He may be a man of constant sorrow, but after selling off the rights to his music, Bob Dylan is a man of constant compilations. The Joker Vol. 1 has the songwriter’s early recordings, the officially released pieces which remain a crucial part of those 1960s offerings, mashed together. The self-titled debut, along with The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, is in a compilation which, like many of the other official, YouTube-based playlists, offers very little for the listener. No recontextualization of the songs at hand, no sense of growth for the artist at the heart, or a new lesson to be learned. Redundant adaptations of songs are still listened to, because a growing number of those heading back to Corrina, Corrina, want a suggestion, a promise, of fresh material. This is all you can get without a raid of the archives or bootlegged tapes.
Those latter releases, the unofficial output from dedicated bootleggers, are why the Dylan YouTube channel will forever pale in comparison. They may have the official tapes, but what they do not have is the copyright necessary to publish what independent listeners are piecing together. It is nice to have an excuse to listen once more to I Shall Be Free and Man of Constant Sorrow, but listeners can use The Joker Vol. 1 as, at best, a reminder of these songs. Seek out the alternative versions, the better pieces which feature on compilations to follow from those hard-working bootleggers, which the official releases can never put out. Most of the playlist pieces from the official account are borderline slop. A shoddy image slapped onto a playlist which features songs uploaded years before, but stripped of the liner notes, the added context which gives us the much-needed detail. What is the purpose of Baby Please Don’t Go and Cocaine being mixed into the fray of the first two albums? Who knows.
The Joker Vol. 1 highlights what should be a growing concern for Dylan listeners. When the purpose of a compilation is solely to piece together already released songs, to muddy the waters of their context, then at what stage do we lose the clarity these songs first highlighted? The Joker Vol. 1 is merely a symptom of the wider problem, and it will not affect the meaning, the heartfelt brilliance, of songs which feature on it like Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right, or Freight Train Blues, but it will make it harder for the official Dylan releases, the compilations the studio are polishing off and sending out, to leave an impact. Stiff competition from those with access to live tapes, unreleased materials and whatever else rests in the murky waters of copyrighted pieces is sinking the official releases rapidly.
What little can be learned from this playlist can be found in listening to the albums separately. The Joker Vol. 1 just toys around with word association; the Jokerman track, released twenty years after the scope of this compilation, has seemingly affected the title. There is no suggestion, noted or unannounced, that it would be an inherent link from song to song. Where it may seem a tad ridiculous to slam a playlist made, presumably, by one of the label employees, it is a damnable showcase of just how flat the effort for these songs now is. At a time when the line between generative AI slop and the real deal is blurred so effectively by those with the shameful tools to do so, a sense of care to the already released materials must be cultivated. Throwing pieces together and photoshopping an album compilation cover is more effort than the generative filth of today, but it still lacks the context those artificially filled-in pieces have. It is almost no better.
