Bob Dylan’s Carnegie Hall show should open the floodgates for more archival live recordings 

Twenty years on from the release of Carnegie Hall 1963 and Bob Dylan fans are hungry for more. They always will be. It’s a void of a belly on these dedicated listeners, and rightly so. Bootlegs and live clippings are out there. It would take a lifetime to listen to because Dylan has given his life to the stage. If we are to take away the bootleg releases, though, we are left with few examples of Dylan as a performer. His early years are well documented on paper, but practically speaking, it is relatively hard to hunt down documents from the years after his electric controversy. A few are sprinkled throughout the decades, a Rolling Thunder Revue here and a Real Live there, but few of the official releases offer a quality similar to audience recordings and soundboard rips. This is a wrong which could easily be righted. When, though? 

Dylan has offered mere morsels of his exceptional stage work in the past. Carnegie Hall 1963 and Live at the Gaslight 1961 are decent showcases of Dylan as an artist working hard to make a name for himself. Those folk scene pieces are essential listening because of their historical context rather than, say, the quality of the performance. Hard Rain remains the peak of these official live releases. Not just by default of being listenable compared to Dylan and the Dead, but because it offers a glimpse of what bootleg frequenters know. No two Dylan shows are the same. Rights and clearances are always a hurdle for artists and the archivists to jump, but there are surely opportunities to delve a little bit deeper. To offer out a few more tracks from the days of interest to dedicated listeners wanting more from The Bootleg Series.  

For every live rendition made available on The Bootleg Series (a show from the so-called Gospel Years features on Trouble No More, for instance), a myriad of other, better performances are bootlegged. We can only speculate what goes into the choices behind the scenes, but there is a sense that the bootlegger has gotten the edge over the official Dylan releases because of the rapid turnaround. How quickly a recording can be put out there is staggering, but it also circumvents the need to head straight for the source. It can sometimes be decades between the performance and its release, as was the case for Trouble No More. It depends on what purpose the listener wants from a bootleg. Do they want it for solely listening purposes, or do they wish to dive into the history of the performance? 

Carnegie Hall 1963 offers the latter, if you can hunt down a copy that is. For all the official releases out there, it is harder to find some of the performances which should be prominent. Newport Folk Festival, the Time Out of Mind return to form, and even a bulk of the Rolling Thunder Revue is better listened to through bootleg releases rather than officially licensed albums. It’s a battle the likes of Neil Young and Paul McCartney are fighting against and, ultimately, losing, because the quality over quantity argument is not factored in. Quality is found in the quantity. There are bootlegs of bootleg shows, compilations of the very best from these performers. No official licence can keep up with that, not even the ones where the quality is mixed to a modern sound system standard.  

You can listen to six songs from the Carnegie Hall show on Spotify. Nine more are on a separate release. It does not take a master of music or a computer expert to piece those two releases together, thus offering the full show, which, for copyright reasons and public domain rulings, cannot be released as a whole. It’s a ridiculous hang-up of releases which affects more than just Dylan. The Rolling Stones released several songs in the US and not the UK, with different songs featured from album to album. American audiences would have to wait until five years after Electric Light Orchestra’s Balance of Power to hear the B-sides, unless they paid a ridiculous fee to import them. Granted, Carnegie Hall 1963 released in 2005, long before Spotify was a regularly used commodity, but all it takes is one rip from a person who bought a very limited Anniversary Collection 1963 vinyl to upload the songs.  

What it means for the historian out there, the at-home listener who wants the full release, is having to piece a performance together themselves. It erodes the purpose of the release to offer a mere snippet rather than the whole work. We can only hope the floodgates open soon. But they already have, and the unmanaged influx of repeated works has made it harder to hunt down recordings of work. The Dylan YouTube channel is a huge reason for this difficulty. To their credit, there are live versions and radio broadcasts from the early years on there in better quality than would appear on bootlegs. Live shows, too, mainly from the period before The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, are easily accessed.  

But the same troubles of copyright intent and public domain access is at play here. What can be released is only what is approved. There is a gold mine of songs just waiting to be released, often for the first time officially, in the archives. It’s an unfortunate fact of life which has limited other artists too, and it is why many musicians, from Neil Young to Taylor Swift, are taking better care of their archives and how they are released. For those with performances before the turn of the century though, it means having to figure out when to release songs from the archive. The Anniversary Collection series from Dylan is more a way of retaining copyright than it is a chance for listeners to learn more from a period in the studio. At least those official releases have more care to them than the playlists, which are frequently sent out from the YouTube channel.  

Compilation after compilation of the same few songs, and without the care to add notes to where they are from or what the context of the recording is. This sort of release is all too frequent and is a sign that the archivists working these labels need to take control of as much as they can. Not to monopolise it, people will pay irrespective of the project, but to make sure the history associated with these recordings is preserved. It is one thing to hear the song, another entirely to understand it in the context of its recording. Carnegie Hall 1963 is just one of the many examples. A performance recorded in brilliant quality yet not easily accessible, in full, that is, undermines the purpose of these releases. We should be thankful for what we have, and many listeners are, but the archival live recordings need real organisation as the internet becomes an unusable, generative A.I.-filled void.