Lovely piece by Mick Brown in the Telegraph this weekend, and happy to see that the Dylan compilation I made all those years ago gets a mention…
“I first encountered the song through a CD burned by a friend, a collection of “almost and never released” tracks – the bootleg of all bootlegs, if you will – a beautifully designed and packaged artefact, with photographs and meticulously researched sleeve-notes that would put most professionally produced CDs to shame; in short, a labour of obsessive devotion. It occurs to me that only Dylan fans do this. Not only is he the most bootlegged artist in the history of popular music, as demonstrated by the academic conference at Bristol University that marks his 70th birthday on May 24, he is also the most avidly discussed, the most rigorously scrutinised, the most fervently admired. Everybody has their own version of Bob Dylan, and everybody thinks they know him better than anybody else.”
I love this quote… ““I don’t feel obliged to keep up with the times, I’m not going to be here that long anyway. So I keep up with these times, then I gotta keep up with the Nineties… Jesus, who’s got the time to keep up with the times?”
Mick and I had breakfast a couple of weeks ago and talked at length about I Was Young When I Left Home, bootlegs in general, football, eco-cities in the desert and Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand. Mick’s breadth of interests cannot be contained by a mere breakfast.
martincolyer.com 