Nice And Naughty

Dan Lewis, Now I Know:

The word "nice" comes from the Latin word "nescius" which literally meant "not knowing" — basically "ignorant." When the word was coined in the 14th century, it retained that meaning — according to Oxford Dictionaries, the word "nice" "began life in the fourteenth century as a term for 'foolish' or 'silly.'" It was, unambiguously, an insult, which in a roundabout way, is how it got to this catch-all way to give faint praise today.

For its first generation of use, the denotative meaning (let's go with "foolish") held firm, but in time, that gave way to the word's negative connotation. Before the 14th century was out, people began using "nice" as a one-size-fits-all insult; as Huffington Post describes, the word "was used to refer to a variety of less-than-great sentiments including wantonness, extravagance, ostentation, lasciviousness, cowardice and sloth."

As the Middle Ages waned, so did the breadth of the term. The word "nice" became increasingly about laziness and less about extravagance, which is still not very nice, but less so than before. Still, that wasn't enough for the word's meaning to change to something lukewarmly positive. But we were long on our way. Lazy people were also seen as reserved, private, and demure, and, the word "nice" became somewhat of a neutral term. Huffington Post summarized it like this: "Dive deeper into the Middle Ages, and the meaning deflated. The word started to hint not at ostentation or cowardice but shyness and reserve; not in a negative way, but certainly not yet positively."

Of course, that changed. With the emergence of the Enlightenment, people liked their elites more reserved, more, say, "ladylike," and the word "nice" accurately described these people. As a result, "nice" became the word of praise (faint as it may be) it is today.

Bonus fact: The word "naughty" has a similarly muddled history, and one which may reflect on how we, by default, often blame those in poverty for their situation. It literally means "having nothing" — someone with "naught". The negative connotation came later, as GOOD Magazine explains: "In the 1300s, naughty people had naught (nothing); they were poor or needy. By the 1400s, the meaning shifted from having nothing to being worth nothing, being morally bad or wicked."

Writing A Book About Books

I've never given much serious consideration to those "1000 _______ To _______ Before You Die" books. However, this Literary Hub conversation with James Mustich, who spent 14 years researching and writing the recently-published 1000 Books To Read Before You Die, makes me want to track down his book. Completing a project like this properly requires a ton of time and effort, and it sounds like Mustich took his job extremely seriously.

Thomas DePietro has known Mustich since they were "high-school poets together over forty years ago" and he states that Mustich "walks a fine line between literary critic and enthusiast" and has created "a book that ... exults in the sheer joy of reading, and sharing those pleasures with others".

From Mustich's comments:

It's almost a thousand pages, nearly 900 pages of text and then various indexes to help people navigate through the list that I've made. For each of the thousand books I've written a brief essay, and added endnotes with relevant information and lots of recommendations for further reading. Altogether, there are more than 5,000 books referenced in it. ... I signed the contract for this book 14 years ago. It's been quite some time in the making. ...

The idea is: What about books speaks to people? In general and then specifically. What has spoken to me in particular? There's everything in here from, in terms of a reader's lifetime, from Goodnight, Moon, to The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's book about grief. And chronologically it ranges from the Epic of Gilgamesh up to a book published last year called Life in Code, by Ellen Ullman. ...

[T]here's probably, say, 250 of the 1,000 that are what are generally considered classics, so you can trace in what I've done a kind of course, if you wanted to, in literary history. ... Toward the end of the project, I begin to realize something that was motivating me, somewhat unwittingly. I have two daughters, who are both adults, in their twenties. They have always been readers, and they couldn't walk out of their rooms in our house without tripping over a pile of books. But they don't have the constant sense of the continuum of literature that was so important to me when I was growing up, which, frankly, I absorbed from spending so much time in bookstores in my formative years—not enough fresh air! So I've been reconstructing all of that by my own lights as a kind of record for them, I think. Again, that wasn't a conscious thing, but I think it's certainly part of what gives my book its shape. ...

I framed it for myself like this: what if I had a bookstore, and I could only have 1,000 books in it? I'd want to have classics, yes, but I'd also want to have something for anybody who walked in, and said, "I want a good mystery," or "I feel like reading something about golf." Or medicine. Or theology. Or true crime. One of the things I write about in my introduction is that inveterate readers read the way they eat: hot dogs one day, haute cuisine the next. ... [R]eading isn't all high-mindedness. ...

[F]or a long time, 1,000 seemed like so many. But then when I got towards the end, it was too few, by half at least! There are just so many good books. And closing in on the 1,000 put a fine point on what, of course, had haunted me all along: there is so much I haven't read. Through all the years I worked on the book, I tried to be thoughtful about it, but every week turned up books or authors I'd missed. And every conversation I had with a fellow reader seemed to add to that pile. ... But sooner or later, I had to draw a line. ...

One of the things that takes so long is that you not only need to know enough about the book to have something to say, but you also need to know enough about a subject or an author to know what not to say. ... If you're going to write 500, 600 words about Darwin, or about Madame de Staël, or about Ishmael Reed, you want to know enough about the extent of their work to be able to judge what's important, what to share with someone who may not have any context, and also know enough about the breadth and depth of their thinking to represent it credibly, especially if you're dealing with someone outside one's own tradition or one's own education. You want to be respectful of what you're reading and you want to make sure that you have enough sensitivity and sensibility—or just enough sense with no suffix—to recognize that the work has its own existence whether you read it or not, no matter what you say about it, and to represent that in some way. ...

What I tried to do, especially with those authors whom readers might assume they know about, or assume they're not interested in, or whose work they've always been daunted by, is to give an invitation to their books that is engaging but still robust enough give a sense of the landscapes they create. To suggest that this is what you'll be thinking about if you read this author. For most of us, too much of our reading of serious literature is when we're very young, and they're school assignments. And we approach books a certain way because of that—like they're homework. ... This is a book which I hope people will keep on their shelves and pull off when they want to read Conrad, or they want to read Virginia Woolf, or they're looking for a good mystery. It's meant to be used as a resource. ...

[T]here is a sensibility that runs through my book that I hope readers will find congenial, and come to trust. I don't mean trust as in "agree with," but respect and react to in considered ways. ... [R]eading, and the kind of interior life it presupposes, is really important to one's mental health, and I would also venture to say, to one's moral health and to the mental and moral health of society at large. And that when you pick up a book you are also acknowledging others, because you're reading someone else's words, and you're learning about new worlds. That dialogue that books encourage is critically important. ... I think books have receded from the frontlines of the cultural conversation in a way that's not healthy for the culture.

The Washington Post praised the "scope and diversity" of Mustich's choices. The book "invites rapturous browsing even while eliciting, and expecting, argument. ... It's hard to imagine that such a massive compendium could have been done better or demonstrate a more supple and catholic taste."

 And a look at some sample pages reveals a gorgeous layout.

Winter Rain

Port Hardy does not get cold enough during the winter months for much snow to accumulate. Instead, it rains. A lot, we were told.

It was raining on the night we arrived. We drove the final two hours through endless forests in the dark, with copious rain and heavy fog. I hoped the elk living in those forests had the good sense to stay home that night. (Two signs along the way instructed us to watch out for elk for the next 65 kilometers (40 miles), then another 45 km. So pretty much constantly!)

That was the only rain we saw for our initial week. But most of the last three days have been very wet. There is a baseball field near our house and walking Diego (not pictured at left) in the outfield is like walking in two inches of water. It's like the grass does not exist.

I finally got my work equipment this past Monday and was connected for my shift on Tuesday. So far, the only drawback is the delay in retrieving and saving documents. Of course, those delays are measured in handfuls of seconds, but it still can be frustrating.

