# CD review: Bob Dylan: Fragments – Time Out Of Mind Sessions (1996-1997): The Bootleg Series – 2023: Video, CD cover

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2023/02/06/cd-review-bob-dylan-fragments-time-out-of-mind-sessions-1996-1997-the-bootleg-series-2023-video-cd-cover/
- Published: 2023-02-06T00:04:24+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**The official story surrounding Time Out of Mind goes something like this: Bob 
Dylan, stricken by the death of Jerry Garcia and sensing a hellhound on his own 
trail, turned to his beloved old blues records to exorcise the quickening dread 
he felt upon realizing that the bell also tolls for Zimmerman. **

Dylan, who was only 55 at the time, read his resulting lyrics to producer Daniel
Lanois, who was stunned by their unearthly power, and the pair headed into the studio
to fashion a record falling somewhere between a seance and a last will and testament.

Like all of the stories surrounding the creation of Bob Dylan albums, this one bears
traces of myth and marketing. Typically, his Bootleg Series either subverts received
knowledge (Trouble No More, Another Self Portrait) or magnifies legends (More Blood,
More Tracks, The Cutting Edge). Fragments might be the first release that manages
both. The series can feel overwhelming by design or aimed only at the highest-security-
clearance Dylanologists, but Fragments presents us with a clear chronology: Disc
One gives us the final studio album, remixed and scrubbed fresh so we can avail 
ourselves once more of its glorious shadows and submerge ourselves in its delicious
mood. The remaining four discs—two of unreleased outtakes, one previously available,
and a live set—repositions Time Out of Mind as a rebirth rather than a farewell.

What becomes abundantly clear over the course of the set’s six hours is that Time
Out of Mind is primarily the story of a mood, and one ensemble’s single-minded pursuit
of it. The making of this album was protracted, painful, and in all ways alive, 
and the album’s dour countenance was largely the product of theater and shadow. 
Dylan, ever the role player, was inhabiting a persona, slipping into a black jacket
and working the character for fresh angles. Lanois accentuated the gloom and submerged
the album in a damp chill of effects pedals and reverb until Dylan seemed to be 
speaking to us from the beyond. But—as the new mix on Fragments underlines—his baleful
pallor was stagehand’s makeup, the gushing blood just red silk scarves.

The story began, appropriately enough, in a picaresque old playhouse Lanois dubbed
the Teatro, filled with storybook touches—cob-webbed 16mm projectors, dusty mirror
balls. Dylan and Lanois started with looping jams inspired by Charley Patton’s old
78s. Accompanied by bassist Tony Garnier and drummer Tony Mangurian, they built 
the tracks on top of those primordial beginnings. The mighty, roaring sound that
emerged spooked everyone to attention: “The hair on my arms went up,” recalled sound
engineer Mark Howard.

But Dylan, predictably, wasn’t settling in. He couldn’t work this close to his home
and his family, which, by now, included six children and multiple grandchildren.
They decamped instead to Criteria Studio in Miami, a space with a hallowed history(
Aretha Franklin’s Young, Gifted and Black, the Allman Brothers’ Eat a Peach) and
the ambiance of an airport security detention center. Lanois, shrugging, packed 
up all of his priceless tube microphones and moldering tape loops and relocated 
without complaint to this concrete box. But it was the beginning of a split between
the two that would define and nearly overwhelm the sessions. The two stubborn visionaries
seemed destined to remain at loggerheads. Lanois rarely spoke to Dylan before and
after takes, and entire days unfolded in icy, uncomfortable silence.

Dylan, meanwhile, seemed determined to complicate things as much as possible. He
reportedly felt haunted by Buddy Holly, and in tribute, he created his own ghostly
version of the Crickets, pulling from his touring lineup, session-player royalty,
and beyond. All in all at least 12 musicians found themselves crowded in Criteria,
with Bob Dylan as their bandleader (“Two of everything, like Noah’s Ark,” marveled
pedal steel guitarist Cindy Cashdollar). Dylan would try songs out in different 
keys, abruptly switching in the middle and expecting the band to remap their own
chord progressions without a moment’s hesitation. The playbacks were a disaster,
musicians crashing audibly into one another as they struggled to adapt. Lanois, 
listening with Howard, knew that he might only have a few shots at catching each
song before his tempestuous leader grew bored and moved on, so he ordered musicians
to simply not play if they couldn’t navigate the changes.

Whatever else was happening in the studio, the musicians achieved a rambling, spacious,
loose cohesion. Guitar lines seem to be on the verge of wandering entirely out of
sync with the drums only to fall in on beat with a satisfied breath. These are not
driving rock numbers, and yet they were three or four drum kits rolling away at 
any point. The music came on like a big, black thunderhead, rolling forward with
guitar echo merging into a clatter of drums.

