Leave it to Bob Dylan to completely turn the tables on his naysayers. Just when it looked like he had reached the low point of his career looking like a dirty old man in a Victoria's Secret commercial, he storms the literary world with the publication of \Chronicles: Volume 1,"" an autobiography that reads like he blended his best albums with Jack Kerouac.
Following the book's success, Dylan announced he was teaming up with acclaimed director Martin Scorsese to create ""No Direction Home,"" a feature film tracking Dylan's early 1960's career with unreleased concert footage and interviews. To serve as the film's soundtrack, Dylan opened up his seemingly bottomless vaults to produce No Direction Home: The Soundtrack (The Bootleg Series: Volume 7), loaded with unreleased outtakes and live performances.
While the success of the documentary will not be clear until its PBS debut next week, the album endorses it fully by providing the most revealing Dylan collection in years. Closer in spirit to ""The Beatles Anthology"" than a standard movie soundtrack, ""No Direction Home"" is an excellent aural portrait of Dylan that picks out his best points and showcases his natural talent at both folk and rock music.
Unreleased home recordings begin the album slowly, showing off his acoustic skill and Woody Guthrie fixation with ""When I Got Troubles"" (the earliest ever recording of a Dylan song, the album's booklet notes) and traditionals such as ""Dink's Song"" and ""Rambler, Gambler."" Dylan's voice emerges as the years pass, his evolution from surrealism to social protest is a thing of wonder.
The refreshing, early live performances offer a picture of when it was just Dylan, an acoustic guitar and a harmonica in front of packed concert halls. Dylan has mostly switched to keyboard on tour these days, so it is good to hear the laid back young performer strumming ""Masters of War"" and ""Don't Think Twice.""
If Dylan's slow set of acoustics on the first disc lulls the listener into complacency, he jars them awake on the second disc with the hum of amplifiers heard right before his notorious first electric performance of ""Maggie's Farm"" at the Newport Folk Festival. Backed by a harsh riff easily superior to the original version, it once again slaps listeners in the face and offers a taste of what long-time Dylan accompanist Robbie Robertson called ""the rebel rebelling against the rebellion.""
Dylan's electric rebellion scours through his outtakes of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde which, when put together, feel like a honky tonk jam session between musicians with nothing else to do. Many of these new versions will be surprising to long-time Dylan fans: ""Highway 61 Revisited"" feels neutered without its trademark slide whistle, ""Desolation Row"" has an odd soul behind it with electric guitar to play the riff and ""It Takes A Lot to Laugh"" feels like a rock shuffle instead of a sad lament.
The liner notes are a prize on their own. Disappointingly there are no ""Chronicles""-style comments from Dylan on individual songs. However, Dylan's old guitar player, Al Kooper, offers reflections about what it was like to record with Dylan. Andrew Loog Oldham, former producer for the Rolling Stones, supplies his veteran rock perspective about how Dylan shaped the rock and 'n' generation that was coming-of-age after World War II.
The album is fairly long-clocking in close to two and a half hours-possibly too rambling for the less rabid of Dylan's fans, but nothing less could encapsulate the frantic productivity of his early years. Both revealing and introspective, it shows an artist who always played around with styles and lyrics that even now are easy to get lost in.
""How does it feel?""-pretty damn good.
