Dylan biography liner notes
"Searching For A Gem"
Biograph
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| This page is part of a list of original releases by release date of international commercially-released regular stereo Dylan albums. They do not contain rarities or obscurities and are not eligible for the Searching For A Gem list. Nevertheless, their interest value or scarcity means they're worth listing here - as far as I know some are not included on any other Internet site. Promo releases of regular albums are now listed here and no longer in the former yearly Promo sections. This page is still incomplete - more international releases of this set required. |
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If you have any entries to add to the list or additions/corrections to existing entries, please let me know! Please note I cannot value your Dylan rarities - see the Mission page for reasons why. Contact the dealers on my Trading page for assistance!
Revised 06 January, 2025.
Original US stereo 5LP boxed set, Columbia C5X 38830, 7 Nov 1985 (also available as 3 cassettes, CXT 38830). The CD edition, Columbia C3K 38830, was released in Jan 1986. The front centre picture is a 1965 photograph by Daniel Kramer. The liner notes and rare photographs come from film director Cameron Crowe, who interviews Bob about each of the tracks. Thanks to "Betsy" for the poster scan - it has the text &quo On Valentine’s Day 1966 in Nashville, TN, Bob Dylan was finally able to record a version of the song “Visions of Johanna” to his liking: He had debuted the song in concert the previous October in Baltimore and had struggled with various arrangements and instrumentation during a recording session in November 1965 in New YorkContinue reading “Visions of Johanna” On September 19, 1974, Bob Dylan recorded the song “Up to Me”: It was the last day of the New York sessions for what would become the 1975 album Blood on the Tracks. Dylan, aiming for a more commercial sound, re-recorded some of the songs captured in New York before the release of the album.Continue reading “Up to Me” Bob Dylan was asked about his 1965 hilariously surreal rock ‘n roll masterpiece “Tombstone Blues” for the 1985 box set Biograph by interviewer Cameron Crowe. Dylan recalled the inspiration for the composition of the song 20 years later: “I felt like I’d broken through with this song, that nothing like it had been done before…justContinue reading “Tombstone Blues” Bob Dylan recorded all 11 songs on his fourth album — Another Side of Bob Dylan — on a single night, June 9, 1964. As demonstrated in the title, the songs reflected a shift in Dylan’s writing style. The writer Nat Hentoff was present for the recording of the album on that night in JuneContinue reading “To Ramona” In 1940, the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin wrote a piece called “On the Concept of History” as he was trying to escape from Vichy France. Within the essay, Benjamin shares a rhyme that was written in the midst of France’s July Revolution of 1830, when it was reported that people had shot atContinue reading “Time Passes Slowly” In 2001, Bob Dylan won both the Academy Award and the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song for his prophetic and pessimistic song “Things Have Changed” which was rel 1985 box set by Bob Dylan Biograph is a compilation spanning the career of American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on November 7, 1985, by Columbia Records. Consisting of 53 released and unreleased tracks from 1962 to 1981, the box set was released as a five-LP set, a three-cassette tape set, and a three-compact disc set. Biograph reached No. 33 on the Billboard 200 in the U.S. and has been certified platinum by the RIAA. The recordings on Biograph are a mix of rarities, hit singles, and album tracks. They are not presented in chronological order; 18 of its 53 tracks had not been previously issued, and three more had only been previously available on singles. Every studio album released by Dylan prior to the appearance of this box set is represented by at least one track, with the exceptions of Self Portrait, Dylan, Desire, Infidels, and Empire Burlesque, although two songs from Desire appear in live versions and "Abandoned Love" is from the Desire sessions. The set comes accompanied with a 36-page booklet, containing rare photos and liner notes by Cameron Crowe, who interviews Dylan about each of the tracks. While too comprehensive to be strictly a greatest hits album, it does include nine of the dozen Top 40 hits by Dylan during the time period covered. Missing are "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35", "George Jackson", and "Hurricane". Nine of the ten tracks from Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits appear on this compilation. Initially released in all formats in a box conforming to the dimensions of a vinyl long-playing album, on August 19, 1997 it was reissued by Legacy Records in a smaller compact disc brick package, the tracks remastered using Sony's Super-Bit Mapping process. On August 6, 2002, it was reissued again in a booklet format with three discs; yet another new issue of this edition appeared in the marketplace on April 5, 2011. The 2011 edition was mastered at Sterling Sou The sudden, shocking realization that this entire blogging project is an attempt to understand Christmas Day 1985. Biograph, the five-album Bob Dylan retrospective, was released on November 7, 1985. I was sixteen years old when I received it on Christmas day that year from my parents. I also received a stereo – one of those all-in-one things that were mostly plastic but which incorporated a turntable, two cassette decks (dubbing!) and a radio tuner, and external speakers. I no longer had to listen to music on the family turntable, which was one of those huge wooden cabinet things from the 1970s in the living room. Freedom! We celebrated Christmas in Montreal that year, with my father’s parents. I remember the genuine joy of receiving that stereo (completely unexpected) and Biograph (somewhat expected, I’m sure I would have asked for it – I wanted it but it was expensive-ish for a teenager with no job). I remember assembling the stereo after lunch (well, plugging in the two speakers – not much assembling) and unwrapping and listening to Biograph for three and a half hours while reading the two booklets, one a well-illustrated biography of Dylan and the other a series of reminiscences on the songs via interviews with Dylan conducted by Cameron Crowe (who was still a few years from becoming the filmmaker of Say Anything…). This was a feast for someone like me, who was only somewhat aware of the hits. I am certain that Christmas Day 1985 was the first time I heard “Lay Lady Lay”, “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down”, “If Not For You” and dozens and dozens of other songs. Indeed, so unaware was I of Dylan’s career that the distinction between released and unreleased songs (18 of the 53 tracks on Biograph were previously unreleased) made no sense to me. I wasn’t hearing familiar songs with some new material – it was almost all new to me. Since I listened to this album hundreds of times in the next couple of years there are still unrele |