The unreleased outtakes on Fragments reveal some of the extraordinary moments they
littered along the path. On Disc 2’s take on the folk standard “The Water Is Wide,”
Dylan leans into the performance as if he might reach out and touch the shoulder
of his beloved. It’s as devoted as he ever sounded, and behind him, Garnier and 
Mangurian play so subtly and understated they register as lighting. Disc 5 gives
us the original haunting take of “Can’t Wait” that raised Howard’s arm hairs: Over
a hard backbeat, Dylan’s block piano chords and impressively tasty riffing from 
Lanois, Dylan chews the scenery with the unhinged glee of a Shakespearean actor 
let loose in a Hollywood blockbuster. The song is mesmerizingly dark, but hearing
Dylan bite down with panther’s teeth on “I’m getting old,” it’s easy to conclude
that he was feeling nothing but the opposite.

The extra discs yield the usual Bootleg pleasures: The Disc 2 version of “Cold Irons
Bound” features stunning alternate lyrics about “stones in the pathway hurled” and“
clouds of blood,” while the live versions of “’Til I Fell in Love With You” and “
Standing in the Doorway” inflect the songs with sinewy hints of roadhouse blues,
soul, gospel. But the true glory of these recordings is witnessing session legends
like Mangurian, Jim Dickinson, and Bucky Baxter—giants whose playing pushed the 
blood through the veins of American song—sound momentarily lost, reverent, uncertain.
The performances on Fragments surely represent some of these players’ most unguarded
and searching work. Years later, they still spoke of these sessions with a mixture
of anxiety and awe.

This lingering unease points to what makes Time Out of Mind special in Dylan’s discography,
maybe even singular: More than almost any of his studio albums, it was the product
of cult-like group obsession. Everyone from Lanois to Dylan to the phalanx of hired
guitarists behaved like people gripped by a shared trance. Sessions stretched to
10 hours while Lanois drove Dylan to try “Not Dark Yet” again in E-flat, then in
B-flat, until Dylan finally snapped, “If you haven’t got it now, you ain’t getting
it.” Whatever their disagreements or tensions, everyone toiled under the mutual 
assumption that there were spirits in this material, ones that only they could coax
out.

Their struggle centered on two songs—“Not Dark Yet” and, ironically, “Mississippi,”
a song written for and left off of the final album. There are multiple versions 
of both songs littered across Fragments, and it is fascinating to hear them expand
and contract, changing shapes and keys and tempos. For Dylan, the song had always
been the thing: His catalog had always boasted the folk virtues of pliability. You
could speed his songs up, slow them down, throw rock drums behind them or do any
old thing, and the songs would remain, somehow, themselves: “Desolation Row” remains
recognizably “Desolation Row” on take 5 and Take 13. But something different happens
to “Not Dark Yet” and “Mississippi” when the players fiddle with them: They become
different songs.

Listening to the evolution of Time Out of Mind’s most beloved song, “Not Dark Yet,”
shows how these lurching, unsteady sessions wound up yielding their particular exhausted
glitter. The first alternate take is in a different key, sending Dylan’s voice into
a higher register and the song into ill-fitting sunlight; it’s a harmless little
ramble. The second take, on Disc 3, is slower, and in the same key as the final 
version. You can hear Dylan’s voice settle into the tired languor that defines “
Not Dark Yet.” But although you get a tantalizing glimpse of its potential, the 
view is blocked by a marching-band triplet fill on the drums and some Hornsby-esque
piano trills. It doesn’t feel gloriously endless, as it does in the final studio
version; it simply feels long. It wasn’t until the band stumbled into lockstep, 
all musicians’ frills burned away, that the song’s dark shadow loomed into view.

But the story of Fragments—the story of the album Time Out Of Mind isn’t, but almost
was—rests with “Mississippi.” No song undergoes so many fitful revisions. On Disc
2, it’s an uptempo, zydeco-inflected rocker. On Disc 3, the band works it into a
gut-wrenching funk that Lanois loved but Dylan rightfully discarded. The definitive
version of “Mississippi,” which wasn’t released until 2008 and included on the fifth
disc, is suffused with air and light. If “Not Dark Yet” sounded like it was in the
beginning stages of evaporation, “Mississippi” felt like fumes itself—far too ethereal
and light for Time Out of Mind.

Dylan, with his typical foresight, understood this implicitly. This is why he saved“
Mississippi” for 2001’s Love & Theft. Critics and fans hailed that one as a rebirth:
here, seemingly, was Dylan riding high, Time Out of Mind’s Edgar Allen Poe rags 
tossed off in favor of a natty bowler hat and a riverboat gambler’s mustache. But
Fragments reveals the truth of the matter: The man who croaked about walking through“
streets that are dead” already had his glittering blue eyes on the next horizon.

![Bob Dylan: Fragments - Time Out of Mind Sessions (1996-1997): The Bootleg  Series,
Vol. 17 Album Review | Pitchfork](https://i0.wp.com/media.pitchfork.com/photos/6376593f88636060815b6a01/
master/w_1280%2Cc_limit/Bob-Dylan-Deluxe.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

### _Related_