Tuesday, January 1, 2019

Bob Dylan - Positively 4th Street - Non-Album Tracks (1965)

This album covers Bob Dylan's stray tracks from 1965. It's a mixed bag, with a lot of variety. There's a big hit ("Positively 4th Street") and some other rocking songs with a full band. But there also are some folky acoustic songs. To come up with a song order, I did a little research on when each song was recorded, and I present these in strict chronological order.

A few songs need some extra explanation. Four of the songs are duets of cover songs with Joan Baez. These come from the 18th CD on the 18 CD version of "The Bootleg Series, Vol. 12 - The Cutting Edge." I just posted some song edits from this CD that come from the second half of this CD. The first half is all duets with Baez. There are eight Dylan-Baez duets in all there. I deemed only four of them worthy of this album. The other four are all more snippets than full songs, of about a minute each, and/or they're not fully realized versions. Clearly, Dylan and Baez were fishing around to find songs they both knew how to sing, and sometimes they found a good one and sometimes they didn't.

Of the ones I kept, I made significant edits to two of them. "Young but Daily Growing" fades out in mid-verse. So I trimmed the end so it stops at a more satisfying point. For "Lost Highway," Dylan and Baez had some trouble remembering the last verse, and fumbled around before they figured it out. I edited out the fumbling.

While putting this album together, I was discovered to find that Dylan performed the song "Long Distance Operator" live in 1965. You may recognize the song because it was done by the Band in 1968 as part of "The Basement Tapes" done by Dylan and the Band released in 1975. But even though it's known as a Band song, it was written by Dylan and performed only a couple of times by him (with the Band backing him up) in 1965. Luckily, there is one decent live recording of Dylan doing the song, although the sound isn't great.

This album is 44 minutes long.

01 Farewell, Angelina (Bob Dylan)
02 You Don't Have to Do That [Acoustic Version] (Bob Dylan)
03 If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Bob Dylan)
04 Blues Stay Away from Me (Bob Dylan & Joan Baez)
05 Lost Highway (Bob Dylan & Joan Baez)
06 Young but Daily Growing (Bob Dylan & Joan Baez)
07 Wild Mountain Thyme (Bob Dylan & Joan Baez)
08 Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence (Bob Dylan)
09 Positively 4th Street (Bob Dylan)
10 Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window (Bob Dylan)
11 I Wanna Be Your Lover (Bob Dylan)
12 Jet Pilot (Bob Dylan)
13 Unnamed Instrumental (Bob Dylan)
14 Long Distance Operator [Live] (Bob Dylan)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15105782/BobD_1965g_Positivly4thStreet_atse.zip.html


I made the album cover with a photo from 1965.

2 comments:

  1. i'd be inclined to put 'love is a four letter word'on here.
    thanks for all your work,i've enjoyed listening to these.

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    1. I strongly considered that, except there's no known version of Dylan performing the song. I found a version of him and Joan Baez doing it, but it was Baez doing 100% of the singing with Dylan making a few comments before and after. Maybe he was strumming his guitar, I don't know. It seemed like not enough Dylan for it to go on a Dylan album.

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