WICKED MESSENGER

THE BOB DYLAN ENCYCLOPEDIA by Michael Gray (832 pp, Continuum)

While not the David Thomson of rock, Gray aims pretty high, and hits enough marks to keep you going back for more (see Marcus, Greil, and Lee, CP). Without ever describing his tone or solo style, his incisive entry on Robbie Robertson spins your head around several lampposts:

...In 2005 he saw the rease of another of his rewriting of history, a 5-CD plus one DVD set titled THE BAND: A MUSICAL HISTORY, in which he re-mastered his own choices of material from Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawks' 1963 single 'Who Do You Love' through to the combined Band and Staple Singers performing Robertson's 'The Weight' in a studio in 1977 for inclusion in the LAST WALTZ movie--THE NOTES TO WHICH FUDGE OVER THE DATE AND PLACE OF RECORDING FOR QUITE A NUMBER OF THOSE ITEMS ONCE CLAIMED AS COMING FROM THE BASEMENT TAPES SESSIONS... the re-masters include 'Can YOU Please Crawl Out Your Window?' single from 1965, 'Tell Me Mama' and 'Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues' live from Liverpool May 1966, 'Odds and Ends' from the Basement Tapes 1967, 'I Ain't Got No Home' from the Guthrie Memorial Concert in 1968, 'Forever Young' from PLANET WAVES recordedin 1973, and 'Rainy Day Women #12 & 35' and 'Highway 61 Revisited' from the 1974 come-back tour... [emphasis added]

All this and NO entry for Peter Stone Brown, tsk tsk.

pub date: June 15, 2006

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