The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7: No Direction Home - The Soundtrack (2005)
Disc One
1. When I Got Troubles
2. Rambler, Gambler
3. This Land is Your Land
4. Song to Woody
5. Dink's Song
6. I Was Young When I Left Home
7. Sally Gal
8. Don't Think Twice, It's All Right
9. Man of Constant Sorrow
10.Blowin' in the Wind
11.Masters of War
12.A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
13.When the Ship Comes In
14.Mr. Tambourine Man
15.Chimes of Freedom
16.It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
Disc Two
1. She Belongs To Me
2. Maggie's Farm
3. It Takes a Lot To Laugh, It Takes a Train To Cry
4. Tombstone Blues
5. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
6. Desolation Row
7. Highway 61 Revisited
8. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
9. Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again
10.Visions of Johanna
11.Ballad of a Thin Man
12.Like a Rolling Stone
 
By the time we get to the seventh
installment of Bob Dylan's "Bootleg" series, I must admit that the
novelty had worn off quite a bit, and these types of releases just
weren't warranting the same levels of excitement.
Not for me anyway. He was putting out
these types of recordings much more frequently than he was original
material, and unless you were a diehard fan, you really just stopped
giving a care.
The background of this disc is that it's a "soundtrack" to a PBS
documentary directed by the great Martin Scorsese. It's been awhile
since I watched the documentary, but to group this release with the
documentary seems
stretching it a bit thin. The Scorsese project focused mainly on the
earlier part of Dylan's career, with most of the material in the film
centered around the leap from "acoustic folk" to "electric rock" and all
the turmoil surrounding the jump. A lot of latter day interviews with
the likes of Joan Baez and Allen Ginsburg et al. So, yes, the music
here is basically from that same time frame, so I guess that's where you can
justify calling this a soundtrack.
Unlike his first Bootleg collection that
was chocked full of treasures, this one seems as though he's digging for
scraps. There are a few "new" songs here, but they're from the earliest
days, so the recordings are very primitive and they're not so much
entertaining as they are interesting. By the time he's two minutes into
Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land (the third song), I'm
already fighting to stay awake.
The bulk of this material is demos and alternate versions of songs any
Dylan fan knows. The first disc is more acoustic, the second being more
electric. None of the songs here seem to add to much to the depth of
Dylan's catalog, and I really can't fathom anyone listening to
this record frequently since all of the original songs are so much
better and stronger than what is here. It doesn't help when the latter half of the latter
disc seems to be filled with songs that average about seven minutes in
length.
But as I try to be objective, I need to remind myself that this
was Dylan at his peak, and these recordings did occur
during the time when everything the man touched turned to gold, so like
The Beatles "Anthology" series, the disc serves as a great "behind the
scenes" peek of the man when times, at least popularity wise, were the
best and brightest for the man.
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