What is a tell-tale sign?

According to linguaholic.com, it is “an indication that something exists or has happened. It is generally used to suggest that something that is secret – or at least, not obvious – is being revealed.”

Tell Tale Signs is also the title of the eighth installment of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series, covering the years 1989-2006. There are 39 tracks in the overpriced 3CD deluxe version, 27 in the 2CD version, and 13 in the one-volume edition. I’ll be looking at the 3CD set here.

Identifying The Sources

If we break down the 39 tracks in the collection, we find ten random tracks: five of them written for soundtracks, two traditional songs recorded live, two from an aborted project with David Bromberg, and a duet with Ralph Stanley.

The other selections are alternate takes, outtakes or live renditions from five albums Dylan released between 1989 and 2006: Oh Mercy, World Gone Wrong, Time Out of Mind, “Love & Theft”, and Modern Times. But of these 29 tracks, 23 of them come from just two albums: 1989’s Oh Mercy and 1997’s Time Out of Mind.

It looks like there’s a tell-tale sign here.

The Lanois Albums

The obvious connection between the two albums is that they were both produced by Daniel Lanois, whose distinctive style of production can be heard on recordings by Peter Gabriel, U2, Robbie Robertson and others. The moody, swampy sound he conjured for Dylan on these two albums has been praised by many and condemned by just as many more. Certainly, the tracks from these sessions collected on Tell Tale Signs have a very different sound, less contrived, more natural.

So that is one tale Dylan might be tell us, that the creative struggles he had with Lanois (and it seems there were many, resulting in days in which they refused to talk to each other) might have turned out differently if he had had his way. Dylan was hospitalised with histoplasmosis after recording had finished but before Time Out of Mind’s release, so it is likely that the mixing of the album was not uppermost on Dylan’s mind at the time.

It’s a convincing story, to me at least. But I don’t think it’s the only story being told here.

Alternate Versions of
Time Out Of Mind Songs

Let’s look at the twelve songs on the collection deriving from the Time Out of Mind sessions:

• There are three versions of “Mississippi”, a song later re-recorded and released four years later on “Love and Theft”. The first was a demo recording made in Oxnard, California in 1996, before they moved to Florida for the album sessions proper. This take features just Dylan and Lanois on guitars and is regarded as the best of the three. Many think it the highlight of the whole collection. The other two versions boast different lyrics and seem to lose the groove of the song. The re-recorded version laid down in 2001 (and produced by Jack Frost, the pseudonym Dylan adopts for production work) returns to the words and arrangement of the demo, but amped up with a full band.

The tale: trust your first instincts, and when something gets lost, go back to the beginning.

• “Dreamin’ of You”, a moody, unreleased song that shares a number of re-written lines, as well as a lot of the same bereft despair, with “Standing in the Doorway”.
• Two very different versions (one a slow blues, the other upbeat, almost ska-like) of an unreleased song, “Marchin’ to the City”, that shares its 12-bar structure with “Till I Fell in Love with You”, a blues song that appeared on Time Out of Mind. In fact, the chorus of “Till I Fell in Love With You” is taken from a verse in “Marchin’ to the City”.
• Two songs sung live in concert, “Cold Irons Bound”, in a much more dynamic performance of the arrangement on the album, and “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven”, a gorgeous performance of the song with an entirely different tune and groove.

Reworking Lyrics

The tale with these songs may be that folk songs and the blues are at the root of his understanding of song writing; the old folk ballads and blues couplets were all common property and could be shuffled and twisted into a multiplicity of shapes.

In “Standing in the Doorway”, he sings:

“The light in this place is so bad
Makin’ me sick in the head
All the laughter
is just makin’ me sad
The stars have turned cherry red”

While in the outtake, “Dreamin’ of You”, he starts:

“The light in this place
is really bad
Like being at the bottom
of a stream
Any minute now
I’m expecting to
wake up from a dream”

In the outtake “Marchin’ to the City”, he sings:

“Go over to London
maybe gay Paree
Follow the river,
you get to the sea”

And in “Not Dark Yet” it becomes:

“Well I been to London
and I been to gay Paris
I followed the river
and I got to the sea”

And the couplet from the outtake of “Can’t Wait”:

“My back is to the sun
because the light is too intense
I can see what everybody
in the world is up against”

(which turns up as the opening lines of “Sugar Baby” on 2001’s “Love and Theft”.) 