But, in general, working at home - I'm going to really enjoy this. Finish a job, then walk down the hallway and put some wet clothes in the dryer. ... Change the CD in the small stereo in my office. ... Email a co-worker that I can start a job, but I need to walk my dog first. ... Continue organizing my office while keeping an eye on the in-box.

Last evening, for my dinner break, I grilled a couple of burgers, had some tater tots going in the oven, and built my first fire in the fireplace. I brought a comfy chair over by the fireplace and ate with Diego laying beside me. Later, he got up and sat rigidly behind me, just over my left shoulder, keeping his sharp eyes focused on the dwindling supply of tater tots.

Baseball: In the summer, most weekday Red Sox games will begin at 4 PM (or 5 PM), which means that home night games will likely be over by 7:30 PM. During the first week of the 2019 season, the sun will set about 8 PM. In late June, it will get dark at roughly 9:45 PM. ... Two hours of daylight after a night game!

Port Hardy, After One Week

One of the most amazing things about Port Hardy (or our little part of it) is the silence. Walking out the back door onto the deck with Diego, turning right and going along the garage and down the driveway to the street, I would hear absolutely nothing. Except for some bird calls. The silence has a real presence. When there is no sound, you believe you can hear the utter quiet; the term "deafening silence" refers to something real. There is a weight to it, a heft.

No passing cars, no honking, no traffic on nearby streets, no machinery, no planes overhead, no bus announcements, no trains, no yelling. Two days ago, I heard a noise, which I determined was a ferry departing down on the bay.

We arrived at 9435 Mayors Way last Tuesday evening. It was a little dusky as we drove north from Campbell River. Port Hardy was 2.5 hours away. In addition to the dark, it began raining, so we saw nothing of the endless scenery of the trip's final 230 kilometers (143 miles). The landlord's agent was waiting - with a fire in the fireplace - to welcome us and give us keys. Later, we put a comforter down on the floor and had some dinner.

We knew we would be arriving at night and the house would be empty, so we had the movers in Mississauga load our mattress and a futon (and several boxes of necessary supplies) at the back of the U-Haul. When we took these items out, I noticed that several boxes were sopping wet on the bottom, the cardboard falling away in pieces. I immediately feared that the U-Haul had a leak somewhere and (considering the days of rain we had traveled through) a lot of our stuff was now ruined. I tried putting it out of my mind, figuring that another 12 hours would not matter if the boxes already had been in water for a week or more.

Four local men came by at 10 AM the following morning and unloaded the U-Haul. I quickly saw that my fears about water damage were unfounded. My brother-in-law, who had driven the U-Haul across the country, surmised that two large jugs of water at the back of the truck had frozen. The plastic containers had then expanded and cracked and some melting ice had leaked out. It turned out that the water was really only in one area and nothing was damaged - other than the many things broken or damaged by the incompetent movers back in Ontario. (I wish the Port Hardy guys had been able to pack the truck.)

We spent the rest of Wednesday and Thursday unpacking, hooking up computers, putting legs back on tables, filling bookshelves with books, storing the flat boxes and bubblewrap in the garage. We had two great meals in town - including perhaps the best fish-and-chips we have ever had - which was tremendously encouraging.

Because Laura would be driving south to Nanaimo on Sunday for two weeks of job training (and her brother and his wife were returning the U-Haul in Campbell River before continuing on to Nanaimo, where they would take a ferry back to the mainland), we decided to explore the town a bit on Friday and Saturday. We drove down to Tsulquate Park (maybe three minutes from our house) and walked along the water, passing a playground, the ferry dock, and a large wooden carrot.

Laura also spotted two bald eagles high in the treetops, scanning the water.

My happiness over this move and our new situation has been a pleasant (and somewhat strange) surprise. The house, rented for several hundred dollars less than our 19th-floor Mississauga apartment, the outdoor space of a deck, the remoteness of the town, the ability to work from home ... it is striking how every single aspect of this resettlement has gone smoothly and wonderfully.

Yesterday I drove into town, thinking I would go to the library and the Port Hardy Museum (which are part of the same building), but I forgot they are both closed on Monday. I walked into Cafe Guido because there is a book store off on one side (The Book Nook), in a semi-lower floor, with some used books among the the new ones. In a craft store upstairs, I met an adorable golden-haired young dog. I bent down to pet him and he poked his nose towards my jacket pocket, where there were bits of Diego's peanut butter crackers. The dog followed me around the store before giving up and walking back by the register and laying down.

I bought a tea and walked past the library (a sign on the door: "No Bathroom - Key Went Missing") and found the Ministry office for which I had once hoped to work (before my law firm suggested working remotely). Back on the main street, one business was closed, the owner having added an explanation ("More Medical Procedures!"). I saw the post office down one street, so I went and picked up our mail.

I sat out on the deck reading for a bit, with Diego on the stake in the side yard. Our neighbour in the house beyond the deck came over and said hello to Diego. She and her husband are retired and they travel a lot in their massive RV (Arizona, Florida, and "down island"). They apparently are famous (relatively speaking, of course) for having the most Xmas lights on their house, but they are behind schedule this year. A pizza delivery guy asked her over the weekend, "So where are the lights?" She wanted to know if she could come into our yard to string lights on the fence separating our yard and their driveway because there are plants and whatnot on her side. I said sure. (There are some lights up now, but I don't think she will top the houses I saw in Brooklyn decades ago.)

There has been a lot of frost on the grass every morning, with the temperature around freezing. The snow/ice crystals on the top of the fence posts and the car roof are pointy or fuzzy.

The smoke from chimneys tells me that many people have wood stoves or fireplaces going in the mornings. The morning quiet and the smell of wood burning is exquisite. We will need to purchase some firewood, which I believe one of the movers said he chops and sells.

It's hard to tell for sure after only one week, but Port Hardy seems to be the right amount of town for me. At age 55, the basics are pretty much all I need. Everything is a mere 3-5 minutes away and there is neither traffic nor crowds (as long as I avoid the grocery store on the weekend or late afternoon). I also really like the uniqueness of every single house. I hope to drive around soon and take more photos.

And while it was raining on the night we arrived, I don't think it has rained at all since. On Monday and today, it reached 10 degrees C (50 F).

I love being so close to the water. In the first picture below you can sort of see a road in the middle of the picture going off to the left. There is another slight curve and then it goes down a hill and Queen Charlotte Strait is visible.

Today, I got a library card. When the librarian looked at my Ontario drivers license, she asked what brought me to Port Hardy. I told her my wife was the new librarian in this branch. She knew someone had been hired, and we talked for a bit.

I also drove out of town to take a picture of the Welcome To Port Hardy sign we half-saw in the dark last week.

I want to learn about this area and the various small towns.

At Long Last! "Blood On The Tracks" Is The Focus Of Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series: Volume 14

In September 2012, Bob Dylan released an alternate take of "Meet Me In The Morning" (from Blood On The Tracks) as the B-side to "Duquesne Whistle". At that time, it was reported that "Meet Me In The Morning" was a track from the soon-to-be-released Volume 12 of Dylan's Bootleg Series.

However, that did not happen. Volume 12 ended up being devoted to The Basement Tapes. Volume 13 was an overview of Dylan's "Christian Period" (1979-81).

It was announced last week that the Blood On the Tracks set - which must have been mostly completed and ready to go six years ago - will be released on November 2 as Volume 14! More Blood, More Tracks will include six discs comprising "every surviving take" from the New York sessions, including false starts and "studio banter".

