Another Self Portrait

Bob Dylan's influence on popular music is incalculable. As a songwriter, he pioneered several different schools of pop songwriting, from confessional singer/songwriter to winding, hallucinatory, stream-of-consciousness narratives. As a vocalist, he broke down the notion that a singer must have a conventionally good voice in order to perform, thereby redefining the vocalist's role in popular music. As a musician, he sparked several genres of pop music, including electrified folk-rock and country-rock. And that just touches on the tip of his achievements. Dylan's force was evident during his height of popularity in the '60s -- the Beatles' shift toward introspective songwriting in the mid-'60s never would have happened without him -- but his influence echoed throughout several subsequent generations, as many of his songs became popular standards and his best albums became undisputed classics of the rock & roll canon. Dylan's influence throughout folk music was equally powerful, and he marks a pivotal turning point in its 20th century evolution, signifying when the genre moved away from traditional songs and toward personal songwriting. Even when his sales declined in the '80s and '90s, Dylan's presence rarely lagged, and his commercial revival in the 2000s proved his staying power.

For a figure of such substantial influence, Dylan came from humble beginnings. Born in Duluth, Minnesota, Bob Dylan (b. Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941) was raised in Hibbing, Minnesota, from the age of six. As a child he learned how to play guitar and harmonica, forming a rock & roll band called the Golden Chords when he was in high school. Following his graduation in 1959, he began studying art at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. While at college, he began performing folk songs at coffeehouses under the name Bob Dylan, taking his last name from the poet Dylan Thomas. Already inspired by Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie, Dylan began listening to blues while at college, and the genre wove its way into his music. He spent the summer of 1960 in Denver, where he met bluesman Jesse Fuller, the inspiration behind the songwriter's signature harmonica rack and guitar. By the time he returned to Minneapolis in the fall, he had grown substantially as a performer and was determined to become a professional musician.

Dylan made his way to New York City in January of 1961, immediately making a substantial impression on the folk community of Greenwich Village. He began visiting his idol Guthrie in the hospital, where he was slowly dying from Huntington's chorea. Dylan also began performing in coffeehouses, and his rough charisma won him a significant following. In April, he opened for John Lee Hooker at Gerde's Folk City. Five months later, Dylan performed another concert at the venue, which was reviewed positively by Robert Shelton in The New York Times. Columbia A&R man John Hammond sought out Dylan on the strength of the review, and signed the songwriter in the fall of 1961. Hammond produced Dylan's eponymous debut album (released in March 1962), a collection of folk and blues standards that boasted only two original songs. Over the course of 1962, Dylan began to write a large batch of original songs, many of which were political protest songs in the vein of his Greenwich Village contemporaries. These songs were showcased on his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Before its release, Freewheelin' went through several incarnations. Dylan had recorded a rock & roll single, "Mixed Up Confusion," at the end of 1962, but his manager, Albert Grossman, made sure the record was deleted because he wanted to present Dylan as an acoustic folkie. Similarly, several tracks with a full backing band that were recorded for Freewheelin' were scrapped before the album's release. Furthermore, several tracks recorded for the album -- including "Talking John Birch Society Blues" -- were eliminated from the album before its release.

Comprised entirely of original songs, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan made a huge impact in the U.S. folk community, and many performers began covering songs from the album. Of these, the most significant were Peter, Paul and Mary, who made "Blowin' in the Wind" into a huge pop hit in the summer of 1963 and thereby made Bob Dylan into a recognizable household name. On the strength of Peter, Paul and Mary's cover and his opening gigs for popular folkie Joan Baez, Freewheelin' became a hit in the fall of 1963, climbing to number 23 on the charts. By that point, Baez and Dylan had become romantically involved, and she was beginning to record his songs frequently. Dylan was writing just as fast.

By the time The Times They Are A-Changin' was released in early 1964, Dylan's songwriting had developed far beyond that of his New York peers. Heavily inspired by poets like Arthur Rimbaud and John Keats, his writing took on a more literate and evocative quality. Around the same time, he began to expand his musical boundaries, adding more blues and R&B influences to his songs. Released in the summer of 1964, Another Side of Bob Dylan made these changes evident. However, Dylan was moving faster than his records could indicate. By the end of 1964, he had ended his romantic relationship with Baez and had begun dating a former model named Sara Lowndes, whom he subsequently married. Simultaneously, he gave the Byrds "Mr. Tambourine Man" to record for their debut album. The Byrds gave the song a ringing, electric arrangement, but by the time the single became a hit, Dylan was already exploring his own brand of folk-rock.

Inspired by the British Invasion, particularly the Animals' version of "House of the Rising Sun," Dylan recorded a set of original songs backed by a loud rock & roll band for his next album. While Bringing It All Back Home (March 1965) still had a side of acoustic material, it made clear that Dylan had turned his back on folk music. For the folk audience, the true breaking point arrived a few months after the album's release, when he played the Newport Folk Festival supported by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. The audience greeted him with vicious derision, but he had already been accepted by the growing rock & roll community. Dylan's spring tour of Britain was the basis for D.A. Pennebaker's documentary Don't Look Back, a film that captures the songwriter's edgy charisma and charm.

