreams can tell us a lot about ourselves, if we can remember them. We can see what’s coming around the corner sometimes without actually going to the corner..

~Bob Dylan (to Bill Flanagan in 2009) “Series of Dreams” is a major Dylan song and an important statement.

~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan: Performing Artist Volume 3: Mind Out Of Time 1986 And Beyond )

1. The 1991 – Bootleg Series 1-3 version

According to the “book” included with “The Bootleg series 1-3″, this is a version overdubbed in 1991. The original is take 1 from March 23, 1989.



2. Tell Tale Signs version

This version is take 2 from the March 23 recording session.



Check out my post: Bob Dylan’s best songs – Series of Dreams

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11. I’ll Keep It With Mine

“I’ll Keep It with Mine,”·a heartbreakingly lovely solo performance on piano and harmonica, did tum up on Biograph, after sitting in the vault for twenty years. How can Dylan record something so beautiful and then let it remain unreleased? This is a question that gets asked again and again, which is why so many ,people collect Dylan tapes or buy boodeg (illegal, unauthorized) Dylan albums.

~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan Performing Artist I: The Early Years 1960-1973 )

Studio A, NY, January 13, 1965 (Biograph)

I’ll Keep It With Mine by Bob Dylan on Grooveshark

Evening; January 27, 1966 (Bootleg Series)

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Well, it’s always been my nature to take chances

My right hand drawing back while my left hand advances

Where the current is strong and the monkey dances

To the tune of a concertina

~from “Angelina” …. there were some real songs on this album that we recorded, a couple of really long songs, like there was one I did – do you remember Visions Of Johanna?…. Well, there was one like that. I’d never done anything like it before. It’s got that same kind of thing to it. It seems to be very sensitive and gentle on one level, then on another level the lyrics aren’t sensitive and gentle at all. We left that off the album.

~Bob Dylan (to Neil Spencer – July 1981) How to comment on this extraordinary piece of writing? Recorded at the ‘Shot of Love’ sessions of April-May 1980, Angelina is unlike anything else Bob Dylan has ever written – part Cocteau film, part Braque painting, totally surreal, it defies logic and heads off for the deepest, darkest parts of poetic mystery. Though Dylan has never commented about the song in public, chances are that he’d confess that it was as much mystery to him as to anyone else.

~John Bauldie (TBS1-3 booklet)

Rundown Studios

Santa Monica, California

26 March 1981

1st Shot Of Love recording session. Produced by Jimmy Iovine

Check out my post: Bob Dylan’s best songs: Angelina

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13. Call Letter Blues

The children cry for mother

I tell ‘em, “Mother took a trip.”

Well, the children cry for mother

I tell ‘em, “Mother took a trip.”

Well, I walk on pins and needles

I hope my tongue don’t slip.

~Bob Dylan (Call Letter Blues) Such self-consciously autobiographical imagery probably told for it in the end. I just can’t imagine Dylan releasing the line ‘Children ask for mother, I tell ‘em mother took a trip’ into the world back in 1974. But at least he got as far recording this one with Weissberg’s band on that first night, cutting it in three takes, before deciding that he would rather replace it with an entirely fanciful morning blues, a.k.a. ‘Meet Me In The Morning’. The tune, he kept. Literally. As the 1991 release of ‘Call Letter Blues’ fully revealed.

~Clinton Heylin (Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. 2, . 1974-2008 )

A&R Studios, NYC

September 16

3 takes, take 3 released on The Bootleg Series (rare & unreleased) 1961-1991, Volume 2, March 26, 1991.

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Bob Dylan (guitar, vocal)

Charles Brown III (guitar)

Barry Kornfeld (guitar)

Eric Weissberg (guitar)

Thomas McFaul (keyboards)

Tony Brown (bass)

Richard Crooks (drums)

Call Letter Blues by Bob Dylan on Grooveshark

Check out my article: Bob Dylan’s best songs: Call Letter Blues

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14. Foot Of Pride

“Foot of Pride” is in a sense written from the same place of hostility and anguish and self-righteousness as “Man of Peace” and “Neighborhood Bully” and “Union Sundown,” but I like it, I can listen to it over and over again, I intuitively put it in a class with Dylan’s better work rather than with his clunkers. Why? Because of its intelligence, its sincerity, its originality, its great sound and superb vocal performance.

