Bob Dylan – The Freewheelin’ Outtakes Review

A true oddity, this one. Bob Dylan has such a vast backlog of material, much of it stuffed away in a vault somewhere, and it is not up to us listeners to seek it out. We must wait, patiently or impatiently, for it to be served up by Dylan’s team. Occasionally, a new project is quietly released. Some playlist on the YouTube channel or a compilation quietly put out to cover a copyright expiration. Even those releases have worth to them. They sometimes feature an alternative version worth talking about or recontextualise what has come before it, and what followed a particular album or period for Dylan’s songwriting. We can learn from many of those moments, even if they’re mere fragments, as The Bootleg Series has showcased. But The Freewheelin’ Outtakes, a compilation which has appeared on Dylan’s official YouTube channel, has none of that.  

Despite its title, it has nothing to do, really, with The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. These are not early renditions of Masters of War or Girl from the North Country. Granted, there are one or two songs here that do appear on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, but they are placed here as a sort of catch-all. A cover for the team to hide behind if and when they are questioned about why an eleven-year-old playlist (at time of writing) suddenly features Rocks and Gravel (Solid Road), a song which appeared on Through the Open Window. Great it may be to spend time with the likes of That’s All Right, Mama and Corrina, Corrina, you hardly need to dig up this old compilation. It’s resurfaced like a car driven into a river, long abandoned but hooked up by a sliver of contemporary connection. If it were not for Rocks and Gravel (Solid Road) then there would be no feasible reason for the team controlling Dylan’s backlog to bring this one back up. How bizarre it is, then, to see it released and reimagined with this song inclusion.  

Rocks and Gravel (Solid Road), as great an archival release as it is, has little to no connection to the songs it’s sandwiched between. What we get from Whatcha Gonna Do and Hero Blues as bookends to the Through the Open Window lead single is nothing. Zilch. We receive no further information on the effects from song to song, nor on the implication of what The Freewheelin’ Outtakes wishes to say. You would be forgiven for thinking this is a collection of outtakes from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Not so. It’s the usual run of songs that feature on these Dylan YouTube playlists. Whether they’re artificially generated or brought together by someone who believes they can squeeze a few more coins from the backlog are anybody’s guess. I Shall Be Free, The Death of Emmett Till, Whatcha Gonna Do, all pieces that appear on other compilations. They should be no surprise to anyone.  

A shame considering what this could have been. You could argue that Through the Open Window serves those wanting outtakes from Dylan’s second album. But if you call an album The Freewheelin’ Outtakes, you should rightly expect outtakes from the album, not a jumble of songs tangentially related to The Freewheelin’ Outtakes. A wasted experience this one, as is often the case for these YouTube playlist pieces. Dylan would slap the wrist of anyone who bootlegged his shows; he is likely not aware of the alternative. This is a clear example of how bootleggers, operating in what many artists may see as a grey area, are offering up different avenues of connecting with our all-time favourites, learning more from their compilations than we can from official releases.