Dylan made his breakthrough to the pop audience in the summer of 1965, when "Like a Rolling Stone" became a number two hit. Driven by a circular organ riff and a steady beat, the six-minute single broke the barrier of the three-minute pop single. Dylan became the subject of innumerable articles, and his lyrics became the subject of literary analyses across the U.S. and U.K. Well over 100 artists covered his songs between 1964 and 1966; the Byrds and the Turtles, in particular, had big hits with his compositions. Highway 61 Revisited, his first full-fledged rock & roll album, became a Top Ten hit shortly after its summer 1965 release. "Positively 4th Street" and "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" became Top Ten hits in the fall of 1965 and spring of 1966, respectively. Following the May 1966 release of the double album Blonde on Blonde, he had sold over ten million records around the world.

During the fall of 1965, Dylan hired the Hawks, formerly Ronnie Hawkins' backing group, as his touring band. the Hawks, who changed their name to the Band in 1968, would become Dylan's most famous backing band, primarily because of their intuitive chemistry and "wild, thin mercury sound," but also because of their British tour in the spring of 1966. The tour was the first time the British had heard the electric Dylan, and their reaction was disagreeable and violent. At the Manchester concert (long mistakenly identified as the show from London's Royal Albert Hall), an audience member called Dylan "Judas," inspiring a positively vicious version of "Like a Rolling Stone" from Dylan and the band. The performance was immortalized on countless bootleg albums (an official release finally surfaced in 1998), and it indicates the intensity of Dylan in the middle of 1966. He had assumed control of Pennebaker's second Dylan documentary, Eat the Document, and was under deadline to complete his book Tarantula, as well as record a new record. Following the British tour, he returned to America.

On July 29, 1966, he was injured in a motorcycle accident outside of his home in Woodstock, New York, suffering injuries to his neck vertebrae and a concussion. Details of the accident remain elusive -- he was reportedly in critical condition for a week and had amnesia -- and some biographers have questioned its severity, but the event was a pivotal turning point in his career. After the accident, Dylan became a recluse, disappearing into his home in Woodstock and raising his family with his wife, Sara. After a few months, he retreated with the Band to a rented house, subsequently dubbed Big Pink, in West Saugerties to record a number of demos. For several months, Dylan and the Band recorded an enormous amount of material, ranging from old folk, country, and blues songs to newly written originals. The songs indicated that Dylan's songwriting had undergone a metamorphosis, becoming streamlined and more direct. Similarly, his music had changed, owing less to traditional rock & roll, and demonstrating heavy country, blues, and traditional folk influences. None of the Big Pink recordings was intended to be released, but tapes from the sessions were circulated by Dylan's music publisher with the intent of generating cover versions. Copies of these tapes, as well as other songs, were available on illegal bootleg albums by the end of the '60s; it was the first time that bootleg copies of unreleased recordings became widely circulated. Portions of the tapes were officially released in 1975 as the double album The Basement Tapes.

While Dylan was in seclusion, rock & roll had become heavier and artier in the wake of the psychedelic revolution. When Dylan returned with John Wesley Harding in December of 1967, its quiet, country ambience was a surprise to the general public, but it was a significant hit, peaking at number two in the U.S. and number one in the U.K. Furthermore, the record arguably became the first significant country-rock record to be released, setting the stage for efforts by the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers later in 1969.

Dylan followed his country inclinations on his next album, 1969's Nashville Skyline, which was recorded in Nashville with several of the country industry's top session men. While the album was a hit, spawning the Top Ten single "Lay Lady Lay," it was criticized in some quarters for uneven material. The mixed reception was the beginning of a full-blown backlash that arrived with the double album Self Portrait. Released early in June of 1970, the album was a hodgepodge of covers, live tracks, re-interpretations, and new songs greeted with negative reviews from all quarters of the press. Dylan followed the album quickly with New Morning, which was hailed as a comeback.

Following the release of New Morning, Dylan began to wander restlessly. He moved back to Greenwich Village, he finally published Tarantula in November of 1970, and he performed at the Concert for Bangladesh in August 1971. During 1972, he began his acting career by playing Alias in Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which was released in 1973. He also wrote the soundtrack for the film, which featured "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," his biggest hit since "Lay Lady Lay." The Pat Garrett soundtrack was the final record released under his Columbia contract before he moved to David Geffen's fledgling Asylum Records. As retaliation, Columbia assembled Dylan, a collection of Self Portrait outtakes, for release at the end of 1973. Dylan only recorded two albums -- including 1974's Planet Waves, coincidentally his first number one album -- before he moved back to Columbia. The Band supported Dylan on Planet Waves and its accompanying tour, which became the most successful tour in rock & roll history; it was captured on 1974's double live album Before the Flood.

