The Laboratory of the Cutting Room Floor: Anticipating Bob Dylan's Another Self Portrait

CBS Records announced this past week the forthcoming August release of Bob Dylan's Another Self Portrait (which contains session material from that original 1970 album as well as its follow-up, New Morning). It's hard to know what to expect. As another instalment in their Dylan Bootleg Series, which takes us again into their vaults to experience unreleased material, CBS is calling Another Self Portrait an opportunity to "give fans a chance to reappraise the pivotal recordings that marked Dylan's artistic transformation as the 1960s ended and the 1970s began." But the record they've chosen is probably the most reviled in Dylan's catalogue. It also shows us the pitfalls of selling goods defined by the iconic name of the artist rather than by the quality of the material within.

When he released Self Portrait, Bob Dylan essentially pulled a fast one on his fans. And the critics largely hated it. In Rolling Stone, critic Greil Marcus opened his epic review by asking, "What is this shit?" What was this shit? Besides the sly joke of the album's title (he performs mostly covers rather than original material), Dylan positioned the two-record set as a riposte aimed at those who wished to hold him to the mantle of being a spokesman of his generation. "I wish these people would just forget about me," Dylan told Rolling Stone in 1984 looking back at Self Portrait. "I wanna do something they can't possibly like, they can't relate to. They'll see it, and they'll listen, and they'll say, 'Well, let's get on to the next person. He ain't sayin' it no more. He ain't given' us what we want,' you know? They'll go on to somebody else." But the record was also aiming to achieve something more. It represented a somewhat daring, yet failed, attempt to conceptually put his music in the context of the American songbook of Tin Pan Alley. So besides including live versions of his own "Like a Rolling Stone" and "The Mighty Quinn" (from the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival), he performed Rodgers and Hart's "Blue Moon", Elmore James's "It Hurts Me Too," plus traditional folk material like "Alberta" and "Little Sadie." Self Portrait doesn't fall apart because the concept is bad. It's that Dylan can't fully commit himself to the concept.

Bob Dylan around 1970

The performances are often so shoddy and poorly arranged that their inclusion seems haphazard. Not only are the recordings from the Isle of Wight horribly sloppy, Dylan's cover of Paul Simon's "The Boxer" (where he painfully attempts to be both Simon and Garfunkel), Gordon Lightfoot's "Early Morning Rain," and The Everly Brothers' "Take a Message to Mary" add nothing to the originals. Unlike on Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Harding, albums in which Dylan's highly subjective voice demanded to be heard and the songs themselves were bold, funny and could nail an epoch, in Self Portrait he disappears into the arrangements. The songs sing the singer – and not very well. With the exception of a few tracks, like "Copper Kettle" and "All the Tired Horses" (where his voice is actually nowhere to be found, but his spirit is), Self Portrait resembles a bootleg album of hastily assembled tracks. (The album's single, "Wigwam," in which Dylan trills over a bed of Muzak that might have been dreamed up by James Last, is Self Portrait's ultimate sick joke.) There is little on the record, in other words, that illustrates what made Bob Dylan one of our most significant songwriters and performers.

So how does one approach songs from the cutting room floor of an album that should have perhaps been left on the cutting room floor? I haven't obviously heard the record yet so I can't say. But the fragments in the teaser trailer CBS put together do illustrate a man tracing the roots of both his musical path and interests. When his near-fatal motorcycle accident in 1966 forced him into semi-retirement, it was as if he also retired from the violent battles with his audience to pull back from redefining himself. So he retreated not only into domesticity, but into one of the fruits that domesticity provides: your own record collection. In the safety of his own living room, he became the audience rather than the performer facing one. Among other things, Self Portrait suffers from the sense that Dylan is playing the songs to himself rather than to the listener. But the samples I've heard on Another Self Portrait, from Eric Anderson's "Thirsty Boots" and Tom Paxton's "Annie's Gonna Sing Her Song," actually reach out to an audience. You hear the threads of what not only came to define the musical territory Dylan had already been mining to that point, but also what would later become the Bob Dylan Theme Time Radio Hour on satellite radio. On that program Dylan, as the host, took us on musical journeys through the history of American music – blues, jazz, show-tunes, rock and folk – using a theme like 'the weather' as the clothes line on which he hung the songs. On Another Self Portrait, he also extends to his listeners the country sound he was immersed in with his previous album, Nashville Skyline, by reminding us (as he had on the irreplaceable The Basement Tapes) that his music was not narrowed by the social protests of the topical song. In his mind, the American songbook is an evolving and expanding catalogue tracing a map of the nation's struggles and triumphs. 

Another Self Portrait could very well be the album that Self Portrait wasn't. It may compare to how Good As I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993) set Dylan up for his series of records (Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft) that brought his voice back to its authentic sound. In those two early Nineties records, Dylan revisited the songs of his youth, earlier versions of the America that would help him come to terms with the country he was living in now. He then set forth to mine his own path with those tracks ("World Gone Wrong," "Black Jack Davey") as skeleton keys for his own ("Not Dark Yet," "High Water (for Charley Patton)"). But we already know that the history that followed those sessions led into the eventual aimlessness that Good As I Been to You got him out of. The only authentic thing about Self Portrait was its portrait of an artist in hiding. What Another Self Portrait might just reveal is more of what Dylan was actually hiding from. 

- Kevin Courrier is a freelance writer/broadcaster, film critic and author (Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa, Randy Newman's American Dreams, 33 1/3 Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles Utopian Dream). Courrier teaches part-time film courses to seniors through the LIFE Institute at Ryerson University in Toronto and other venues. His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism.