Each version is an original – Culture News: Music



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When a reporter showed him some lithographs that Pablo Picbado had made of a bull, the first figurative and the last summary, the singer briefly watched and felt that the painter should have stopped after the second. "Oh," he said after a long look, "I see why he should continue."

It is more than 50 years ago. Picbado still lives in his work and Bob Dylan still plays on the stages. More than 700, he wrote or interpreted and recorded. His audience views these recordings as original and compares each subsequent performance with them. Dylan sees things differently. For him, the published version describes only the variant, a fixed variant. Like Miles Davis, with whom he has much in common, like the contempt of his admirers, Dylan always interprets his songs differently, deconstructs them, sings them or tells them as if they had been rewritten: as a series of moments.

Best in the cellar

"On the record, my songs do not come," he says in Martin Scorsese's documentary "No Direction Home," "they are made in performance before the people". Each version is an original for him. It also has drawbacks, as all the spectators of the last 20 years, who have had to listen to Dylan mbadacre his songs on the stage, know.

In other words, softer too: Bob Dylan's performance practice brings variety to concerts, but also carries the singer's risk of falling. His reluctance to repeat makes his new material more interesting than others; There are no more black prints of an artist than of him. In the 1970s, Dylan released for the first time unpublished songs, a selection of the "Basement Tapes" that he had recorded in the 60's with the band's musicians.

Since the early 90's, he has licensed the so-called "Bootleg Series". To date, 14 CD collections have been published, the last a few days ago. No other singer, no other band has not been as successful as he has managed, for example, to keep a song like "Blind Willie McTell" secret for decades with stupid justification "I do not Did not register well ". The explanation is all the more oppressive as the verb has two interpretations: record and remember. Significantly, Bob Dylan compared the piece to an unfinished image of Picbado.

Songwriter at work

The fact that he refused us his best can only be said to a certain extent from the 14th edition of "Bootleg Series". But she shows how Dylan works as a songwriter. "More Blood, More Tracks" is the title of the complete edition of the film "Blood on the Tracks", which contains six CDs, but which was published in 1975 and is deemed to correspond to its chiefs. ;artwork. it is also Keith Richards' favorite record on Dylan, the Stones guitarist who really knows music.

Most importantly, however, "Blood on the Tracks" is interpreted autobiographically as a bitter, hurtful document, recounting Dylan's separation from his first wife, Sara, with whom he had been married for nine years and had five children. The album sounds like a combination of revenge and insult, cruelty and explanation. "I can not understand why people are doing this kind of pain," said Dylan when publishing the disc, before blurring all the traces and writing that he had inspired Anton Chekhov. His son Jakob perceived things differently and he looks more credible: "On this album, I hear my parents talking."

The 14th edition of "Bootleg Series" clearly shows two things: First of all, Bob Dylan decided for once what versions of his songs he publishes. And secondly, it seems fascinating to discover what variations, what detours and what worries he has of these versions.

The genesis is particularly interesting because Dylan has recorded more than half of the songs twice. A first time in four days in New York and three months later in Minneapolis, because his brother David had advised him to do it. As the direct comparison of the versions shows, the brother was right. Previous versions confirm Dylan's method of work: most early recordings sound like rehearsals, others seem too exuberant for such an enigmatic character, others have technical flaws: you can hear the sleeve of his jacket open on the guitar, a lot of things sound impatient, he rewrote a lot of things. But each version is an original. And at the same time, like a sung lithography. You understand why he had to continue.

Bob Dylan: More blood, more leads. Sony Music.6 CD, about 130 Fr. (Editors Tamedia)

Created: 15.11.2018, 19:38 pm

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