Dylan's 1974 tour was the beginning of a comeback culminating with 1975's Blood on the Tracks. Largely inspired by the disintegration of his marriage, Blood on the Tracks was hailed as a return to form by critics and it became his second number one album. After jamming with folkies in Greenwich Village, Dylan decided to launch a gigantic tour, loosely based on traveling medicine shows. Lining up an extensive list of supporting musicians -- including Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Arlo Guthrie, Mick Ronson, Roger McGuinn, and poet Allen Ginsberg -- Dylan dubbed the tour the Rolling Thunder Revue and set out on the road in the fall of 1975. For the next year, the Rolling Thunder Revue toured on and off, with Dylan filming many of the concerts for a future film. During the tour, Desire was released to considerable acclaim and success, spending five weeks on the top of the charts. Throughout the Rolling Thunder Revue, Dylan showcased "Hurricane," a protest song he had written about boxer Rubin Carter, who had been unjustly imprisoned for murder. The live album Hard Rain was released at the end of the tour. Dylan released Renaldo and Clara, a four-hour film based on the Rolling Thunder tour, to poor reviews in early 1978.

Early in 1978, Dylan set out on another extensive tour, this time backed by a band that resembled a Las Vegas lounge act. The group was featured on the 1978 album Street Legal and the 1979 live album At Budokan. At the conclusion of the tour in late 1978, Dylan announced that he was a born-again Christian, and he launched a series of Christian albums that following summer with Slow Train Coming. Though the reviews were mixed, the album was a success, peaking at number three and going platinum. His supporting tour for Slow Train Coming featured only his new religious material, much to the bafflement of his long-term fans. Two other religious albums -- Saved (1980) and Shot of Love (1981) -- followed, both to poor reviews. In 1982, Dylan traveled to Israel, sparking rumors that his conversion to Christianity was short-lived. He returned to secular recording with 1983's Infidels, which was greeted with favorable reviews.

Dylan returned to performing in 1984, releasing the live album Real Live at the end of the year. Empire Burlesque followed in 1985, but its odd mix of dance tracks and rock & roll won few fans. However, the five-album/triple-disc retrospective box set Biograph appeared that same year to great acclaim. In 1986, Dylan hit the road with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers for a successful and acclaimed tour, but his album that year, Knocked Out Loaded, was received poorly. The following year, he toured with the Grateful Dead as his backing band; two years later, the souvenir album Dylan & the Dead appeared.

In 1988, Dylan embarked on what became known as "the Never-Ending Tour" -- a constant stream of shows that ran on and off into the late '90s. That same year, he appeared on The Traveling Wilburys, Vol. 1 -- by the supergroup also featuring George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne -- and released his own Down in the Groove, an album largely comprising covers. The Never-Ending Tour received far stronger reviews than Down in the Groove (the Traveling Wilburys album fared much better), but 1989's Oh Mercy was his most acclaimed album since 1975's Blood on the Tracks, due in part to Daniel Lanois' strong production. However, Dylan's 1990 follow-up, Under the Red Sky (issued the same year as the second album by the Traveling Wilburys, now a quartet following the death of Roy Orbison shortly after the release of the Wilburys' first long-player in 1988), was received poorly, especially when compared to the enthusiastic reception for the 1991 box set The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased), a collection of previously unreleased outtakes and rarities.

For the remainder of the '90s, Dylan divided his time between live concerts, painting, and studio projects. He returned to recording in 1992 with Good as I Been to You, an acoustic collection of traditional folk songs. It was followed in 1993 by another folk record, World Gone Wrong, which won the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album. After the release of World Gone Wrong, Dylan released a greatest-hits album and a live record.

Dylan released Time Out of Mind, his first album of original material in seven years, in the fall of 1997. Time Out of Mind received his strongest reviews in years and unexpectedly debuted in the Top Ten, eventually climbing to platinum certification. Such success sparked a revival of interest in Dylan, who appeared on the cover of Newsweek and began selling out concerts once again. Early in 1998, Time Out of Mind received three Grammy Awards -- Album of the Year, Best Contemporary Folk Album, and Best Male Rock Vocal.

Another album of original material, Love and Theft, followed in 2001 and went gold. Soon after its release, Dylan announced that he was making his own film, to star Jeff Bridges, Penelope Cruz, John Goodman, Val Kilmer, and many more. The accompanying soundtrack, Masked and Anonymous, was released in July 2003. Dylan opted to self-produce his new studio album, Modern Times, which topped the Billboard charts and went platinum in both America and the U.K. It was Dylan's third consecutive album to receive praise from critics and support from consumers, and it was followed three years later in 2009 by Together Through Life, another self-produced effort (as Jack Frost) that also featured contributions from David Hidalgo of Los Lobos and Mike Campbell of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. He capped off the year with an old-fashioned holiday effort, Christmas in the Heart. Proceeds from the album were donated to various charities around the world.

Dylan released the self-produced (again as Jack Frost) Tempest on September 11, 2012; it debuted at three on both the Billboard 200 and the U.K. charts. The next two years brought acclaimed entries in the ongoing Bootleg Series -- 2013 saw the release of Another Self Portrait (1969-1971), which restored the reputation of a much-maligned era, and 2014 saw the long-awaited appearance of The Basement Tapes Complete -- and then Dylan threw a curve ball for his next studio album. Released in February 2015, Shadows in the Night found the singer/songwriter devoting himself to selections from the Great American Songbook in the pre-rock & roll era. Every one of the ten songs had previously been recorded by Frank Sinatra, and Dylan's album was his version of Sinatra's saloon songs, arranged by his own touring band. Shadows in the Night debuted at seven in the U.S. and at number one in the U.K. It was followed in the autumn by the next installment in The Bootleg Series, The Cutting Edge 1965-1966. Available in three editions -- a double-disc distillation, a comprehensive six-disc box, and a complete, limited-edition 18-CD set -- The Cutting Edge 1965-1966 collected unreleased (and unbootlegged) outtakes from the recording of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde.

