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Rare Bob Dylan coming out...


Matthew

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Rare Bob Dylan coming out from Starbuck's. It's a good concert to have if you don't have a bootleg of it yet, but it is too bad the His Bobness is going corporate in his old age. Could be he needs the cash.

First Ray Charles, then Alanis and now Bob Dylan has sold his soul to coffee giant Starbucks.

The two parties have agreed to release rare Dylan material at the coffee chain's outlets. The disc, Dylan: Live At The Gaslight 1962, features his early material and will be available exclusively at Starbucks starting August 30.

The 10 track disc was recorded in October 1962 at New York's Gaslight Café and its songs have been rated by fans as his finest early recordings. The new record also includes a super-early version of the Dylan classic, "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," as well as what is believed to be a recording of his first ever performance of "Don't Think Twice It's Alright."

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I used to have a bootleg of the Gaslight tapes and it is great stuff. I'm definitely going to get this when it comes out. Why is everybody so uptight about this, though? I don't normally go to Starbucks, but I've been known to have a hot chocolate there on occasion.

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Why all the negativity toward Starbucks? I'm enjoying a nice coffee from them right now. As for this disc, I'm not all that interested in this early period of Dylan-why can't they just release the complete Basement Tapes already?

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Will this be on sale in a range of options?:

Tall - a one track single

Grande - the full album

Venti - a double album in deluxe packaging with extended dance mixes on the second disc?

(surprised they missed the chance to include a version of 'One More Cup of Coffee' from 'Desire').

Edited by Bev Stapleton
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I don't care if this one is co-sponsored by the the Aryan Nations - get it - fascinating early Dylan, recorded when he still had a great singing voice, and a great snapshot of an absolutely masterful performer before he was corrupted by illusions of his own genius -

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I don't care if this one is co-sponsored by the the Aryan Nations - get it - fascinating early Dylan, recorded when he still had a great singing voice, and a great snapshot of an absolutely masterful performer before he was corrupted by illusions of his own genius -

I'm with you. I've been trying to create my own Gaslight tapes from a couple of bootlegs and single trackes that Sony has set free but I haven't gotten very far.

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The music's OK; I actually found it to be a little too "early" for my tastes. He sounds like a young kid, but it's alright.

As for Starbucks, it's just an alternate distribution channel. Most adults, I daresay, never step foot inside a record store anymore. He gets premium placement (by the counter/cash register), with not much competition. Also, many of the CDs Starbucks sells are of performers of the same era (Joni Mitchell, for example). Simply makes sense to me.

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Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Starbucks... everyone loves to bash the big guys - mostly because it's a popular thing to do.

I got Highway 61 Revisited a while ago and really liked it. Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks are next, along with this Starbucks release I'll bet.

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As for Starbucks, it's just an alternate distribution channel.  Most adults, I daresay, never step foot inside a record store anymore.  He gets premium placement (by the counter/cash register), with not much competition.  Also, many of the CDs Starbucks sells are of performers of the same era (Joni Mitchell, for example).  Simply makes sense to me.

Exactly! Targeting your, uh, target audience.

Bob's Gaslight recordings are among my favorites - this is great, essential stuff. And so hard to believe he was only like 20 years old when he recorded them... :tup

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  • 1 month later...

Yeah I did. Good stuff. I also ordered the soundtrack with a book and in doing so got a free 6 cut

cd of a '63 Carnegie hall concert. I was around when all this was new but at the time didn't get Dylan. I was much more interested in Miles Davis and Jean-Luc Godard. I may be the only person in the world whose first Dylan Lp was Self Portrait.

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It's funny, Lon, but I heard Self-Portrait for the first time only a year or two ago. Since the reviews were generally so bad, and since there's so much better Dylan out there, I always skipped it. But I found a used disc one day and finally picked it up. It's far from his best work, of course, but some of it's really not bad.

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I actually think the lps sound better than the disc til we get a remaster, I spun them recently and I have the disc too.

I really like the way he interpreted the songs of others. . . just unique and with so much feeling (well, so many different feelings). The "home-iness" of it, the sort of feeling that it was recorded in friendship and good times. And the musicians on there are top notch!

I'm going to listen to it again soon!

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the Gaslight stuff is astonishing for how MATURE a performer Dylan was - I'm just finishing the writing of a history of rock and roll (1950-1970), and though I have a lot of problems with Dylan, I make a point in the book about how musically accomplished he was, even though we tend to concentrate on the "poetry" - in the midst of writing the book I interviewed Ed Sanders (of the Fugs), who told me about a benefit that was thrown, ca. 1963, for the Living Theater in NYC - Dylan showed up, and did a few songs; though he was barely known, the crowd went wild at his charisma, and Sanders said how obvious it was that here was something (someone) special and new and quite important. Another intersting thing about the Gaslight recordings (and his work up until, I would say, the early 1970s) is how well he uses his voice - it's so perfectly expressive, focused, pointed, and modulated. That is something he seems to have lost quite suddenly; the later singing is, to my ears, a parody of the early Dylan, annoying and grating and completely unfocused -

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the Gaslight stuff is astonishing for how MATURE a performer Dylan was - I'm just finishing the writing of a history of rock and roll (1950-1970), and though I have a lot of problems with Dylan, I make a point in the book about how musically accomplished he was, even though we tend to concentrate on the "poetry" - in the midst of writing the book I interviewed Ed Sanders (of the Fugs), who told me about a benefit that was thrown, ca. 1963, for the Living Theater in NYC - Dylan showed up, and did a few songs; though he was barely known, the crowd went wild at his charisma, and Sanders said how obvious it was that here was something (someone) special and new and quite important. Another intersting thing about the Gaslight recordings (and his work up until, I would say, the early 1970s) is how well he uses his voice - it's so perfectly expressive, focused, pointed, and modulated. That is something he seems to have lost quite suddenly; the later singing is, to my ears, a parody of the early Dylan, annoying and grating and completely unfocused -

I agree with everything in your post except your last remark. Listen to latter day Dylan recordings like "Things Have Changed" or "High Water (for Charlie Patton)" and you'll hear that he still has an amazingly expressive delivery...but it's much more subtle than it was in his youth.

I agree, however, that classic performances such as these are relatively fewer and further between than they were between 1961 and, say, 1975. I'm a big fan of his singing during the Rolling Thunder Review...

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