I am very sorry for the inconvenience, but it turns out that Columbia Records polices You Tube with such meticulous ruthlessness that NOTHING by Dylan is available there save (horrible) cover versions, (mostly terrible) later career concert versions and the like.
In order to allow you to hear enough Dylan to get a feel for his music and make sense of Tuesday's film, I created a playlist on Spotify:
Dylan
You will have to download Spotify - which is free, and which you'll be prompted to do if you follow the link. Sorry about that, but short of burning 11 or 12 CDs this weekend, it seemed like the best solution.
The playlist begins with the famous 1966 live version of "Like a Rolling Stone" from Manchester, England. It opens with a folkie, outraged by the presence of a loud electric band (The Hawks, later to become The Band), yelling "JUDAS!" at Dylan, who responds, "I don't believe you - you're a LIAR!" then tells his band to "Play fuckin' loud." They do.
It then jumps back a couple years with several songs from the studio albums that made his reputation as he moved from king of the folk revival to rock star.
"Maggie's Farm" is the 1965 live version that scandalized the Newport Folk Festival: Pete Seeger allegedly had be restrained from taking an axe to the power cables to make the band stop.
We then leap forward two years to the Basement Tapes, the peculiar demos Dylan recorded with The Band in a big pink house in Woodstock as Dylan recovered from a near-fatal motorcycle accident right after the British tour we heard on the first track. These four songs give a sense of the weird, funny Americana of these sessions - bizarre characters straight out of backwoods tall tales and music that that sounds like it would fit just as well in a Wild West bar room or a carnival as a rock and roll record.
After that, it's a tour of his later career, running from 1968 to 2001, hitting major points like his initial comeback after the accident; the bitter music that followed a divorce; his conversion to fundamentalist Christianity; and the surprising return to form in the 90s and 00s after nearly twenty years of haphazard inspiration.
It all ends with "I'm Not There," the most mysterious of The Basement Tapes tracks. This was the Holy Grail of lost Dylan material until Todd Haynes made Tuesday's film, named after the song, and the soundtrack featured the recording.