In May 2016, Dylan returned with Fallen Angels, his second Sinatra-inspired collection of songs from the Great American Songbook; it debuted at number seven on the Billboard charts. Later that year, Columbia/Legacy released The 1966 Live Recordings, a 36-disc box set containing every known recording from that pivotal year, but its release was overshadowed by Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in the autumn of 2016. Dylan continued his exploration of the Great American Songbook with the March 2017 release of Triplicate, a triple album containing three thematically arranged collections of pop standards. Entitled Trouble No More 1979-1981, the 13th volume of The Bootleg Series spotlighted Dylan's Christian era in the early '80s and arrived in November 2017. Live 1962-1966: Rare Performances from the Copyright Collections, a double-disc set of highlights culled from previously released rarities collections, appeared in July 2018. Four months later, the six-disc deluxe version of More Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 14 appeared. It contained all known studio recordings -- full and partial -- that eventually resulted in the classic Blood on the Tracks in 1975. Dylan further explored his 1975 archives in 2019, teaming with director Martin Scorsese for the documentary Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese. The film appeared in June, accompanied by a 14-disc box called The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings. Later in 2019, The Bootleg Series, Vol. 15: Travelin' Thru -- a triple-disc set concentrating on Dylan's Nashville recordings of the late '60s, highlighted by his sessions with Johnny Cash -- was released.

Dylan released "Murder Most Foul," a nearly 17-minute track about the JFK assassination, on March 27, 2020. It was his first original song in eight years, and it was quickly followed by "I Contain Multitudes" and "False Prophet," a pair of singles that announced the arrival of his 39th studio album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, on June 19, 2020. Rough and Rowdy Ways debuted at number one on Billboard upon its release; it entered the U.K. charts at number one. The outtakes collection 1970 -- a set featuring unreleased material from the Self Portrait and New Morning sessions, including recordings with George Harrison -- appeared in February 2021. In September, Springtime in New York: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 16 (1980-1985) was released. Easily one of the artist's most provocative periods, it focused on the years that birthed Shot of Love, Infidels, and Empire Burlesque, with numerous unreleased outtakes, alternate takes, rehearsal recordings, and live performances.

—Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Another Self Portrait, the tenth volume in Bob Dylan's official bootleg series, assembles a slew of unreleased tracks, un-and over-dubbed alternate takes, and demos, mostly from 1970's Self Portrait and New Morning sessions —they were recorded simultaneously and released within months of one another —and other material. Dylan restlessly dug into the fakebook of folk, blues, and country tunes that nourished him from the beginning. The few original songs are minor ones. Twenty-six of these 35 selections were recorded between March and June. Dylan is in fine voice and he tries on many: some raspy, others crystal clear, all of them bold. The interconnected nature of these albums is revealed with the opening demo for "Went to See the Gypsy" (used on NM). It's just Dylan and guitarist David Bromberg. (Another take recorded three months later features just Dylan on electric piano.) There are two undubbed takes of "Little Sadie" at different tempos; two of "Time Passes Slowly" —the first a basic folk-rock read, the latter an aggressive one with Al Kooper's B-3 swelling to a crescendo from the jump. Dylan and Bromberg, with Kooper on piano, deliver a haunted, undubbed "Days of 49." Many of the unreleased tunes are gems. "Pretty Saro" —with Dylan in his cleanest Nashville Skyline croon displaying a real range —and the vocal and piano read of "Spanish Is the Loving Tongue" are deeply moving love songs. "House Carpenter" is a high lonesome blues. The skeletal "Alberta #3" puts the versions from SP to shame. Eric Andersen's "Thirsty Boots" has Bromberg's spidery guitar weaving a separate lyric through Dylan's vocal. A demo of "When I Paint My Masterpiece" from 1971, contains slightly different (better) lyrics. The stripped-down "Copper Kettle" stands out when contrasted with its released version. Dylan was impatiently experimenting with arrangements on both records, particularly the latter, and some don't work. "If Not for You" features a violin instead of George Harrison's guitar. The unreleased "Working on a Guru" is almost a throwaway, but Harrison's blues-rock guitar playing smokes. The alternate "New Morning," with a brassy, Stax-style horn arrangement, is great, but the full orchestral overdub on "Sign on a Window" —complete with harp —fails, as does the spoken word with female gospel backing chorus on "If Dogs Run Free." Arguably, of the NM material, Dylan made the right choices for the finished album, which doesn't make what's here less interesting. The remainder of these tracks includes "Minstrel Boy," an unreleased Basement Tapes number, and two tunes from the Isle of Wight with the Band, some alternates of Nashville Skyline, and others from 1971. Another Self Portrait asks many questions, but there is one that hounds because it's unanswerable, especially in regard to its namesake: why did Dylan record all this material, in this way, and then release something entirely different? It doesn't matter. For fans, this is more than a curiosity, it's an indispensable addition to the catalog.

