Some LP Saved My Life Tonight... Seems Like A Freeze Out - Uncle Jeff's Most Prized LP

We were talking about our most prized piece of vinyl and I had to go into the stacks and pull out an old Dylan bootleg I picked up in Boston as a kid. It was one of those rubber stamped LP's with no track listing, but it had the TMOQ (Trade Mark of Quality) sticker on it and that meant you were in for something good. Now back then, around 1971, there was no stinkin' Internet, no bittorent, and believe me, we didn't like it. The only way to hear unreleased gems was to buy sketchy bootleg recordings from underground record shops, places Uncle Jeff was known to inhabit as a toddler. I had to take the train downtown and sure enough near Cambridge I found this mysterious Dylan LP, pink cover and all. The hairy dude at the counter said it was on colored vinyl and this might have been the LP that caused my lifelong fetish for sexy vinyl—it was splattered white, brown and black like a spin-art painting done at the amusement park. And the recordings have an excellent studio sound, all unreleased Bob takes of which only some are available on the Bootleg Series Dylan has so mercifully unleashed for the masses.

Track listing:

Side 1:
1. California
2. Lay Down Your Weary Tune (a Whitmark Demo)
3. Dusty Old Fairgrounds
4. If I Could Do It All Over, I'd Do It All Over You (one I'd heard Artie Traum do)
5. Whatcha Gonna Do
6. Farewell

Side 2:
1. I Wanna Be Your Lover (with the Band in 1965)
2. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window (fast version)
3. From A Buick 6 (outtake)
4. Visions of Johanna (piano version)
5. She's Your Lover Now (amazing!)

Now before you start thinking, "Aw I've heard all these before…", you gotta realize at the time none of these tracks were even remotely in circulation. Thanks to the good late night DJ’s at WBCN, I'd heard one or two of these songs and the double Great White Wonder LP that I picked up before was a good primer (3-sides of Basement Tapes), but this LP is the ONE that started the lifelong love of collecting BOOTLEGS, say it again, BOOTLEGS, the wondrous source of insights and magic that later became somewhat of a thorn in artists' sides. TMOQ, the amazing Kornyphone Label, Rubber Dubber, you betcha! And if it was on colored vinyl, all the better!

Well, the LP is wrapping up side-two right now, and it's still all in the grooves, the magic of illicit adventure, the revelatory insight into the recording process, the mystery of why some songs don't make it and the desire for more. The second side ends with the most famous cut-off fade-out lyrics in all bootlegdom, "Now your mouth cries wolf...", the song was never finished.



We'll save the story of Neil Young's Live on Sugar Mountain LP for another day.

Uncle Jeff