True to form with the Little White Wonder rips, the track list is wrong and the lyrics are nowhere to be seen. Guesswork is needed to piece this one together and this marks an odd thrill for volume three, which at least has a different lineup of songs compared to the preceding edition, a replication of the first. Tune in to everyone’s favourite Dylan song, Lady Down Your Weart Tune, a translation gaffe usually reserved for cheap toy products shovelled onto Poundland shelves. A crisp quality is available with this one – a nice vinyl rip with a few shoddy pockets and crackles within. But such is the charm of a bootleg where songs are renamed, remoulded and run through by a company which does not appear to hear the charms of intertextuality.
These pieces are predominantly from the Bringing it All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited tapes, and they certainly sound like rips from that period. If You Gotta Go, Go Now has the swing of acoustic and percussion blends which would make the finished project such a memorable one. Early versions of She Belongs to Me feel rather quaint when compared to the final version, but A Rare Batch of Little White Wonder (Vol. 3), for all its misspelt labelling, is a very important moment for the bootleg community. It is more a vocal growth than anything else. A chance for Dylan to shed the somewhat limited and often shy early style of his first records. He takes it but by the sounds of A Rare Batch of Little White Wonder (Vol. 3), it could have been a far softer approach to these songs. Drifting acoustics and a generally calmer appeal instead of the rocking and roaring experiences of those now-defining songs. Love Minus Zero / No Limit is certainly an example of that.
Folk-oriented tones are still the main draw for Dylan here, and those early stages of a song coming together means the instrumental section is not lacking, but fragile. Primitive placements of a few sparse parts are a far more interesting listen now we have the finished version; however it may pale in effort or instrumental stability. Bass grooves sounding off through Love Minus Zero / No Limit show off the intent to come. Harmonica additions, too, have all the sound and bluster of a song not far off its revolutionary status. Such is the brilliance of this compilation – a far stretch better than the preceding entries because this marks a mixture of live stage brilliance and on-the-fly innovations which would soon become a part of music history.
Hearing that for a half hour is a real treat for those dedicated Dylan fans out there. Dusty Old Fairgrounds from the New York Town Hall performance is a genuine treat, a slice of live material dropped right in the middle of tracks in their early, formative process. Revolutionary work can be heard, right here, and the compilation efforts of the Italian team behind this bootleg are onto something they did not know they had. They certainly made a blunder of it in the first two volumes but here, little flickers of studio and stage brilliance from a major turning point in Dylan’s career is a near-perfect experience. To have this kind of insight and a peek behind the curtain before The Bootleg Series ever allowed listeners to do so is remarkable and it remains a strong listen.