—Thom Jurek

Bob Dylan (re)paints a masterpiece for the 10th edition of his Bootleg Series

I misheard Bob Dylan back in 1970 as I lay back on the single bed in my room at my folks suburban home in Marin County and listened again and again to Dylan's then-new and controversial album, Self Portrait, as it played on my shit Zenith portable stereo. There were no lyrics included with the album; no liner notes. Just a very long list of musicians who had played on it. Dylan sure wasn't offering any help in figuring out what he was up to, but then had he ever?

Self Portrait seemed confusing at first, a two-record set dominated by covers of other people's songs. Other people's songs? What the goddamn was the man who had intellectualized rock songwriting doing singing "Blue Moon" and 'The Boxer' for God's sake?

It's fitting that I start this column with the word "I," and that I'm telling you about my experience, the experience of one middle class 17-year-old boy who was ignorant of the history behind many of the songs Dylan covered on Self Portrait.

I didn't know B. Bryant, the writer of "Take Me As I Am (Or Let Me Go)," nor F. Bryant, who along with B. Bryant wrote "Take A Message To Mary," (both songs included on Self Portrait) were famous Nashville songwriters Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who wrote hits for the Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison, George Jones and many others. Or that "Little Sadie," which Dylan claimed to have written, had been recorded almost 40 years earlier by Clarence Ashley. Hell, I'd not yet heard of Clarence Ashley. And who were the Lomax's, who along with F. Warner, were credited with writing the gold rush ballad "Days of 49"?

I was 17. What the bejesus did I know?

Dylan often sang in the first person. Nineteen-sixty-three's "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" begins with the line, "I was riding on the Mayflower when I thought I spied some land." His 1965 single, "Positively 4th Street," begins, "You've got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend." The opening track on Dylan's new album, The Bootleg Series Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait (1969-1971), is a demo of New Morning's "Went To See the Gypsy" that begins, "I went to see the gypsy, staying in a big hotel, he smiled when he saw me coming, and wished me well."

I, he, he, me and me – in the very first line.

"I use I and me and you," Dylan told Allen Ginsberg during an interview in 1977. "It's personal."

It's personal. Maybe that's what drew me to Dylan when I heard "Like A Rolling Stone" on the radio in 1965 and flipped out. There was the voice and the music of course, but the way he sang so directly to the girl. This was between the singer and "Miss. Lonely." And it was on the radio!

So personal.

There are many layers to Bob Dylan.

But I digress and I owe you more regards what I misheard.

The original Self Portrait starts with a line I heard as "All the tired horses in the sun, how am I gonna get any writing done."

Yes, I thought in 1970 as I tried to make sense of all those new Dylan recordings (24 tracks), after what Dylan's been through (the infamous motorcycle accident, the wall of hateful boos that greeted his switch to rock 'n' roll, and all he'd accomplished including the recording of nine mind-blowing albums — most of them filled with his own idiosyncratic compositions), how was Bob Dylan going to write more songs? How could he top himself? Well he couldn't, of course. Yes I misheard, but what I thought was sung sounded like the truth. And if he was too tired to write new songs, well what else could he do?

What follows that song (which is sung by his backup singers – no Dylan vocal) is an album of Dylan singing mostly other people's songs. There are old songs ("Days of '49"), pop songs ("Blue Moon"), a few by his contemporaries ("The Boxer," "Early Mornin' Rain") and a few of his own oldies but goodies (including "Like A Rolling Stone" and "She Belongs To Me," as played at the Isle of Wight in August 1969).

Self Portrait was an album of songs Dylan liked, and to some degree, songs that had influenced or impacted him. Self Portrait was Dylan as reflected through the mirror of his taste. But with Dylan, nothing is ever as it seems, so at the same time he was sharing a bit of himself, he was also fucking with us. Or was he?

In his memoir "Chronicles," Dylan said he was tired of being "the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent, Kaiser of Apostasy, Archbishop of Anarchy, the Big Cheese." He wanted to escape an image the media and the public had imposed on him. So, he writes, he did what he could to shake things up, including the release in 1969 of Nashville Skyline, an album of simple country songs sung in a smooth country croon we'd never heard before.

And he followed up little over a year later with Self Portrait. "I released one album (a double one)," he wrote in "Chronicles," where I just threw everything I could think of at the wall and whatever stuck, released it, and then went back and scooped up everything that didn't stick and released that, too."

Only that wasn't true. Another Self Portrait is evidence that there were many other songs Dylan didn't release, plus alternate takes and demos. And while there's no reason to think Dylan wasn't trying to escape the 'voice of a generation' straightjacket, the songs he recorded were no joke. This was no duck and cover operation. Critics and some of the public didn't get it, but so what?