The most revealing of the TOOM outtakes are two versions of “Can’t Wait”, a 12-bar blues song that also appeared on the released album. The version released on TOOM begins with a busy mid-paced shuffle of percussion, a throb of bass, guitar and organ punctuating the spooky groove.

He sings:

“I can’t wait, wait for you to change your mind
It’s late, I’m trying to walk the line
Well, it’s way past midnight and there’s people all around
Some on their way up, some on their way down
The air burns, and I’m trying to think straight
And I don’t know how much longer I can wait. “

The version on disc one of Tell Tale Signs (an earlier version than the master take according to the sleeve notes) begins with Dylan at the piano musing: “If we do it in… how about Bb?” Then he plays a few chords to establish the rhythm as the guitarist and bassist join in. This version has its own spooky groove, but the sound of the band and the voice of the singer are all very present, as if in the room, as opposed to the sound of a “record”, that the Lanois version was clearly intent on getting.

The version on disc three is another early take, and it is a devastating performance. It starts with a moody organ playing sustained chords and a throbbing bass. An electric guitar and Dylan’s piano join in, then a soft drumbeat. The atmosphere the sound paints is somewhere between the other two takes, and the lyrics are similar to the previous one. But the stretched-out tempo, the vulnerability of the voice, and the shocking honesty of the singer as he confronts old age and oblivion make it a startlingly different song.

“I can’t wait,
wait for you to change your mind
I can’t wait
for you to walk the line
You ever feel like your brain’s been bolted to the wall?
That’s you’re drowning in your thoughtlessness
and cut off from it all
I don’t know…
Maybe for you it’s not that late
But as for me,
I don’t know how much longer I can wait.”

Later in the song, there is startling moment when the inevitability of parting, and of death strikes him:

“My hands are cold,
the end of time has just begun
I’m gettin’ old…
anything can happen now to anyone

Loneliness around me
diggin’ in me like a rake
What a piece of work she is
to cause my heart to break

I thought somehow
that I’d be spared
this fate
And I don’t know
how much longer
I can wait.”

Outtakes or Master Takes

Value judgements are what they are, and if I say that the two outtakes are far superior to the master take, and the one on disc 3 clearly the best, I’m sure there are those who would disagree. But I think it fair to say that the inclusion of that take on TOOM would have changed the shape of the album markedly.

There are a number of major songs among the 11 tracks on Time Out of Mind: “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven”, “Not Dark Yet”, “Highlands” for sure, with “Love Sick”, “Standing in the Doorway” and “Cold Irons Bound” not far behind. I don’t mean to demean the other songs – “Dirt Road Blues”, “Million Miles”, “Till I Fell in Love with You”, “Make You Feel My Love” and “Can’t Wait” – to call them minor.

The inclusion of songs of varying weight is what makes an album more satisfying than a compilation. But either of the two outtakes, particularly the second one, would have become one of the major songs on the album, establishing the voice of the wandering storyteller most vividly. (Many feel that “Make You Feel My Love” is the odd one out among the 11 songs, a romantic ballad that has proved to be a hit for a number of singers but sounds very out of place on the album. But viewed as a song sung from one of the stages of grief – denial – it fits in more comfortably.)

The sense of age, of loss, and of death that this take of “Can’t Wait” makes tangible is palpable, and it seems ridiculous for such a recording to be overlooked. Yet that same deep devastation that the song conjures so well is mirrored in the accepted masterpiece of the album, “Not Dark Yet.” The song sequence needed one such moment, one such dark hole at the centre of the journey. But not two. Hamlet’s great soliloquy, “To be or not to be…” would have had less impact if it were followed in the next scene by “So Should I stay or should I go”.

This then is another tale to be told: that the needs of the album outweigh the rights of any individual song.

Finally, there are two versions of “Red River Song”, one starting low-key with just two guitars, slowly building as an accordion and other instruments come in, and the other with a full band from the start. It is a wonderful song, the best from the whole session, in the opinion of Jim Dickenson, the Memphis keyboard player who performed on the album.

The tale: …this one defeats me. It is a major song, would have fit the tone of the album perfectly, and it doesn’t encroach on another song’s territory as “Can’t Wait” might have done. Perhaps the tale here is that sometimes Dylan gets it wrong. After all, he left “Blind Willie McTell” off Infidels, yet has since played it 226 times in concert.

More Than A Collection of Songs

So, these are some of the tales that volume 8 of the Bootleg Series tells me. They may or may not have been the ones the teller intended me to understand, but I don’t think that’s something that has ever troubled Bob Dylan.

He tells his tales and we make of them what we will.