~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan: Performing Artist, Vol 2: The Middle Years 1974-1986 )

Outtake from “Infidels” released on “The Bootleg Series 1-3”

Power Station Studios, NYC

April 29, 1983

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‘Abandoned Love’ marks the very point at which Dylan decided to (temporarily) abandon love, and particularly forsaken love, as the prime subject-matter for his songs.

~Clinton Heylin (Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. 2, . 1974-2008 )

Studio version:

Studio E

Columbia Recording Studios

New York City, New York

31 July 1975

5th Desire session, produced by Don DeVito.



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I just HAVE to include this GREAT live version:

The performance is one of the finest documented stolen moments Dylan ever spent on stage … after a few gentle strums he launched straight into a narrative no less haunting and lovelorn than the songs on his most recent album [Blood On The Tracks] …

~Clinton Heylin (Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. 2, . 1974-2008 )

Other End

New York City, New York

3 July 1975



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16. I Wanne Be Your Lover

Recorded autumn 1965 as part of the Blonde On Blonde sessions, finally released on “The Bootleg Series 1-3” in 1991.

Studio A, NY, October 5, 1965

I Don’t Wanna Be Your Partner by Bob Dylan on Grooveshark

Here is a cool unreleased version:



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17. This Wheel’s On Fire

Recorded:

Big Pink’s Basement

Stoll Road

West Saugerties, New York

May-October 1967

released on THE BASEMENT TAPES, June 26, 1975

This Wheel’s On Fire by Bob Dylan on Grooveshark

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18. Born In Time

‘Born In Time’ is one of two songs written for Oh Mercy of which Dylan makes no mention in Chronicles (the other being ‘God Knows’). Both tracks would end up on his next album in radically different guises, having undergone a great deal of reconstructive surgery in their passage from New Orleans to Los Angeles. Discounting any solo demos, the February 28 ‘Born In Time’ was the first song definitely recorded for the 1989 LP, which usually means an important song written early in the process. ‘Born In Time’ was both.

~Clinton Heylin (Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. 2, . 1974-2008 )

There are 6 versions circulating; 3 from the “Oh Mercy” sessions in 1989 (2 of them officially released on Tell Tale Signs in 2008) & 3 from the “Under The Red Sky” sessions in 1990 (one of them released on the album).

Here are two:

The Studio

New Orleans, Louisiana

28 February 1989

Tell Tale Signs 1

Born In Time [Unreleased, Oh Mercy] by Bob Dylan on Grooveshark

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Unreleased version from the “Under The Red Sky” sessions:

Born In Time by Bob Dylan on Grooveshark

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Composing it [When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky], yeah. Um… you know, it was bits and pieces of different places that went into writing that. Lines overheard here and there, you know, strung together over a long period of time, resulted in that particular piece.

~Bob Dylan (to Eliot Mintz – March 1991) …Dylan sings wonderfully. The songs seems capable of kicking itself into even-higher gear, and as the band recognizes it, so does Dylan, who gets audibly more and more excited as the song progresses

~John Bauldie (about the TBS 1-3 version)

There are 2 radically different released version of this song: TBS (The Bootleg Series 1-3) version (released in 1991) & the bad “Empire Burlesque” version

TBS version:

Recorded @ Studio A, The Power Station, New York City, New York – 19 February 1985.

The band included 2 “E-streeter’s”: Roy Bittan & Little “Stevie” Van Zandt.

When The Night Comes Falling From The Sk by Bob Dylan on Grooveshark

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20. Tears of Rage

Recorded:

Big Pink’s Basement

Stoll Road

West Saugerties, New York

May-October 1967

released on THE BASEMENT TAPES, June 26, 1975

Tears of Rage by Bob Dylan on Grooveshark

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Here is a spotify playlist with the songs available on spotify:

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Check out:

-Egil