Bob Dylan - Another Way Home (1963)

 

Side A:
1. House Carpenter
2. Rocks and Gravel
3. Quit Your Low Down Ways
4. Worried Blues
5. Kingsport Town
6. Let Me Die in My Footsteps
7. Walls of Red Wing       

Side B:
8. Rambling, Gambling Willie
9. Baby, I'm in the Mood for You
10. (I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle
11. Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues
12. The Death of Emmett Till
13. Hero Blues
14. Milk Cow Calf's Blues
15. Whatcha Gonna Do?

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan was his second album and his only album released this year. Yet he had enough outtakes from it to release a second album this year. The album had an original tracklist that got aborted. One of these was a song called Talkin' John Birch Blues. The talking blues was a form of blues that featured talking over music instead of singing and was popularized by Woody Guthrie. Bob Dylan was invited to perform on The Ed Sullivan Show and wanted to play the song. The network wouldn't let him and wanted him to play a different song, but he refused and walked off the stage. This controversy caused the label to not include the song on the album. So because of this, he would record a new song a year later to the day called Talkin' World War III Blues. Though he had another talking blues song that I used on this one. Most of these songs would later get released on the Bootleg Series Volume 1.

Bob Dylan - Great White Wonder (1977)

 

Side A:
1. Bonnie Ship the Diamond
2. All American Boy
3. Get Your Rocks Off
4. Johnny Todd
5. Tupelo

6. One for the Road

Side B:
7. I'm Your Teenage Prayer
8. Four Strong Winds
9. The French Girl
10. Joshua's Gone Barbados
11. Baby Ain't That Fine
12. Rock, Salt, and Nails

This is a sequel to my single album version of his Basement Tapes double album from 1975. With the release of The Bootleg Series Vol. 11, we have a whole slew of songs we could use. Also Dylan never released an album in 1977, so I thought maybe he could put out more tracks from the tapes for its 10 year anniversary and name it as a tribute to the bootleg that initially brought the tapes to public attention. On the box set, the tracks from the original album appear on discs 3 and 4, and there's a couple new tracks on there we could use for our sequel. Though some were unfinished like "The Hills of Mexico" and some were just short like "Down on Me". To fill it out we can include tracks from disc 2 which is where “Tiny Montgomery" originates from. 

Bob Dylan - Self Portrait (1970) (upgrade)

 

Side A:
1. Alberta #1
2. Days of '49
3. Early Mornin' Rain
4. In Search of Little Sadie
5. Little Sadie
6. Belle Isle

Side B:
7. Copper Kettle
8. Gotta Travel On

9. Annie's Gonna Sing Her Song
10. Railroad Bill

11. These Hands

12. Tattle O'Day

This is my first ever album upgrade post. In doing research on the last Bob Dylan double album post I did which was Blonde on Blonde, I cut out too much material and had to look through outtakes to look for more. I heard this album had some outtakes but I found 8 from The Bootleg Series Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait and 2 from the Dylan album from 1973 for a total of 10!

My main problem with my last reconstruction was that there weren't enough tracks using Dylan's regular voice to make a full album, but with these new outtakes we can! Three of them ended up using Dylan's country croon, the two tracks from Dylan and Pretty Saro from Another Self Portrait. But when deciding on which material to use, I took out the last 5 tracks and replaced them with 4 new ones. The end result finally sounds like a proper cover album.

Bob Dylan - Blonde on Blonde (1966)

 

Side A:
1. Rainy Day Women #12 & 35
2. Pledging My Time
3. One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)
4. I Want You
5. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
6. Just Like a Woman

Side B:
7. Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine
8. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?
9. Temporary Like Achilles
10. Absolutely Sweet Marie
11. 4th Time Around
12. Obviously 5 Believers

This is a single album version of Bob Dylan's double album Blonde on Blonde. Not only is this his first double album but it's also THE first double album, beating The Mothers of Invention's Freak Out! by a week. One interesting thing is that the last song is 11 minutes long but also takes up the last side making it considerably shorter than the other sides. Because of this I wanted to see what kind of bonus material I could include which I don't usually do when condensing an album, but I also cut out the two lengthy 7 minute long songs so it seemed necessary. 

Three of the songs from this period I couldn't include because they were a minute long: Medicine Sunday, Jet Pilot, and Lunatic Princess, but some songs I could include are Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?, I Wanna Be Your Lover, She's Your Lover Now, and I'll Keep It With Mine. The last two were incomplete so I ended up only using the first one. These were recorded during the New York sessions which lasted from October 1965 to January 1966, but only one song made it to the final version of the album. Afterwards recording sessions moved to Nashville. 

Bob Dylan - Self Portrait (1970)

 

Side A:
1. Alberta #1
2. Days of '49
3. Early Mornin' Rain
4. In Search of Little Sadie
5. Little Sadie
6. Belle Isle

Side B:
7. Copper Kettle
8. Gotta Travel On
9. Blue Moon
10. The Boxer
11. Take Me As I Am (Or Let Me Go)
12. Take a Message to Mary
13. Alberta #2

Here's my single album reconstruction of Bob Dylan's double cover album Self Portrait. At the time it was called Dylan's worst album. Part of it was cause Dylan used an alternate voice on some of the songs that he had been using since his last album as part of his "country phase". I tried getting rid of the songs that use it on the first side but by the second side it was unavoidable. I also tried to keep just the covers and get rid of originals and live tracks.

I'll give Dylan respect for wanting to cover songs from the Great American Songbook, but one interesting thing is that he covered a Simon and Garfunkel song that came out earlier that year. One song I got rid of was the instrumental Wigwam which was the album's only single. For this version I nominate Copper Kettle. It's not my favorite but it might've done well. 

Bob Dylan - Basement Tapes (1975)

Side A:
1. Odds and Ends
2. Million Dollar Bash
3. Lo and Behold!
4. Clothes Line Saga
5. Apple Suckling Tree
6. Please, Mrs. Henry
7. Tears of Rage

Side B:
8. Too Much of Nothing
9. Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread
10. Quinn the Eskimo
11. Tiny Montgomery
12. You Ain't Goin' Nowhere
13. Open the Door, Homer
14. This Wheel's on Fire

This is based on the 1975 album Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan and The Band. When the tapes were recorded in 1967, they became legendary. Some songs from the tape became part of the first rock bootleg Great White Wonder in 1969. So there had been a demand for an official release of the tapes for years, but when it was released in 1975, the fans were unhappy. Many criticized the songs which only featured The Band as unnecessary, but the tracks were recorded around the same time and were officially unreleased up to that point. Many others criticized the use of overdubbing with new parts recorded for the album by The Band, as well as the fact that the Dylan material represented wasn't among his best. 

Excluded tracks included I Shall Be Released and Quinn the Eskimo. In total, there were 16 songs with Bob Dylan and 8 songs with The Band. Because of this, an official release of the tapes came out in 2014 as part of Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series Vol. 11. There were 139 tracks across 6 CDs. But I feel like if you took out the tracks by The Band and two more of the lengthy tracks from the original album, it's pretty easy to turn a 2 LP set into a 1 LP album. The only real change I made is that I replaced Crash on the Levee with Quinn the Eskimo.