For fans of what many people (including myself) regard as Dylan's greatest album, this confirmation is still stunning news - because it was never clear what would be released. Would it be everything, as was done with The Cutting Edge, an 18-disc set of everything recorded for Dylan's mid-60s masterpieces Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde On Blonde? Or would it be a sampling, as was done with the gospel sessions for Trouble No More? And would there be anything included that was previously unknown?

More Blood, More Tracks will feature over 70 previously unreleased recordings, though they are all songs, either from the official album or the two outtakes released in more recent years. But there is no possible way this set will not be riveting because it is impossible for Dylan to sing a song the same way twice. Even in successive takes, he will emphasize different words, perhaps also changing the lyrics slightly. The personal nature of these songs only heightens that aspect of his performance. Also the recordings for this album were done solo, with a full band, and with a partial band.

The music will no doubt be a revelation, but then there is this: the accompanying book will include "a complete reproduction of one of Dylan's legendary handwritten 57 page notebooks", in which he wrote and revised the album's 10 songs. (There are also at least seven songs written at the same time but not recorded.*) There are stories about the infamous "red notebook", but there were actually two or three notebooks. This is Holy Grail stuff! The original notebooks are currently held in a museum in New York City and are not available to researchers until after Dylan's death.

I see "Idiot Wind" scrawled at the top of the second page and the song spills over to the third and fourth pages. I also read "Blame it on a simple twist of fate" near the bottom of the first page. In March 2016, The New York Times published an article about Dylan's archives is Tulsa, Oklahoma, and included close-ups of three other notebook pages:

While Dylan's shopping lists ("hot dogs") or to-do lists ("hook phone back up") are interesting, I hope there are not too many of them in MBMT.

*: The unrecorded songs, according to Clinton Heylin's The Recording Sessions 1960-1994: "Bell Tower Blues", "There Ain't Gonna Be Any Next Time", "Where Do You Turn (Turning Point)", "It's Breakin' Me Up", "Don't Want No Married Woman", "Ain't It Funny", and "Little Bit Of Rain".

The recording history of Blood On The Tracks is slightly irregular. A test pressing was compiled from the New York sessions and sent to a few journalists in late 1974. As the legend goes, Dylan played this test pressing for his brother David around Christmas and, based (perhaps) on his brother's feedback, decided to re-record five of the songs, making the final album a mix of the two sessions. It wasn't long before bootleg copies of the test pressing began circulating and Dylanologists have been arguing which version of the album is "better" ever since.

Unfortunately, the multi-track masters of the five re-recordings are all that survive from the two Minneapolis sessions. Andy Gill and Kevin Odegard, in A Simple Twist of Fate: Bob Dylan and the Making of Blood on the Tracks, offer a fuller accounting of what was played. This information most likely comes from interviews with the various musicians. (Odegard was one of the Minnesota musicians.)

December 27, 1974, Sound 80 Studio, Minneapolis, Minnesota
1. Idiot Wind (Rehearsal)
2. Idiot Wind
3. Idiot Wind
4. Idiot Wind
5. Idiot Wind (Released on Blood On The Tracks)
6. You're A Big Girl Now
7. You're A Big Girl Now (Released on Blood On The Tracks)

December 30, 1974, Sound 80 Studio, Minneapolis, Minnesota
1. Tangled Up In Blue (G version)
2. Tangled Up In Blue (partial A version, rehearsal)
3. Tangled Up In Blue (Released on Blood On The Tracks)
4. Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts (rehearsal)
5. Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts (Released on Blood On The Tracks)
6. If You See Her, Say Hello (rehearsal)
7. If You See Her, Say Hello (Released on Blood On The Tracks)

Bob Dylan / More Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series Volume 14

[The information in italicized brackets comes from Michael Krossgaard previously-published research. While he had access to recording logs and files in the archives of Columbia/Sony Records, the information may not be entirely accurate. Also, the information included in MBMT may not be completely correct, as noted below.]

DISC 1

A&R Studios, New York, September 16, 1974
1. If You See Her, Say Hello (Take 1) – solo
2. If You See Her, Say Hello (Take 2) – solo – previously released on The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3
3. You’re a Big Girl Now (Take 1) – solo
4. You’re a Big Girl Now (Take 2) – solo
5. Simple Twist of Fate (Take 1) – solo [incomplete]
6. Simple Twist of Fate (Take 2) – solo
7. You’re a Big Girl Now (Take 3) – solo
8. Up to Me (Rehearsal) – solo [not included by Krossgaard]
9. Up to Me (Take 1) – solo
10. Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts (Take 1) – solo [not included by Krossgaard]
11. Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts (Take 2) – solo – included on test pressing [listed as Take 1 by Krossgaard]

DISC 2

A&R Studios, New York, September 16, 1974
1. Simple Twist of Fate (Take 1A) – with band
2. Simple Twist of Fate (Take 2A) – with band [incomplete]
3. Simple Twist of Fate (Take 3A) – with band
4. Call Letter Blues (Take 1) – with band
5. Meet Me in the Morning (Take 1) – with band – edited version included on test pressing and Blood on the Tracks
6. Call Letter Blues (Take 2) – with band – previously released on The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3
7. Idiot Wind (Take 1) – with bass
8. Idiot Wind (Take 1, Remake) – with bass [incomplete]
9. Idiot Wind (Take 3 with insert) – with bass [listed as Take 4 by Krossgaard]
10. Idiot Wind (Take 5) – with bass [incomplete]
11. Idiot Wind (Take 6) – with bass
12. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (Rehearsal and Take 1) – with band [incomplete]
13. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (Take 2) – with band [incomplete]
14. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (Take 3) – with band [incomplete]
15. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (Take 4) – with band
16. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (Take 5) – with band
17. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (Take 6) – with band
18. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (Take 6, Remake) – with band [incomplete]
19. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (Take 7) – with band [incomplete]
20. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (Take 8) – with band

DISC 3

A&R Studios, New York, September 16, 1974
1. Tangled Up in Blue (Take 1) – with bass [incomplete]

A&R Studios, New York, September 17, 1974
2. You’re a Big Girl Now (Take 1, Remake) – with bass and organ
3. You’re a Big Girl Now (Take 2, Remake) – with bass, organ, and steel guitar – included on test pressing and previously released on Biograph
4. Tangled Up in Blue (Rehearsal) – with bass and organ [not included by Krossgaard]
5. Tangled Up in Blue (Take 2, Remake) – with bass and organ [listed as Take 1 by Krossgaard]
6. Spanish Is the Loving Tongue (Take 1) – with bass and piano [listed as "?" by Krossgaard]
7. Call Letter Blues (Rehearsal) – with bass and piano [listed as "Blues (incomplete)" by Krossgaard]
8. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (Take 1, Remake) – with bass and piano
9. Shelter from the Storm (Take 1) – with bass and piano – previously released on the Jerry McGuire original soundtrack
10. Buckets of Rain (Take 1) – with bass
11. Tangled Up in Blue (Take 3, Remake) – with bass
12. Buckets of Rain (Take 2) – with bass
13. Shelter from the Storm (Take 2) – with bass [listed as "slow" by Krossgaard]
14. Shelter from the Storm (Take 3) – with bass [incomplete; listed as "fast" by Krossgaard]
15. Shelter from the Storm (Take 4) – with bass – previously released on Blood on the Tracks

DISC 4

A&R Studios, New York, September 17, 1974
1. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (Take 1, Remake 2) – with bass [listed as "slow" by Krossgaard]
2. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (Take 2, Remake 2) – with bass [listed as "fast" by Krossgaard]
3. Buckets of Rain (Take 1, Remake) – previously released on Blood on the Tracks [not listed by Krossgaard]

