There’s a “Love Sick” (Version 2) that sounds more Delta blues, more foreboding, than the cautionary, ethereal version that opened Time Out of Mind, while “Make You Feel My Love (Take 1)” is musically fleshed-out and features a more expressive vocal than on the familiar take. The second and third discs focus on “Outtakes and Alternates,” and hearing Dylan and the musicians work through changes in the arrangements is fascinating. Dylan’s voice is more upfront, the mix more immediate, live, and spontaneous. In these mixes, the entrancing veil of swampy murk is mostly stripped away, revealing a more authentic sense of the rooms in which the sessions were recorded (at Teatro in Oxnard, California, and Criteria in Miami).
#FRAGMENTS DYLAN FULL#
What resulted over several sessions between 19 is captured here in all its fly-on-the-wall glory.įragments, which comes as a 5-CD or 10-LP box set (or a 2-CD/4-LP set of highlights), begins with a fresh remix of the full Time Out of Mind album. Dylan studied the elusive shadowy sounds of blues, folk, and early rock and roll for inspiration: Link Wray, Little Willie John, Little Walter, and the like. According to Steven Hyden’s enlightening liner notes in Fragments, the 17th volume of Columbia Records/Legacy Recordings’ ongoing Bootleg Series, “The ideas came so suddenly that he would rip apart cigarette packs to scribble them down.” The result became 1997’s Time Out of Mind, one of the most successful artistic “comebacks” of the rock era.ĭylan once again teamed with Lanois and gathered an impressive and sympathetic group (including Duke Robillard, Bucky Baxter, Augie Meyers, Jim Dickinson, Brian Blade, Jim Keltner, Cindy Cashdollar, Tony Garnier, David Kemper, Winston Watson, Robert Britt, and Tony Mangurian) to bring out the mystery and yearning these new songs demanded. They came fast and furious, after shows, on the bus, in hotel rooms. As the ’90s progressed, he started writing again, jotting down lyrics with a fervor he hadn’t experienced in some time. But as it turned out, Dylan was reaching back to his roots for inspiration. Then came Good As I Been to You and World Gone Wrong in 19, respectively, two solo acoustic albums of folk and blues covers that to detractors underlined the possibility that Dylan’s best years were behind him. With the release of its follow-up, however, the 1990 Don Was-helmed Under the Red Sky, the reviews returned to mixed and middling, leading some to wonder if the previous album, which contained such beautifully crafted moments as “Most of the Time” and “Man in the Long Black Coat,” was just a late-career fluke. Bob Dylan closed the 1980s with the Daniel Lanois-produced Oh Mercy, an acclaimed return-to-form after more than a decade of bad reviews and being “written off,” as his concert introductions voiced by stage manager Al Santos dryly made clear, “as a has-been by the end of the ’80s.” Oh Mercy pointed the way to a new chapter for one of America’s greatest songwriters in the coming decade.
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