In 1969, even before the commercial success of his country turn, Nashville Skyline (which reached #3 helped by the pop hit "Lay Lady Lay"), Dylan was continuing to experiment with country music, but was also looking back to the old folk music (always a source of inspiration), perhaps searching for a new direction — recording old songs as he did when he and The Band recorded The Basement Tapes at Big Pink in 1967.

Dylan first recorded 11 songs during three days of sessions in the spring of 1969 in Nashville. Then over three days in March of 1970 he cut over 30 more songs in New York with musicians including David Bromberg (guitar/dobro) and Al Kooper (organ, piano). What is hard to believe, but apparently true, Dylan sent the New York tapes to Nashville for overdubs by Charlie McCoy (bass) and Kenneth Buttrey (drums) and a bunch of other Nashville cats. "He [Dylan] wasn't even there," Buttrey is quoted as saying in Clinton Heylin's "Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions."

Self Portrait was released in June of 1970 and the critical response was deafening.

With that one album it seemed at the time that Dylan instantly lost all the credibility he'd earned the previous decade. His staunchest defenders turned on him. "What is this shit?" Greil Marcus wrote in Rolling Stone.

But not me. I wrote a review praising Self Portrait that ran in the first (and only) issue of a magazine I co-published and co-edited, Hard Road (published in July 1970). I ended that review like this:

"Bob Dylan (Robert Zimmerman) has gone through many changes and this album is another change, another mood. Many people will dislike it because it sounds different than the Dylan they're used to. That's all right though because a few people will have moved along with Dylan and will really dig it."

Yes, I liked it then and I like it now.

Oh but things might have been so different if the recordings on Another Self Portrait had been released in Self Portrait's place. Though I still dig Self Portrait, the new album blows it away. Listening to Another Self Portrait is a revelation. Remember the first time you heard Blonde On Blonde, or John Wesley Harding?

Yeah, that kind of mindblower.

It's a joy to listen to the album. Each song, as it plays, feels like a wondrous and unexpected gift, followed by an equally wondrous and unexpected gift.

Dylan's voice is in your face from the first song. And you remember how there was a time when he could really sing. Once he had a voice as distinctive as the one Salinger used to narrate "The Catcher in the Rye." Dylan used many voices in the '60s and '70s – he moved from Okie folkie to sarcasm-dosed rocker to Nashville crooner. All those voices are wonderful, so full of emotion — and they all sound uniquely Bob Dylan. Those voices, as much as his words and music, are why he is such an important figure in 20th Century music.

All of those great voices and more are on Another Self Portrait.

With Another Self Portrait we get a mix of the original Dylan songs that ended up on New Morning and his distinctive covers. Most of the 35 songs on the two CDs (there is a four CD version that also includes Dylan and The Band's entire August 1969 Isle of Wight performance, and a remastered Self Portrait) were recorded in 1970 during the sessions for Self Portrait and New Morning. There are also a few alternative takes from the Nashville Skyline sessions of early 1969, one from The Basement Tapes, two from the Isle of Wight performance, and two previously unreleased versions of songs recorded in 1971 for Greatest Hits Vol. II.

There are demos and alternative takes, but just as impactful are seven recordings stripped of the Nashville overdubs. Those songs (two versions of "Little Sadie," "All the Tired Horses," "Wigwam," "Days of 49," "Copper Kettle" and "Belle Isle") are heard here as they were recorded with only David Bromberg, and occasionally Al Kooper accompanying Dylan.

If I had to pick out one song to sum up Another Self Portrait, it's the here-to-fore unheard "Pretty Saro," a video of which appeared online two weeks before the album's August 27, 2013 release date. "Pretty Saro" began life as an English ballad. The words to Dylan's version are similar to those recorded in the early-to-mid '60s by Judy Collins, Pete Seeger and Jean Ritchie, but the music is different, and so is the melody that Dylan sings with his Nashville croon. The song lasts just over two minutes, and it is as mysterious and all-consuming as the Basement Tapes' recording, "I'm Not There."

It is a story old as love itself that Dylan sings to us. Down in a lone valley somewhere, "a sad lonesome place," the singer is bidding farewell to pretty Saro, who he dreams of "wherever I go." Pretty Saro won't have the singer because he has neither a big house nor the silver and gold he would need to win her love. Still, he tells us that if only he were "a poet and could write a fine hand," that he'd write her a letter and she'd understand. "But I dream of pretty Saro," he ends the song. "Wherever I go."

The lyrics are beautiful and haunting, but it's not those borrowed words that have me listening again and again. It's those minor chords that Dylan has added, and the beautiful flights his voice takes. Dylan doesn't just deliver the words, he sings them, and there is an ache in his voice containing all of life's defeats. A red rose that has been stepped on, that's the lonesome sound of Dylan's voice.

If you liked the Dylan of The Basement Tapes and John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline and New Morning, you'll like Another Self Portrait. If you are of a certain age, it may remind you of how you felt listening to the above albums when they were first released. I remember the relief I felt when in early 1968 I listened to "Down Along the Cove" and "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight," the final tracks on John Wesley Harding. Dylan up in Woodstock; Dylan looking like a country gentleman on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post; Dylan making laid-back country music. It felt right, and I too wanted to get back to the country, even though I had no country to get back to having lived my whole life in that house in Marin. Oh to have a cabin in the woods, a creek nearby, and maybe an old rusting pickup to get around in. The other records that followed – Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, New Morning – contained music to accompany sitting on the front porch of that imaginary cabin.