A&R Studios, New York, September 18, 1974
4. Buckets of Rain (Take 2, Remake) – solo [incomplete; listed as Take 1 by Krossgaard]
5. Buckets of Rain (Take 3, Remake) – solo [listed as Take 2 by Krossgaard]
6. Buckets of Rain (Take 4, Remake) – solo [not listed by Krossgaard]

A&R Studios, New York, September 19, 1974
7. Up to Me (Take 1, Remake) – with bass [incomplete]
8. Up to Me (Take 2, Remake) – with bass
9. Buckets of Rain (Take 1, Remake 2) – with bass
10. Buckets of Rain (Take 2, Remake 2) – with bass [incomplete]
11. Buckets of Rain (Take 3, Remake 2) – with bass [incomplete]
12. Buckets of Rain (Take 4, Remake 2) – with bass – previously released on Blood on the Tracks
13. If You See Her, Say Hello (Take 1, Remake) – with bass – previously included on test pressing
14. Up to Me (Take 1, Remake 2) – with bass [incomplete]
15. Up to Me (Take 2, Remake 2) – with bass
16. Up to Me (Take 3, Remake 2) – with bass
17. Buckets of Rain (Rehearsal) – with bass
18. Meet Me in the Morning (Take 1, Remake) – with bass – previously released on "Duquesne Whistle" 7-inch single
19. Meet Me in the Morning (Take 2, Remake) – with bass
20. Buckets of Rain (Take 5, Remake 2) – with bass

DISC 5

A&R Studios, New York, September 19, 1974
1. Tangled Up in Blue (Rehearsal and Take 1, Remake 2) – with bass [incomplete]
2. Tangled Up in Blue (Take 2, Remake 2) – with bass [incomplete]
3. Tangled Up in Blue (Take 3, Remake 2) – with bass – included on test pressing and previously released on The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3
4. Simple Twist of Fate (Take 2, Remake) – with bass [false start]
5. Simple Twist of Fate (Take 3, Remake) – with bass – previously released on Blood on the Tracks [Krossgaard lists 3 takes for this date]
6. Up to Me (Rehearsal and Take 1, Remake 3) – with bass [incomplete]
7. Up to Me (Take 2, Remake 3) – with bass – previously released on Biograph
8. Idiot Wind (Rehearsal and Takes 1-3, Remake) – with bass [incomplete]
9. Idiot Wind (Take 4, Remake) – with bass
10. Idiot Wind (Take 4, Remake with organ overdub) included on test pressing and previously released on The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 [Krossgaard says overdub recorded on October 8]
11. You’re a Big Girl Now (Take 1, Remake 2) – with bass
12. Meet Me in the Morning (Take 1, Remake 2) – with bass
13. Meet Me in the Morning (Takes 2-3, Remake 2) – with bass [Krossgaard lists 6 takes: 3 incomplete and 3 false starts]

DISC 6

A&R Studios, New York, September 19, 1974
1. You’re a Big Girl Now (Takes 3-6, Remake 2) – with bass [not mentioned by Krossgaard]
2. Tangled Up in Blue (Rehearsal and Takes 1-2, Remake 3) – with bass [incomplete]
3. Tangled Up in Blue (Take 3, Remake 3) – with bass

Sound 80 Studio, Minneapolis, MN, December 27, 1974
4. Idiot Wind – with band – previously released on Blood on the Tracks
5. You’re a Big Girl Now – with band – previously released on Blood on the Tracks

Sound 80 Studio, Minneapolis, MN, December 30, 1974
6. Tangled up in Blue – with band – previously released on Blood on the Tracks
7. Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts – with band – previously released on Blood on the Tracks
8. If You See Her, Say Hello – with band – previously released on Blood on the Tracks

Notes on Disc 5:

The notes state that "Tangled Up in Blue (Take 3, Remake 2)" from September 19 was included on the test pressing and released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3. However, the booklet included with The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 states the song was recorded on September 16. (But that cannot be correct if there was only one incomplete take done that day.) Also, "Tangled Up In Blue" and "Idiot Wind" on the test pressing are not the same takes that appeared on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3.

More - though certainly not all - will be revealed on November 2.

The Death Of Truth

Michiko Kakutani was a book critic at The New York Times for more than three decades. She has written The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump.

Bridey Heing, Longreads:

[I]n this tight volume [160 pages], Kakutani teases out seemingly disparate strands of cultural and political developments in the United States and weaves them together into a thorough yet readable narrative of how America grew into a place where truth is subjective, and a reality TV star can become its leader. ...

This work is interested less in the fanaticism of true believers than in the complicity of the average citizen, and the ways in which the entire system shifted away from factuality to subjectivity over the past sixty or so years.

[H]er analysis of cultural trends and the rise of subjectivity adds most to the conversation — and is perhaps the most controversial of her targets. ... "The postmodern argument that all truths are partial (and a function of one's perspective) led to the related argument that there are many legitimate ways to understand or represent an event...[I]t's also been exploited by those who want to make the case for offensive or debunked theories, or who want to equate things that cannot be equated." ...

She quotes Newt Gingrich, the architect in many ways of the Republican party we currently have, from a 2016 interview in which he makes false claims regarding crime rates. When called out for claiming FBI statistics were only "theoretically true," he responded, "What I said was equally true. People feel it."

That attitude — that an opinion, if deeply felt, can stand counter to a fact — is likely all-too familiar at this point. ... The Trump administration, with their alternative facts, is speaking the language of a society that leans more heavily on opinion than objective reality and has become more reliant on personal narrative than fact for understanding the world around them. ...

As a result, opinions that are not backed up by facts are given airtime and normalized by a mass media that does not know how to navigate a surreal world they, in part, helped build — perpetuating the cycle rather than breaking out of it.

A lengthy excerpt from the book was published by The Guardian.

If a novelist had concocted a villain like Trump – a larger-than-life, over-the-top avatar of narcissism, mendacity, ignorance, prejudice, boorishness, demagoguery and tyrannical impulses (not to mention someone who consumes as many as a dozen Diet Cokes a day) – she or he would likely be accused of extreme contrivance and implausibility. ... But the more clownish aspects of Trump the personality should not blind us to the monumentally serious consequences of his assault on truth and the rule of law, and the vulnerabilities he has exposed in our institutions and digital communications. It is unlikely that a candidate who had already been exposed during the campaign for his history of lying and deceptive business practices would have gained such popular support were portions of the public not blase about truth-telling and were there not systemic problems with how people get their information and how they've come to think in increasingly partisan terms.

With Trump, the personal is political, and in many respects he is less a comic-book anomaly than an extreme, bizarro-world apotheosis of many of the broader, intertwined attitudes undermining truth today, from the merging of news and politics with entertainment, to the toxic polarisation that's overtaken American politics, to the growing populist contempt for expertise. ...

For decades now, objectivity – or even the idea that people can aspire toward ascertaining the best available truth – has been falling out of favour. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s well-known observation that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts” is more timely than ever: polarisation has grown so extreme that voters have a hard time even agreeing on the same facts. This has been exponentially accelerated by social media, which connects users with like-minded members and supplies them with customised news feeds that reinforce their preconceptions, allowing them to live in ever narrower silos. ...

Orwell wrote that "political chaos is connected with the decay of language", divorcing words from meaning and opening up a chasm between a leader's real and declared aims. This is why the US and the world feel so disoriented by the stream of lies issued by the Trump White House and the president's use of language to disseminate distrust and discord. And this is why authoritarian regimes throughout history have co‑opted everyday language in an effort to control how people communicate ...

