Bob Dylan - Dylan 65 Revisited (Acoustic Version) (1998)

A gift to Dylan archaeologists from those enterprising bootleggers at Great Dane, who seem bent on becoming the underground's answer to Bear Family Records. 1965 Revisited is a collection of every unreleased recording -- outtakes, unmixed vocal/acoustic guitar tracks, concerts, interviews, talk show appearances -- that Dylan is known to have done that year, 14 CDs' worth. The results are imposing, to say the least, as is the price (around $400 depending upon where one gets it), but also extremely worthwhile. The set kicks off with a CD full of outtakes from the Bringing It All Back Home sessions from January 1965, before the backing band was added, and Dylan's complete appearance on ABC-TV's Les Crane Show. Discs Three, Four, and Five cover the period of the documentary Don't Look Back, and features several performances and excerpts, but the best moments come from interviews by unctuous journalists; Dylan's harangue about truth to Horace Judson of Time is also included here. Discs Seven and Eight are given over to outtakes from Highway 61 Revisited, some of which are familiar, and all of which are in sterling quality. Disc Eight concludes with Dylan's earth-shattering appearance with an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25. Disc Nine reveals the full depth of negative feeling opened by Dylan with his electric debut -- the tape of his Forest Hill Tennis Stadium concert from August 28, 1965 was made from the audience, and one can hear the booing and catcalls in vivid detail as his backing band is introduced; Disc Ten includes the rest of the show and some early outtakes from Blonde On Blonde. Part of Disc 11 and all of Disc 12 is made up entirely of Nat Hentoff's unpublished Playboy interview with Dylan, where the artist makes a sincere effort to answer some fairly verbose questions about music and his outlook on it -- he comments on Hank Williams, Buck Owens, Jesus, anti-communism, Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson, Chairman Mao, and a multitude of topical subjects. Disc 11 also has an 18-minute interview backstage in Detroit with deejay Allen Stone, in which Dylan sounds utterly exhausted. Disc 13 has a nearly one-hour press conference from San Francisco where Dylan is in better spirits, having a bit of fun with the reporters, who get into the spirit of the proceedings and ask some genuinely intelligent questions, to which he responds in kind, especially about music. This disc concludes with a good quality audience tape of his show at Berkeley from December 4, which is continued on Disc 14 -- he and Robbie Robertson and company sound absolutely savage at this show. The disc and the set close out with a Los Angeles press conference from December 17, where Dylan has a lot of quietly nasty, knowing fun answering genuinely stupid questions. The booklet is pretty cool too, not as informative or filled with text as it might have been, but filled with good photos.