Bob Dylan – A Rare Batch of Little White Wonder Review

Dedicated fans of Bob Dylan and Neil Young changed the landscape of how we listen to our favourites. Studio recordings and official releases are no longer enough. We have the world and their work at our fingertips. Twenty-four hours in a day which needs filling up with sound and experience. The weak shall sleep while the strong carry on, powering through and tuning in to the scraps of Little White Wonder, a booming bootleg experience which feels more like the starting pistol for decades of shoddy recordings. But now the artists are in on the running. Young is offering his live performances and best bootlegs as actual releases while Dylan slowly picks through the vault of unreleased works. For those who want it straight from the source, A Rare Batch of Little White Wonder will hit the spot. 

For the absolute hardcore listener, this will serve as a real treat. Those who feel they have heard all Dylan has to offer have not sunk into the shabby bootlegs. This collection of recordings is a wonderful experience. California serves as a twelve-bar powerhouse, like Outlaw Blues but a definitively different experience. An unofficial release printed in Italy right around the time Dylan released, a self-titled exploration of unreleased efforts. The tap was not turned off. Out poured rare release after rare release. Studio cuts and alternative takes were all to play for and those dedicated fans, even now, are clawing for more. The likes of Who You Really Are and Baby Please Don’t Go are wonderful. There is much to love about the scratchy exposure heard on the tracks, something remastering them would remove.  

Only a Hobo is where the more recognisable material filters through. Harmonica prominence and an acoustic flow which Dylan would depart from using in the latter stages of the 1970s. It was not growth but a new direction. A Rare Batch of Little White Wonder serves as a collection of pieces Dylan was either unaware of or embarrassed enough by to refuse their inclusion on Dylan. A great shame, as the bootleg here serves as a better example for a decade of work than Dylan does. With streaming this on YouTube comes the removal of confusion. The Death of Emmett Till is labelled a Gordon Lightfoot song, for whatever reason. Two greats of the genre though sadly the Sundown powerhouse has no notes to lay down on this EP. Candy Man has Dylan cough and splutter his way through a track which seems unavailable elsewhere. 

Or at least getting your hands on them in other forms proves difficult. At least with A Rare Batch of Little White Wonder, there is a chance to hear these tracks. Where they are ripped from and how they got onto this Italian release is not our business, but it would be nice to find out the process behind it. We are in the dark on that for the time being though. Leaks from the vault Dylan has been frequent now. But there is a charm to the original process of finding this extra material. Those recordings smuggled out of gigs and sat on for decades, later released and remastered by a community of bootleggers as active now as they were when Dylan was at his most popular.