[Trump's] personal assault on the English language. His incoherence (his twisted syntax, his reversals, his insincerity, his bad faith and his inflammatory bombast) is emblematic of the chaos he creates and thrives on, as well as an essential instrument in his liar's toolkit. His interviews, off‑teleprompter speeches and tweets are a startling jumble of insults, exclamations, boasts, digressions, non sequiturs, qualifications, exhortations and innuendos – a bully's efforts to intimidate, gaslight, polarise and scapegoat.

Precise words, like facts, mean little to Trump, as interpreters, who struggle to translate his grammatical anarchy, can attest. Chuck Todd, the anchor of NBC's Meet the Press, observed that after several of his appearances as a candidate Trump would lean back in his chair and ask the control booth to replay his segment on a monitor – without sound: "He wants to see what it all looked like. He will watch the whole thing on mute."

The Real Question: "How Many Brown People Can Live In America And It Still Be America?"

The Southwest Political Report, June 20, 2018

Donald Trump isn't anti immigrant. He's a White Supremacist. This isn't about immigrants. Melania Trump is an immigrant. This is not about the children of immigrants. Ivanka Trump is the child of an immigrant. Eric Trump is the child of an immigrant. Donald Trump Jr. is the child of an immigrant. Joe Arpaio is the child of immigrants. ... The Klansman Fred Trump was the son of immigrants. ...

This is not about immigration. This is not about the law. This is about the fear of a Brown America. ... [H]ow many Brown people with Spanish last names can live in America and it still be America? This is the question that animates this so called immigration debate. It is the driving force behind it. This is what is meant by infestation. This is what is meant by animals. This is what is meant by drug dealers and rapists. This is what is meant by bad hombres. This is what is meant by calling El Salvador a shithole. This is what drives for the call for a wall. This is what is meant by saying Mexico will pay. ...

The theme of Brown people as a threat to White standards, civility and safety is an old trope in US politics. ... Trump did not make these politics up. But he picked them up and ran with them in a way we have not seen for generations. ...

[This] is about the fear of becoming. This fear of White people being forced to assimilate to a growing population that in regions of the country already outnumber them ...

This isn't about immigration. It never has been. It is about the changing face of America. ...

Book 6 Of My Struggle Will Be Published On September 4!

Amazon and Penguin Random House say September 4. (Penguin UK says August 30.)

The final installment in the long awaited, internationally celebrated My Struggle series.

The full scope and achievement of [Karl Ove] Knausgaard's monumental work is evident in this final installment of his My Struggle series. Grappling directly with the consequences of Knausgaard's transgressive blurring of public and private, Book Six is a troubling and engrossing look into the mind of one of the most exciting artists of our time. Knausgaard includes a long essay on Hitler and Mein Kampf, particularly relevant (if not prescient) in our current global climate of ascending dictatorships.

My Struggle is a series of six autobiographical "novels" in which Knausgaard reveals the banalities and humiliations of his life, his private pleasures, and his dark thoughts (as Wikipedia puts it). Knausgaard, who is Norwegian, published the six books from 2009–2011. The English translations began appearing in 2013.

I have no idea how I missed about 97% of the hype, but I did. It wasn't until December 6, 2016, that I opened Book 1. I was immediately addicted, and read all five books - a total of roughly 2,700 pages - in one month. It was (with perhaps one exception) the most enjoyable and astounding reading experience of my life*. And I want to re-read the five books right before diving into Book 6 (which is reportedly 1,264 pages!).

*: Evan Hughes of The New Republic said the books are "like opening someone else's diary and finding your own secrets". Zadie Smith admitted, at one point: "I need the next volume like crack."

In 2013, the Guardian stated that My Struggle "deserves to be called perhaps the most significant literary enterprise of our times":

A man in his 30s, married and living in a pleasant city in Norway, with his first novel just published to much acclaim, Knausgaard suffers from an indefinable malaise: his writing feels obstructed and forced, and its motivations uneasily egotistical; his personal and domestic life seem to constrict him while being unarguably the fruit of his own free choices. ...

What unfolds is a painstakingly detailed account of mid-life, as Knausgaard documents his meeting and relationship with a new partner in Stockholm, their progress into marriage and parenthood, their construction of domestic space and social life, the evolution of their familial relationships and the changing politics of their own bond. These are the universal themes from which My Struggle draws its abundance, and since there is no narrative requirement to attenuate them, Knausgaard finds himself in the position of being able to write about modern middle-class private life with a compendiousness and precision that are entirely singular and new.

One month later, the Guardian noted that in Book 2,

Knausgaard is brutally, painstakingly, viciously truthful – or at least appears to be – about his relationship with his wife and children. Linda is mostly presented as a stubborn, lazy, self-obsessed depressive, while his children are often seen as inconveniences, ignored and abandoned, or used as weapons in domestic disputes.

That is all true, but (a) there is much more in that book and (b) Knausgaard is at least every bit as "brutally truthful" about himself, sometimes to a shocking degree.

Book 3 concerns his childhood from ages 7-10 and Book 4 details his time as an 18-year-old teacher in a tiny fishing village in northern Norway. Book 5 finds Knausgaard in Bergen in his twenties, struggling to become a writer. (He supposedly wrote Book 5 - 550 pages - in only eight weeks.)

Stephen King: Under The Dome (2009)

The genesis of Under The Dome dates back to Stephen King's earliest years as a writer. In 1972, King began work on a novel entitled Under The Dome. (1976 and 1978 have also been given as possible starting dates.) He returned to the idea in 1982, retitled it The Cannibals, but eventually abandoned the manuscript.

"I've got about four-hundred-and-fifty pages done and it is all about these people who are trapped in an apartment building," King said at the time. "Worst thing I could think of. And I thought, wouldn't it be funny if they all ended up eating each other? It's very, very bizarre because it's all on one note. And who knows whether it will be published or not?"

(In September 2009, King posted a 61-page excerpt from The Cannibals (the first four chapters of the original typescript) to his website. An additional 63 pages were posted the following month. These pages are still available for download.)

King has said these two unfinished works "were two very different attempts to utilize the same idea, which concerns itself with how people behave when they are cut off from the society they've always belonged to. Also, my memory of The Cannibals is that it, like Needful Things, was a kind of social comedy. The new Under the Dome is played dead straight."

King:

From the very beginning, I saw it as a chance to write about the serious ecological problems that we face in the world today. The fact is we all live under the dome. We have this little blue world that we've all seen from outer space, and it appears like that's about all there is. It's a natural allegorical situation, without whamming the reader over the head with it. I don't like books where everything stands for everything else. It works with Animal Farm: You can be a child and read it as a story about animals, but when you're older, you realize it's about communism, capitalism, fascism. That's the genius of Orwell. But I love the idea about isolating these people, addressing the questions that we face. ... We have to conclude we're on our own, and we have to deal with it.

King, on UTD's politics:

I was angry about incompetency. Obviously I'm on the left of center. I didn't believe there was justification for going into the war in Iraq. And it just seemed at the time, that in the wake of 9/11, the Bush Administration was like this angry kid walking down the street who couldn't find whoever sucker punched him, and so turned around and punched the first likely suspect. Sometimes the sublimely wrong people can be in power at a time when you really need the right people. I put a lot of that into the book. ... The [Bush-Cheney] administration interested me because of the aura of fundamentalist religion that surrounded it and the rather amazing incompetency* of those two top guys. I thought there is something blackly humorous in it. So in a sense, Under the Dome is an apocalyptic version of The Peter Principle.

On an otherwise normal October afternoon, the small Maine town of Chester's Mill is thrown into chaos when some type of barrier cuts it off from the rest of the world. The barrier (or force field, perhaps) conforms to the exact boundaries of the town. It rises to a height of five miles, while also extending at least 100 feet into the ground. No one can come in or leave - and that includes deliveries of food and medicine.

