While it may grow on the seasoned Bob Dylan fan, Empire Burlesque is hardly a must-listen album. There are those who will defend songs like Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love) and other oddities from this time. Listening to Dylan adapt to the 1980s pop minefield is gruesome listening, but in a way that makes it hard to stop paying attention. Clean Cuts will be a fantastic listen to those who want a little more of that strangeness. Some of the songs featured on his 1992 bootleg would never be released outside of this compilation of studio cuts. Rough mixes of songs that ended up on Empire Burlesque, tracks that would be rewritten and then used for Knocked Out Loaded, and a selection of songs that bring out the worst from that tired-sounding veteran of the studio. Dylan had lost his step majorly around this time, and the opening song Go ‘Way Little Boy is a clear enough example of that.
A lot of the material here ended up being released, be it on bootleg tapes or other albums. Much of it isn’t good enough for those projects either, but in their earlier form they sound as though they’re, at the very least, filled with a promise that couldn’t be made good on. That’s not the fault of anyone particularly, just a perfect storm of Dylan’s songwriting burnout, the change in genre popularity, and a generally heightened expectation from listeners after Infidels. The likes of Driftin’ Too Far from Shore and New Danville Girl (later Brownsville Girl) are interesting listens in this early recording capacity. They’d be better served in their final versions, particularly the Down in the Groove snippets heard here. But then there’s a side of Dylan that he has always explored in these studio sessions but never quite managed to release. Who Loves You More?, has a bluesy style that suits his voice at the time, but it feels more like a way of exerting his influences than anything fit for public consumption. A shame, too, it’s a simple love song with a tremendous electric guitar and piano pairing.
Had that been released at the time, Empire Burlesque would’ve sounded a stretch better. Pair that with the rough mix of standout songs like Tight Connection to My Heart and Clean Cut Kid, and you have a decent case for Dylan’s misstep of a 1985 release being dragged a little too far down the road by the genre expectations of the time. Dylan had wanted to toy with synth and does so. It suits him but is limited in what it does for his lyrics. New Danville Girl, starts off slow and a little disheartening, though Dylan pulls out a thrilling observation on love both lost and found. Losing the intimate details of a broader heartbreak, that’s what Dylan writes of here, and it’s gut-wrenching. Monumental electric guitar work is buried in favour of the timely synth introduction. A rough trade-off, but it’d come back in good time.
The rest of Clean Cuts serves as a reminder that Dylan’s deep cuts and early mixes are often superior to his released material. He sat on When I Paint My Masterpiece for a time, after all. Trust Yourself and Emotionally Yours are in such early states here, yet they show a tremendous understanding of where Dylan was not just as a songwriter, but as a performer too. His raspy voice suits the material at hand, it’s just a shame that whining, croaking tone is playing for attention alongside some thudding percussion and a few backing vocal inclusions that date the material more than the synth additions. Outtakes found here and not yet released are worth sticking around for. It doesn’t get much better than Who Loves You More?, though.
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