Wednesday, January 2, 2019

Bob Dylan - Empire Burlesque - Alternate Version (1985)

Normally, I like posting albums in chronological order. With Dylan, I just posted something from 1965, and the next one should be from 1966. But here's something out of order, because I just put it together and I'm pretty happy about it.

Personally, I'm not a fan of Dylan's gospel period at the start of the 1980s, though he had some good songs here and there (as always). I thought he had a strong career revival from 1983 to 1985, but unfortunately it wasn't reflected well in the albums he put out then. 1983's "Infidels" was very good, but it could have been even better, due to all of the good to great songs he left off it. "Blind Willie McTell" is just the most obvious of the songs he failed to include - I have an entire album of "Infidels" outtakes I plan to post at a later date.

I thought "Empire Burlesque" was another good album from him, but unfortunately it suffered from bad production much more than "Infidels" did. "Infidels" had Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits as a guiding hand, but "Empire Burlesque" was largely self-produced by Dylan. Or at least it was for a while. At the last minute, either Dylan or his record company chickened out and brought in Arthur Baker to add overdubs to the album, to make it sound more contemporary and commercial. Baker came from a background of disco and hip-hop, and was best known for producing New Order and Hall and Oates. So while Baker succeeded in making the album sound like a generic 1985 one, this sound has not dated well.

Luckily, it turns out there's a way to remove Baker's overdubs from the album entirely. There's a bootleg containing mixes of most of the songs before Baker got involved. I simply replaced the official versions with these versions, with three exceptions.

The first exception is the first song, One this album, it's called "Someone's Got a Hold of My Heart." The recording comes from "The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased), 1961-1991," and it dates to the 1983 "Infidels" recording sessions. For some reason, Dylan didn't like this. He changed the song to "Tight Connection to My Heart" on "Empire Burlesque," but everything about the 1983 version is better, from the production to the performance to the lyrics.

The second exception is the song "When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky." The version I use here comes from the same "Bootleg Series." Unfortunately, the version Dylan put on "Empire Burlesque" kept the name, but drastically changed the production for the worse, turning it pretty much into a disco song that doesn't suit Dylan's style at all. The album is much improved simply by using the earlier versions of these two songs.

When I first posted this, I just used the official album version of the last song "Dark Eyes," because that was the only one available. But in 2021, the album "Bootleg Series, Volume 16: Springtime in New York" was released. It had a version, so I've used that one. Both versions are just Dylan and an acoustic guitar, so it doesn't make much difference, but I figure it's nice to have alternate versions of every song.

I could have added some extra songs, or swapped out songs, but I didn't. I do have some good extra songs from this time, but I plan on putting them on a different album. This is just the exact "Empire Burlesque" songs, but as they should have been released, without all the unnecessary extra production.

Does this reveal a previously unsuspected great Dylan album? Unfortunately, no. But it is a pretty good one that I think any Dylan fan should own and appreciate.

01 Someone's Got a Hold of My Heart [Tight Connection to My Heart] (Bob Dylan)
02 Seeing the Real You at Last (Bob Dylan)
03 I'll Remember You (Bob Dylan)
04 Clean Cut Kid (Bob Dylan)
05 Never Gonna Be the Same Again (Bob Dylan)
06 Trust Yourself (Bob Dylan)
07 Emotionally Yours (Bob Dylan)
08 When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky (Bob Dylan)
09 Something's Burning, Baby (Bob Dylan)
10 Dark Eyes (Bob Dylan)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15109373/BobD_1985_Empire_Burlesque_-_Alternate_Version_atse.zip.html

The cover looks similar to the official album cover, but it's not the same. It's based on a bootleg, and it has a different Dylan photo in the middle. I also changed the text of that bootleg to better fit what I did.

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