This sounds promising, but the book (well, as much of it as I could stand) is a huge bore. King takes his time introducing the various characters and how they relate to each other. The narrative moves way too slowly - and there is no need for this book to be more than 1,000 pages long.

Big Jim Rennie is a town selectman, who yearns to run Chester's Mill his way. When the chief of police is killed on what becomes known as Dome Day - he stands too close to the dome and his pacemaker explodes - Rennie sees his chance to grab control.

Dale Barbara, a former Iraq War vet, had been working in the town and was about to leave when the dome appeared. As the US government takes an interest in the Chester's Mill situation, Barbara becomes the government's point-man inside the dome, much to Rennie's dismay.

I gave up after page 250 or so when it seemed like King was determined to explore the secret life of every single person in town, in minute detail. There are a couple of murders early in the book and we learn that Big Jim has been both embezzling from the town and running a meth lab (with the consent of one of the town's pastors).

When I looked online to see how the story was resolved, I was very glad I quit when I did. The New York Post's review noted that Under The Dome's finale "pales to the buildup. King is better at characters and situations than causes and reasons." And John Dugdale of The Sunday Times echoed the thoughts of other reviewers when he stated that readers deserved a more satisfying payoff for staying with King for 1,000 pages:

King's inability to raise his game—to relinquish the methods of his more straightforward tales of the paranormal—prevents you taking his socio-political vision seriously. The simple division of characters into goodies and baddies, the use of magic, the homespun style, the sentimental ending, the vital role played by a dog in defeating the forces of evil—all of these belong in fiction for older children, not the grown-up novels he's bent on emulating.

*: How can King (or anyone else, for that matter) think that the Bush administration was incompetent? Those motherfuckers did just about every legal and illegal thing they wanted to do - and no one stopped them. When you look at things from their point of view, their time in power was an enormous success. And then Obama continued and expanded their inhumane plans for another eight years. Mission Accomplished!

Next: Full Dark, No Stars.

"A Fundamental Divide On What It Means To Live In A Society"

Some people think you should converse (or even debate) with people whose beliefs differ from yours.

I do not agree. I do not need to 'stay informed' of what the other side thinks. (Those beliefs are everywhere, they are part of the atmosphere, and I will absorb them without even trying.) I do not believe it is healthy for me to listen to words that will only disgust or depress or frustrate or anger me.

I do not need to eat shit in order to better understand (or reinforce my love of) my favourite foods. I know how I feel and I am not so presumptuous as to think my words will change anyone's mind. So, really, what is the point?

Kayla Chadwick:

I'm perfectly content to pay taxes that go toward public schools, even though I'm childless and intend to stay that way, because all children deserve a quality, free education. If this seems unfair or unreasonable to you, we are never going to see eye to eye.

If I have to pay a little more with each paycheck to ensure my fellow Americans can access health care? SIGN ME UP. Poverty should not be a death sentence in the richest country in the world. If you're okay with thousands of people dying of treatable diseases just so the wealthiest among us can hoard still more wealth, there is a divide between our worldviews that can never be bridged.

I don't know how to convince someone how to experience the basic human emotion of empathy. ... Our disagreement is not merely political, but a fundamental divide on what it means to live in a society, how to be a good person ...

I'm done trying to convince these hordes of selfish, cruel people to look beyond themselves.

Happy 74th Birthday, Keith Richards!

Bob Dylan: Trouble No More 1979-1981 - The Bootleg Series - Volume 13 (Part 2)

I follow God, so if my followers are following me, indirectly they're gonna be following
God too, because I don't sing any song which hasn't been given to me by the Lord to sing.
– Bob Dylan, December 7, 1979, Interview with Bruce Heiman (KMEX, Tuscon, Arizona)

I was 15 years old, growing up in northwest Vermont, when Slow Train Coming was released in August 1979. I heard "Gotta Serve Somebody" and "Slow Train" on CHOM, an FM rock radio station in Montreal. I liked the title track, but wasn't very impressed with "Gotta Serve Somebody". (I read many years later that producer Jerry Wexler didn't want what he felt was a weak song on the album at all, let alone as the opening track.)

I was also at that time bristling under the strict rules of my mother's house. In 1972, she became involved, through her older sister, with Jehovah's Witnesses. Her deepening involvement in the religion led to my parents' divorce about five years later. I lived a kind of double life, going to meetings but fervently hoping that no one in the neighborhood or at school knew. I was listening to and reading about rock and roll, and while I certainly knew about Bob Dylan, I was not exactly running to buy an album of religious songs. Looking at the back of Slow Train Coming, I remember thinking: What could a song like "Man Gave Names To All The Animals" possibly sound like?

The next thing I heard about Dylan was that his born-again period was over and Infidels, released in October 1983, was a "secular" album. It was the first Dylan album I bought in real time. (It was not entirely secular, but I liked it anyway.) As far as the two records between Slow Train Coming and Infidels, I knew next-to-nothing. Shot of Love was a mystery (with a cheesy cover) and I believed the opinions of others that Saved was just about the worst album in the entire history of sound. (Not the history of recorded sound, but of all sound, back to the Big Bang.) Saved was unlistenable, in other words. (And yet that information did not make me curious to hear it.) It would be many years before I listened to all of Slow Train Coming and Saved and when I did, I liked what I heard. And when I heard tapes of the concerts Dylan played in 1979 and 1980 ... I was truly astounded. His band was fantastic, and he was singing with so much passion, warmth, and sincerity. I was an atheist, but the preaching – delivered in what some critics referred to as a hectoring tone – did not bother me. I found it fascinating.

I began tracking down more live tapes and trying to learn more about this period of Dylan's career. Most books on Dylan devoted very little space to the "gospel years", however. For a while, I considered researching and writing about this overlooked era myself (my previous post about this box set was taken largely from my book proposal to the editors of Bloomsbury's 33.3 Series), but I retired the idea in January 2015, when I heard that Tim Drummond, who had played bass with Dylan during this period (and with many others, including James Brown and Miles Davis, in his life) had died. Note: Clinton Heylin, the author of several solid books about Dylan, has just released Trouble In Mind: Bob Dylan's Gospel Years - What Really Happened.

It was only a few years ago that Dylan fans believed Sony/Columbia would never release a volume in the Bootleg Series devoted to this period. It was assumed the label felt it could not possibly sell enough copies to justify the effort. But perhaps, after the positive reviews for Another Self Portrait (Volume 10, 2013), which offered a re-examination of another much-maligned point in Dylan's long career – Greil Marcus began his Rolling Stone review with: "What is this shit?" – Sony thought the same rehabilitation could be performed on the Gospel Years. And here we are!

The Bootleg Series has evolved in interesting ways since 1991. Two-disc sets of live recordings from 1964, 1966, and 1975 were nice, but they paled in comparison to The Cutting Edge (Volume 12, 2015), an 18-CD behemoth of nearly every note Dylan recorded from 1965-66, when he recorded three seminal albums: Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. Sony then made available, exclusively to purchasers of that overpriced set, an access code to download The 1966 Live Recordings, a 36-CD set (!).

Now, it was clear: bigger was better. A box devoted to Blood On The Tracks was supposed to be next. But it was bumped for The Basement Tapes Complete (Volume 11, 2014) and it has been sidetracked again for Trouble No More. If Volume 14 covers Blood on the Tracks, I hope it contains every note from every recording session. I'd like to think Sony has now boxed itself into a corner, where they are almost forced to give Blood the same exhaustive treatment as those three mid-60s classics. (Also, the Rolling Thunder tours of 1975-76 deserve more than the 2-disc set released in 2002. There were two concerts filmed, including the gloriously intense Fort Collins show, part of which was broadcast on ABC-TV in 1976.)

