As I’ve written, this new box set of songs from Dylan’s vaults is a grab-bag of curiosities interspersed with some genuine treasures.

“Went To See the Gypsy” is a curiosity — a demo of a song that appeared eventually on New Morning with sharpened lyrics and a more committed vocal. It’s interesting to hear Dylan working his way into the song here but the demo offers no revelations.

“Little Sadie” is another curiosity — the basic track of a song that appeared on Self Portrait with overdubs. Again, interesting but not revelatory.

“Pretty Saro”, a track that didn’t make it onto Self Portrait, is a treasure — an old folk ballad sweetly sung in Dylan’s Nashville Skyline croon but with deeper emotion than he mustered for anything on that earlier album. Dylan’s melodic embellishments here seem motivated by genuine feeling. It’s a lovely performance of a very sad song.

“Alberta #3” is an alternate take of a song on Self Portrait, not noticeably better but solid and enjoyable. A curiosity.

“Spanish Is The Loving Tongue”, with Dylan accompanying himself on piano, is a lesser version of the track he released as the B-side of “Watching the River Flow”, which is one of my all-time favorite Dylan performances. Hearing him work his way towards that later, definitive version ranks as another curiosity.

“Annie’s Going To Sing Her Song’ is a treasure — a strong and respectful cover of a wonderful, wry Tom Paxton song.

“Time Passes Slowly #1” is a startlingly ill-considered arrangement of one of the finest, simplest, most touching songs on New Morning. For some reason Dylan punches it out here as though he’s trying to hide its delicate lyricism. A curiosity.

“Only A Hobo” is a treasure — an impassioned 1971 performance of an impassioned song written by Dylan at the beginning of his career in his purest “homage to Woody Guthrie” mode.

“Minstral Boy” is another treasure, from an earlier period than most of the songs on this collection, relevant because it represents a crude version in progress of a song that was played at the Isle Of Wight concert with The Band, issued as part of the deluxe edition of Another Self Portrait.  Dylan is singing temp or dummy lyrics in this recording, made as part of The Basement Tapes in 1967 or thereabouts.  We know from other songs laid down in the basement of Big Pink that Dylan often worked up songs this way, going for the sound of the overall song, the sound of the lyrics before wrestling them into a semblance of coherence (a process he hadn’t quite completed when he sang the song at the Isle Of Wight.)  This violates the image many have of Dylan as a poet who sets texts to music.  He is, rather, first and foremost, a songwriter — his lyrics follow his music as often as his music follows his words.

For a long time I would pull out Dylan’s album Self Portrait every few years and give it another listen, thinking, “I bet this is better than I remember it — I bet it’s a masterpiece waiting to be rediscovered.” It never was — it was just a quirky, interesting album from a quirky, interesting artist, with a lot of fine tracks and lot of less than fine tracks that didn’t quite add up to a coherent work.

I’ve just listened to it again, in the remastered version included in the deluxe edition of the new Dylan box set Another Self Portrait, which collects a bunch of songs from the Self Portrait sessions, outtakes and stripped-down versions of songs on the album, before the overdubs that were added for the commercial release.

After hearing Another Self Portrait, Self Portrait feels different to me now, because I can see where it came from — an experiment in reinvention by an artist who had reached several dead ends in his short career.  Some of the dead ends were masterpieces, like Blonde On Blonde, which couldn’t be repeated, some were experiments, like John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline, which didn’t get Dylan quite where he wanted to go.

Once you stop expecting coherence from Self Portrait, the album takes flight, in its very incoherence, in the earnestness of the restless search it represents.  The vocal performances are consistently riveting, even when they fall short of what they’re aiming for.  The song selection is fascinating, even if it doesn’t amount to a vision, much less a musical self portrait of Dylan.

It remains quirky and interesting, but is also brilliant in its way, and utterly delightful.  It dismayed those who thought it might represent where Dylan had arrived, and might remain, in 1970, but Dylan never really arrives anywhere.  He might stop in Carbondale, just to fuck with your mind — Carbondale! — but he keeps on going.  His work is always about the next stop on the line.

Every time he reaches what just has to be the end of the tracks, he consults his ghostly railroad timetable and finds a forgotten spur line that leads him somewhere else.  We couldn’t have been expected to trust in this in 1970, but now we know better — we know we can hop the Dylan freight anywhere and end up where we wanted to go all along, if we’d only known the way.

Click on the images to enlarge.

Whenever Dylan played with The Band, magic happened. Sometimes it was rough and ragged magic — Robbie Robertson one famously said, “Dylan wanted us to play the songs, he didn’t want us to learn them” — but the roughness and raggedness, the energy exploding on the extreme edges of control, were essential parts of the magic.

Dylan played with The Band at the Isle Of Wight concert in 1969 and a remixed and remastered recording of the concert has just been released as part of the deluxe edition of the new Dylan box set Another Self Portrait.  It’s absolutely astonishing.

It’s new evidence that The Band was the greatest back-up group of all time.  When Dylan wants to rock out, as on “Highway 61”, The Band rocks him into the stratosphere.  When he wants to be tender, as on “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”, The Band cradles him in sweet but never saccharine lyricism.

Dylan’s intellectualism could get a bit precious at times, but The Band always took him back to the roadhouses where the music he really loved was born.  When Levon Helm adds his Arkansas howl to “Highway 61”, Dylan isn’t just referencing the legendary road anymore, he’s singing a song in a joint by the side of it.  “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” is transformed from something dangerously close to a country ballad pastiche into a late-night bandstand salute to fucking.

But there is something deeper going on here.  Dylan’s acoustic set shows us an artist striving for something new in his art — for a naked emotional commitment to his material which would transcend the hipster cool of Blonde On Blonde, the intellectual sang-froid of John Wesley Harding.

When he embraced a country idiom at the end of the latter album, and then made Nashville Skyline, he was moving in that direction, but he wore the country idiom like a mask.  It wasn’t what he was really after.  He got what he was after in his vocal for Lay, Lady, Lay in this concert — something beyond the crooner’s mellifluous tone and a country-music languor, something closer to what Sinatra had mastered, the ability to sing without a mask, as Dylan once described Sinatra’s gift.

This concert is the key to Self Portrait and its expanded version Another Self Portrait.  It shows us what Dylan was searching for in the grab-bag of songs he recorded not long after the Isle Of Wight concert.  Shedding one more layer of skin, he was looking for what lay behind the “protest” songs, the hipster songs, the pastiche songs.  He wanted to perform music that smelled of beer joints, vibrated with genuine heartache, conversed on equal and intimate terms with the ghosts of the American past.

He found a bit of all that with The Band in this concert, every song of which is amazing on one level or another.  It is simply, for all its raggedness, one of the greatest live rock recordings of all time.