At the time Dylan's country voice was reassuring, a retreat from the craziness of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde or an advance past that craziness. The songs on Another Self Portrait, and the way they are sung brings back the comfort I felt listening to those albums way back then. I guess it could be nostalgia, which I'm no fan of, but I think it's something else.

What I think Dylan accomplished on his post-Blonde On Blonde, pre-Planet Waves albums was twofold. Not only did he change his voice and give up (temporarily) the rock 'n' roll he'd been playing since '65, but he simplified his songwriting. It isn't that the songs are simplistic – mostly they're as sophisticated, maybe more sophisticated, than his previous writing, but he dispensed with the surrealism, and the layers and layers of wild assets/images. According to Clinton Heylin, not long after his motorcycle accident Dylan told Allen Ginsberg "he was writing shorter lines, with every line meaning something."

Dylan's own writing became more like the old songs. On Another Self Portrait we get to hear "Went to See the Gypsy" followed by "Little Sadie." A bunch of Dylan songs — "Time Passes Slowly," "Only A Hobo," "Minstrel Boy" and "I Threw It All Away" — are set among public domain songs and more recent covers including "Spanish Is the Loving Tongue," Tom Paxton's "Annie's Going To Sing Her Song," "Railroad Bill" and "House Carpenter."

Mixing it up as he does, we experience Dylan as part of the American folk tradition. Where once he sat at Woody Guthrie's feet, now he's Woody's equal. "Only A Hobo" is as sturdy a song as "In Search of Little Sadie" (which, by the way, is the better of the two versions of "Little Sadie" that Dylan recorded).

There are some fun ones here such as "Working On A Guru" which he recorded with George Harrison on guitar, and a version of "Time Passes Slowly" with Dylan and Harrison singing la la la la las. And as I keep listening, other favorites emerge including "This Evening So Soon," which Dylan learned from Bob Gibson, who recorded it by it's real title, "Tell Old Bill," in 1958, and "House Carpenter," which Dylan probably heard performed by Clarence Ashley on Henry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music.

Another Self Portrait ends with a terrific version of "When I Paint My Masterpiece." It's a solo recording with Dylan accompanying himself on piano. He sings a verse we haven't heard before: "Sailin' around the world in a dirty gondola/ Sure wish I hadn't sold my old Victrola/ Ain't nothin' like that good ol' rock 'n' rolla!"

Yeah baby!

When I misheard the lyric of "All the Tired Horses" all those years ago, I guess I misunderstood. Dylan hadn't run out of ideas. He had plenty more songs to write, and write them he did. He's still writing them. And even so late in the game, I wouldn't think of giving up on him. Plenty of people have been wrong about Dylan in the past, as Another Self Portrait conclusively proves.

— Michael Goldberg

It's a little hard for those of us who weren't there to understand the critical reaction to Bob Dylan's 10th album, 1970's Self Portrait. First, let's pause a moment to reflect on the fact that there was a 10th album already at that point, only eight years and a few months after Dylan released his self-titled debut. It was a busy time: he wrote and performed, culture was churning ahead and changing at what was then an unprecedented pace, and some people in the music world thought of him as a sort of leader of a new consciousness. Into this world he released an album called Self Portrait. One imagines seeing that title and expecting something deeper, heavier, some kind of reckoning with what has gone before. But what the listening public got instead was a mish-mash—a few original songs, a few live cuts, lots of covers, and a generally disjointed sound. It seemed slapdash. And it caused Greil Marcus, Dylan's best critic, to begin his review of the double album in Rolling Stone with the words "What is this shit?"

The latest entry in Dylan's Bootleg Series provides a new opportunity to evaluate the music of this period. Calling this volume Another Self Portrait, including liner notes by Marcus, and offering up a new painting by Bob Dylan as a cover image, is a sly and gutsy move. By most accounts, Dylan was hurt by the initial savaging of Self Portrait, and rushed out its 1970 follow-up, New Morning, to put the album in the rearview as quickly as possible. Later, there was a sense that he wanted to scrub it from his own history. In interviews, Dylan sometimes suggested that Self Portrait was deliberately bad, thrown together as a way to confuse his audience or provoke the media into moving on to someone else so that he could have more privacy in raising his family.

Though we'll never know exactly what he was thinking, the idea of Dylan making a poor album on purpose never made sense. He worked with too many top-shelf musicians that he cared about, and had friends and colleagues investing too much time, to make something that would embarrass them. It seems more likely that the "intentionally bad" storyline was a defense mechanism for a mysterious artist who did, after all, have a pretty hefty ego and was deeply aware of his own talent. So it's reasonable to conclude that Self Portrait was a strange and all-over-the-place album because, for one reason or another, that's the kind of album Dylan wanted to make at that time.