Trouble No More contains eight CDs and one DVD. The discs are housed in a book with an introduction from Ben Rollins, an essay from Amanda Petrusich, and notes on the songs by Rob Bowman.

Rollins describes the gospel concerts as "a true revival meeting ... tightly paced and wonderfully played ... riveting and exciting". Several of the songs are in a "perpetual state of lyrical development" as Dylan "continues to search for their musical essence". He notes that most shows were captured only on cassette mixes off of the soundboards (although four nights in Toronto in April 1980 were recorded on 24-track tape). For music pulled from 37-year-old cassettes, these songs sound fantastic!

Petrusich, the author of Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records, discusses the "incongruous" nature of Dylan becoming born again. If we think of Evangelicalism "as a kind of sense-making rubric – a stern and unambiguous system in which hopelessness and existential worry are addressed and corrected for", she states, then Dylan's change of heart is "maybe not so mystifying. ... Dylan has always performed devotional material ... He has always been searching." She concludes:

If you can separate the teachings of Jesus from the trappings and mistakes of organized religion, there is nothing but beautiful lessons. ... What's maybe most remarkable to me now about Dylan's gospel recordings is the humanity they inadvertently betray ... Feeling remorseful about your failures, and wanting both to prostrate yourself and to be forgiven – it's hard to think of anything more instinctive to the human heart. Listening to Dylan's music from this era, all I can hear any more is that plaintiveness. It's a pure signal. A man looking for a way forward.

I'll likely cite bits from Bowman's notes as I discuss the various songs. But at the start, he writes of hearing a song from Slow Train Coming prior to the album's release, at a Dylan convention in England.

One could hear a pin drop while we all focused our ears, neurons and emotions on the first public airing of "Precious Angel". You could cut the tension with a knife. After the last note vanished into the ether, a very divided room spent the rest of the conference arguing vociferously ... Many assumed that the man who had always asked questions was now unquestioningly accepting doctrine that left no room for critical thinking. ...

I personally loved the whole scene. It reminded me of nothing so much as the furor surrounding Bob's decision to go electric in 1965 ... Once again, Bob Dylan, the questor, was on the move forcing himself and, by extension, his audience to, despite what many thought, ask questions about their beliefs, values, existence and what life was really worth. All great art makes its audience think. All great art makes its audience question. This was, undoubtedly, great art ...

A second book, entitled Pressing On, contains photographs from the recording sessions and tours. (Why do box sets like this always include so many photos (from concerts, of foreign album covers, etc.? A few of these go a very long way. I'd rather have more essays and information about the music.) Among these photos are some real jewels: pages with typed and/or handwrittten lyrics to 14 songs, many of them further edited by Dylan in pencil.

Random phrases and lines are scrawled everywhere and it's sometimes impossible to decipher Dylan's handwriting. The lyrics for two songs – "Slow Train Coming" and "When You Gonna Wake Up?" – bear almost no relation to the recorded versions. There are also many wonderful lines that Dylan discarded, a testament to how prolific he was as a writer during these years.

There is also an essay from Penn Jillette. I thought he was an odd choice as a contributor, but it turns out that his Gospel Bob experience was somewhat similar to mine (and, likely, many other fans). Jillette is eight years older than I am, and he had been buying Dylan albums since Bringing It All Back Home. On August 20, 1979, the 24-year-old Jillette walked into his local record store.

I bought Slow Train Coming. I had been warned it was going to be a gospel record but I wasn't sufficiently prepared. I was shocked. I was bummed. ... I listened to that record but I didn't hear a note. I listened just once, shook my head, and filed it away. My world had fallen apart.

Jillette says he purchased Saved and Shot of Love, but they remained in plastic, unplayed, for years. He was living in San Francisco but did not attend any of the 14 shows Dylan played in that city just over two months later. Now, Jillette admits that he has changed his way of thinking.

Dylan's gospel records are good. I know the records haven't changed over these years, so it's me. I come to Dylan for passion, and profundity. I come to Dylan for truth. ... I come to Dylan to knock me out of the trivial. ... I come to Dylan to make life seem more important than just today, and these records deliver everything I want. At the time these recordings came out, I asked myself, "What's wrong with Dylan?" Now listening to these recordings full of heart, and truth, and passion, naked power, the question suddenly becomes "What was wrong with me?" ...

Here starts my revelation: When these recordings of live versions, outtakes, and rehearsals from the gospel period arrived, I experienced the burning bush. I was on the road to Damascus. These records changed me. I'm not Christian but I've changed. ...

As far the theological content of these records – I still disagree. ... But the medium isn't the message, the message is the message, and fortunately for me, I can hear the message on these records as not just the revealed word of Christianity. The singing on this record is some of the best of Bob's career. He cares. It all matters. Even the sound checks and rehearsals are full of fire. ... I no longer care that I don't agree with the cosmology. ... Art must be deeper and richer than theology.

I must face some of my own hypocrisy. I never sequestered Bach's Saint Matthew's Passion on my shelf in shrink wrap. I listen to all the Bach sacred music without the chip on my shoulder that I had for Bob. I feel the music, the inspiration and the passion directly. Bach's faith doesn't get in the way. The faith is a big part of what I love about it. ... I love Ray Charles singing "Amazing Grace." Why was that always okay with me? Why did it take so much longer to hear Dylan's gospel? ...

I must be careful that my new tolerance doesn't fall into disrespect. Listening to these records I mustn't pretend that Bob could be singing about any old thing. ... [A]s I listen to these gospel songs, I try to take his faith and passion seriously and honestly and feel it as best I can from his point of view. I need to let his preaching the word of god speak to me of the human condition, uplift me, inspire me, and not in any way cheapen the depth of his belief. ...

Common wisdom is that Dylan went back to being a secular song writer after this period, but that's a lie. The truth is Bob Dylan never was and never will be a secular song writer ...

The first two discs of Trouble No More are live recordings, presented in roughly the same order as a concert from 1979-80. Discs 3 and 4 have previously unreleased studio recordings and soundchecks – alternate takes of songs we know, songs that have appeared only on bootlegs (but in higher quality), and one song that almost no one (even hard-core collectors) knew existed.

Discs 5 and 6 are taken from Dylan's 1980 concerts in Toronto and the June 27, 1981 concert in London (when Dylan had re-introduced his older material into his set lists) is on Discs 7 and 8. The DVD includes concert and rehearsal clips interspersed with sermons written by Luc Sante and delivered by actor Michael Shannon. This was apparently done at Dylan's suggestion or insistence.

Dylan preached to his audiences quite a bit during these tours. However, you will hear none of that preaching on this box set. (Even the 2-CD bonus that people (like me!) received if they ordered from Dylan's website, a recording of the San Diego concert from November 27, 1979, is devoid of sermonizing.)

Sony made the wrong decision in axing the sermons. They were an important part of these tours – additional evidence of Dylan's sincerity and zeal – and their absence short-changes listeners of exactly what went on during these shows. Sony could have make each spoken interlude a separate track and people could skip over them if they chose. Not including the six-song opening set by Dylan's background singers was also a mistake. But for those who need the full experience, the bootlegs remain available.

(Next: The music. (Finally!))

Bob Dylan: Trouble No More 1979-1981 - The Bootleg Series - Volume 13 (Part 1)

Lately I've been having evil dreams, I wake up in a cold blue glare
I run the tape back in my mind, wondering if I took the wrong road somewhere
Searching for the truth the way God designed it
When the real truth is that I may be afraid to find it
– Need A Woman

Throughout the summer of 1979, rumors circulated that Bob Dylan had become a born-again Christian. To most of his fans, the idea was preposterous. How could Dylan, a Jewish protest singer and free-thinking rock and roll iconoclast, have embraced Christian fundamentalism?

