Bob Dylan - The Bromberg Sessions (1992-1993)

On this blog, I've been slowly chronologically working my way through Bob Dylan's music career. As I write this in October 2023, I've made it to about the year 1978. But I recently found a few extra songs to this album from the 1990s, so I decided to post this out of chronological order while it was on my mind.

In 1990, Bob Dylan released the studio album "Under the Red Sky," but it was not well received. After that, it seems he lost the inspiration to write songs for most of the 1990s. In 1991, he said, "Maybe a person gets to a point where they've written enough songs. Let someone else write them." He wouldn't rediscover his songwriting muse until 1996. A new batch of songs would result in the critically acclaimed album "Time Out of Mind" in 1997. 

In the meantime, he turned more of his interest to cover songs, especially traditional folk songs. He released an album of such songs in 1992 called "Good as I Been to You," and another one in 1993 called "World Gone Wrong." But just one month before he started recording "Good as I Been to You," in June 1992, he recorded another entirely different batch of mostly folk songs. These are the songs he did at that time:

Rise Again
Nobody's Fault but Mine
The Lady Came from Baltimore
Polly Vaughan
Casey Jones
Duncan and Brady
Catskills Serenade [Kaatskill Serenade]
World of Fools
Miss the Mississippi and You
Sloppy Drunk
Hey Joe
Northeast Texas Women

For this recording session, he was assisted by David Bromberg with the musical backing for all the songs. Two of the songs were even written by Bromberg ("Catskills Serenade" and "World of Fools"). Bromberg is a singer-songwriter who has been releasing his own albums since 1972. But he's possibly even better known as a session musician, because he's adept with most any stringed instrument, including the guitar, fiddle, dobro, mandolin, and pedal steel guitar. Dylan utilized him quite a lot as a session musician on his albums "Self Portrait" and "New Morning" in the early 1970s.

These mostly acoustic sounding June 1992 sessions seemingly went well, and Dylan appeared ready to release them as an album. But Dylan is nothing if not mercurial, and he abruptly changed his mind. In the many years since, only two of the songs from the sessions have been officially released: "Duncan and Brady" and "Miss the Mississippi and You." (They came out on "The Bootleg Series, Volume 8: Tell Tale Signs.") Three others have been bootlegged with excellent sound quality ("Catskill Serenade," "Polly Vaughan," and "Sloppy Drunk"). But the rest remain not only unreleased, but even completely unbootlegged.

However, I've attempted to fill out the rest of the album anyway. Only one more song from the sessions is here, "The Lady Came from Baltimore." I found a bootleg version he did in concert in 1994 with very good sound quality. (He also played "Hey Joe" just once in concert, but the sound quality is poor, so I skipped that one.) Even that only makes for six songs, which are the first six presented here. That's not enough for a full album. But he did a bunch of other cover songs in a similar vein around the same time, 1992 and 1993, so I've used those to fill out the rest of the album. So, to be honest, it's fairly different from what the complete real Bromberg sessions would be, but this is the best we can do for now, and I think it makes for a coherent and excellent album.

"The Girl on the Greenbriar Shore," "Mary and the Soldier," and "32-20 Blues" have all been officially released on "The Bootleg Series, Volume 8: Tell Tale Signs." "The Girl on the Greenbriar Shore" is from a 1992 concert and the other two are outtakes from the "World Gone Wrong" sessions.

Additionally, "You Belong to Me" was a "Good as I Been to You" outtake (the only known such one), but it got released in 1994 for the "Natural Born Killers" soundtrack. Unfortunately, that version had some dialogue from the movie over the end of the song. But I used the UVR5 audio editing program to wipe out that distracting talking. That's why it's the one song with "[Edit]" in the title.

The remaining cover songs ("Little Moses," "Pretty Peggy-O," and "Golden Vanity") are all from bootlegs of concerts in 1992 and 1993. Although they seem to have never been recorded in the studio, they fit in perfectly with the other folky songs he was recording at the time. Luckily, I found very good recordings of all of them. But I also used UVR5 to clean them up, as well as the other two live songs, "The Lady Came from Baltimore" and "The Girl on the Greenbriar Shore." Generally speaking, I was able to wipe out most of the audience noise and cheering from these, so they could better fit in with the other studio tracks.

This album is 54 minutes long. That's rather long as single albums go, but "Good as I Been to You" was 55 minutes long.

Hopefully, someday the complete Bromberg sessions will be released, as well as other unbootlegged outtakes from "World Gone Wrong" (for instance, the songs "Twenty-One Years," "Hello Stranger," and "Goodnight My Love"). But until then, I hope you enjoy this.

01 Duncan and Brady (Bob Dylan)
02 Catskill Serenade [Kaatskill Serenade] (Bob Dylan)
03 The Lady Came from Baltimore (Bob Dylan)
04 Polly Vaughan (Bob Dylan)
05 Sloppy Drunk (Bob Dylan)
06 Miss the Mississippi and You (Bob Dylan)
07 The Girl on the Greenbriar Shore (Bob Dylan)
08 Little Moses (Bob Dylan)
09 32-20 Blues (Bob Dylan)
10 Mary and the Soldier (Bob Dylan)
11 Pretty Peggy-O (Bob Dylan)
12 Golden Vanity (Bob Dylan)
13 You Belong to Me [Edit] (Bob Dylan)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15845351/BobD_1992-1993_ThBrombrgSssions_atse.zip.html

I couldn't find any photos of Dylan and Bromberg together, so I decided to make my own. It was damn near impossible to find any photos of Bromberg at all from the 1990s, since he kept a low profile that decade, not releasing any albums. The best I could find was a black and white photo from 1986. So I used that, and colorized it. I put it next to a photo of Dylan from a 1992 concert at the Concord Pavilion, in Concord, California.