Another Self Portrait complicates the narrative. Considering the strength of these alternate takes, demos, stripped-down mixes, and live cuts, it's a little hard to believe that these were the cast-offs from what was perceived to be an artist's worst album. Many of the songs come from the sessions for New Morning, but there were no clear lines between Self Portrait and New Morning sessions in 1969 and 1970. Akin to Neil Young's later method, Dylan at the end of the 60s seems to have been about recording songs first, lots of them, and figuring out how they fit into an album later.

There was a marked shift in Dylan's music at the end of the 60s. "For sure my lyrics had struck nerves that had never been struck before," he wrote of this time in Chronicles Volume One, "but if my songs were just about the words, then what was Duane Eddy, the great rock'n'roll guitarist, doing recording an album full of instrumental melodies of my songs? Musicians have always known that my songs were more than just words, but most people are not musicians." This passage provides a good framework for understanding the music here. After the word-drunk work he'd created in the mid-60s, and following the mysterious motorcycle accident that laid him up in 1966, his music became simpler and more tuneful. Drawing on his longstanding interest in country music, standards, and any well-constructed song, he began to write and perform songs that felt universal.

That is where the deep and immense pleasure of this set resides: hearing melodies—some new, some old, some borrowed—performed by a distinctive singer at the height of his powers. The two discs are arranged for flow, with songs roughly split along two lines. Disc one is mostly songs recorded prior to Self Portrait, and is heavy on alternate versions of Dylan tunes and renditions of traditional songs. This "Time Passes Slowly" and the demo of "Went to See the Gypsy" don't supplant better-known takes, but they're different enough in feel and arrangement to make the songs sound new. Other differences, like the alternate version of Nashville Skyline's "I Threw It All Away", are more subtle, and the appeal is in hearing the song tinted by a new setting.

But the real revelations on the first disc are the unreleased versions of songs from the public domain. It's now accepted that Dylan returned to relevance late in his career when he released two albums of traditional songs, 1992's Good as I Been to You and 1993's World Gone Wrong. The idea being that, in times of trouble, when he's not sure where else to go, the songs Dylan grew up with and studied were there for him. The versions here of "Railroad Bill", "Little Sadie", "Pretty Saro", and the especially powerful "This Evening So Soon" are brilliant showcases of his ability to inhabit old material and make it his own. And they benefit from the generally spare and acoustic sound. Dylan started his career singing traditional folk songs, but his understanding of them eight years later was far richer.

The second disc is heavier on versions of Dylan originals, with roughly equal smatterings of alternate takes from Self Portrait, New Morning, and Nashville Skyline and live cuts from Dylan and the Band's 1969 Isle of Wight Festival performance. Some of the differences in these versions are striking. The radically altered take of "If Not For You" is performed by Dylan with piano and violin, making the song sound even more tender and vulnerable. There's an alternate version of the funky Nashville Skyline trifle "Country Pie" that, when it breaks down, shows just how in-the-pocket his session pros were when playing live in the studio. There's a version of "New Morning" with a shimmering horn section, giving it an even more buoyant and joyous cast. "Wigwam", the instrumental that was given a bombastic treatment on the Self Portrait album, is heard without orchestration, revealing it as an effortlessly tuneful cowboy tune (the countrypolitan near-instrumental "All the Tired Horses" is heard in a similarly lean version).

Most of the music is heard in versions with minimal instrumentation: Dylan's guitar, a second guitar adding fills, sometimes piano. Which makes the set oddly cohesive and album-like, ironically more so than the Self Portrait album itself. The outliers in this regard were also some of the stranger inclusions on the original album—the in-concert tracks with the Band. Given that neither Dylan nor the Band played live during this period, the fact that they came together for a massive festival was surely big news, so the set is obviously of historical importance. That is doubly true since by this time the recordings they made together in Woodstock were leaking out on bootlegs like The Great White Wonder, so the desire for Dylan/Band collaborations was high. But plucking random numbers from that Isle of Wight set didn't make much sense on the original album, and it doesn't make much sense on Another Self Portrait either. The deluxe version of this set includes a disc with the full set, which is welcome—it has a ragtag charm, Dylan mostly sings in his Nashville Skyline voice, and the song selection is ace. But there's still a weird distance to it all, a lack of intensity that is hard to put a finger on, with laid back versions of familiar tunes that don't really probe for any new meanings.

The deluxe version also includes a remastered version of the Self Portrait album proper. Returning to it, it's hard for those of us a generation or two younger to understand the reaction to it not because it paled in comparison to the greatness that came before, because it obviously did. If you've spent any time listening to Bob Dylan's 1960s catalog, you are still trying to wrap your head around the thought that one person wrote the 56 songs on Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, and Nashville Skyline between 1965 and 1969. Self Portrait, next to these records, in that moment, must have seemed like a joke. But later generations hear it differently. We've discovered Self Portrait in the used bins, torrent downloads, and streaming services alongside records like Street Legal, Saved, Empire Burlesque, Down in the Groove, and Under the Red Sky. And in this broader context, it sounds quite good, another weird and sloppy record from a guy who released a lot of them. And hearing it again with all the fantastic music that surrounded it, music that further cements Dylan's Bootleg Series as one of the most important archival projects in modern pop history, it remains a beguiling artifact.

— Mark Richardson, Pitchfork