In August, Dylan released Slow Train Coming, a set of deeply religious songs that more than confirmed the earlier speculation. Dylan frequently had used Biblical imagery and references in his lyrics, but this was entirely different, and much more than literary allusion. While the music was rooted in rock and R&B, the lyrics were unambiguous expressions of faith in Christ and stark denunciations of non-believers. Insisting "there's only one authority and that's the Authority on high", Dylan pointedly asked: "When You Gonna Wake Up?"

Less than two weeks after a three-song appearance on Saturday Night Live in late October, Dylan began a tour of small theaters on the west coast. That was when fans got the real shock. Dylan ignored his entire back catalogue, refusing to play any song written before his conversion.

This was the bravest, most mystifying, most controversial, and utterly unexpected twist from a man famed for confounding expectations. Dylan's new stance reverberated across musical, cultural, and religious lines, producing a wider and more profound shock than when he famously plugged in an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. As Dylan biographer Howard Sounes put it, "Electricity had annoyed folk purists, but religion bothered everybody."

On the surface, what is now generally referred to as Dylan's "gospel period" was an abrupt and bewildering turn of events. Yet it was wholly in keeping with Dylan's artistic sensibilities. As he has eagerly absorbed all forms of American music – folk, country, blues, gospel – Dylan has refused to remain in any one musical place for very long. The creative spark Dylan derives from swimming against the cultural tide, fueled by the friction between his art and the public's expectations and reactions, has spurred him to create some of his best music. Invariably, by the time Dylan's fans have become comfortable with what he's done, he's already charting a course in another direction.

Slow Train Coming and Saved are message albums, just as Dylan's folk masterpieces are, even if the message wasn't what his fans wanted to hear. A closer look at Dylan's career reveals how far back he had been searching for something, asking family, friends, and fellow musicians about prayer, religion, and Christianity. His lyrics on John Wesley Harding are drawn from and inspired by his Bible reading. Street-Legal, the record that preceded Slow Train Coming, maps Dylan's inner turmoil following his divorce and leaves him on the cusp of a momentous transformation: "There's a new day at dawn and I've finally arrived. .. I can't believe it, I can't believe I'm alive."

Dylan began 1979 by attending Bible study classes at the Vineyard School of Discipleship, near his home in California. (Several members of his Rolling Thunder and Street-Legal bands were either born-again or belonged to the Vineyard Fellowship.) When Dylan began writing songs from a strict religious perspective, he was both surprised and scared. "I didn't like writing them. I didn't want to write them ... I didn't want to sing them." But by April, he had accepted this new direction: those songs would comprise his next album.

On Slow Train Coming and Saved, Dylan portrays himself as someone whose errant way of living should have landed him in a "pine box" years ago. Blinded by the devil, beaten down and empty inside, he was rescued by a "precious angel" who led him to the Lord. He feels he does not deserve this gift of salvation. "You have given Your life for me/How can I live for You?"

Not only has Dylan vowed to change his way of thinking – to "stop being influenced by fools" – he thinks you should, too. According to Dylan, we are all going to have to serve either the Devil or the Lord: "There ain't no neutral ground". He wants to know: "Are you ready for the judgment?/Are you ready for that terrible swift sword?" Dylan confesses some self-doubt – "I hope I'm ready" – but remains resolute: "I am pressing on to the higher calling of my Lord."

Dylan says he has been shunned and exiled by his "so-called friends" because "I don't be like they'd like me to". The religious context is new, but Dylan's image of himself as an uncompromising outsider is one of his recurring themes:

"I try my best to be just like I am, but everyone wants you to be like them" (Maggie's Farm, 1965)

"I just can't do what I've done before" (Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine), 1967)

"If I'd lived my life by what others were thinking, this heart inside me would have died" (Up To Me, 1974)

"What good am I if I'm like all the rest?" (What Good Am I?, 1989)

Dylan's religious lyrics are more straightforward than his usual writing, but their simplicity can be deceptive. The songs convey a lot of information, which may not be obvious without some familiarity with the Bible. Dylan's artistry is bringing together multiple scriptural ideas, yet still leaving the lyric with a light, flowing feel.

The attention paid to these religious lyrics obscured the fact that Dylan had also written some magnificent music. Both albums were recorded at Alabama's famed Muscle Shoals Sound Studios with legendary producer Jerry Wexler. On Slow Train Coming, Dylan's backing band, led by guitarist Mark Knopfler and augmented by a horn section, gave many of the songs a warm R&B groove.

Anyone hoping for a return of the "old Dylan" in 1980 would have been seriously disappointed by Saved. The music was pure gospel, though it failed in capturing the power and passion of the band's live sound. In singing almost exclusively about his personal redemption, Dylan offered an astonishing affirmation of his faith in the face of intense criticism.

Back in November 1979, a San Francisco Chronicle writer called Dylan's initial gospel concert "god-awful", and that set the tone for many subsequent reviews. There were news reports of hostile crowds booing and storming out of theaters, but bootleg recordings of the shows reveal that Dylan's songs of faith were often warmly received. There were some rough audiences, of course. The band took a tremendous amount of abuse in Tempe, Arizona, in late November, although Dylan made things worse by antagonizing the hecklers.

Each night began with a short set of traditional spirituals sung by a trio of female backup singers. Dylan would then come out with the full band and play most of Slow Train Coming. He would take a short break while the women sang another song or two, returning for another set and an encore. He usually played between 16-18 songs. The second half of each show consisted almost entirely of songs no one had ever heard (most of them would be released on Saved). Angry and confused fans yelled out requests for Dylan's hits – or any of his old songs – but he ignored them.

Despite the negative reaction, Dylan was playing some of the most exciting music of his life. (That sentence could also have been written in 1966.) At first, the band was tentative – getting accustomed to the shouts from the audience and feeling its way through the newer, Saved songs, even as Dylan was tinkering with the arrangements. They could rock, but it was the slower, more reflective songs – "I Believe In You," "When He Returns," "Saving Grace" – that stood out every night.

Dylan was singing with urgency, vulnerability, and sincerity, sharing something intensely personal, trying to connect with his audience in a way he rarely had before. It seems to be the time when he was least interested in playing the role of "Bob Dylan".

He was also uncharacteristically talkative during many of these shows, lecturing the crowds about the Book of Revelation and the "end times". Many of his monologues (often referred to as "raps" or "sermons") – how Russia's recent invasion of Afghanistan presaged the coming battle of Armageddon – were heavily influenced by Hal Lindsey's book, The Late, Great Planet Earth.

As the tours went on, though, Dylan softened. He eased up on trying to convert the audience, and even joked about fans walking out on him. At one January 1980 show, while in the thick of playing the unreleased Saved material, he quipped, "And the hits just keep comin'." In April, Dylan added some fresh material to the set. One song, "Ain't Gonna Go To Hell For Anybody", was written after he met with several rabbis who urged him to return to his Jewish roots.

When Dylan played a series of concerts in November 1980 dubbed "A Music Retrospective", he added some of his earlier material to the set. He toured for most of 1981, playing a full mix of his music, both secular and sacred. On his 1984 tour, the gospel songs were all but absent, however, leading many people to assume Dylan had moved on, that his embrace of Christianity had been a passing phase. But Dylan has continued to play songs from Slow Train Coming and Saved at various points over the years and he has made references to his faith in his more recent songs.

(More on "Trouble No More" to come.)