Fragments - Time Out Of Mind Sessions (1996-1997): The Bootleg Series Vol. 17

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We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Everyone from Lanois to Dylan to the phalanx of hired guitarists behaved like people gripped by a shared trance. These are not driving rock numbers, and yet they were three or four drum kits rolling away at any point.

The compilation includes a remix of the original Time Out of Mind album, outtakes, alternate versions and live recordings. 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. But the story of Fragments—the story of the album Time Out Of Mind isn’t, but almost was—rests with “Mississippi. He couldn’t work this close to his home and his family, which, by now, included six children and multiple grandchildren. 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.When it was released in 1997, Bob Dylan’s thirtieth studio album, Time Out of Mind, was hailed as a masterpiece. 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. Wer die Möglichkeit hat seine Live-Auftritte zu besuchen sollte dies tun oder sich die Bootlegs an Land ziehen. And the extra sides of outtakes from the convoluted sessions that produced this gem are equally as compelling. 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.

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. Disc 5 has all the Time Out Of Mind tracks from the deluxe Tell Tale Signs, Bootleg Series 8 (2008) and has the amazing first takes of Mississippi, Can't Wait, Marching To The City and others. But—as the new mix on Fragments underlines—his baleful pallor was stagehand’s makeup, the gushing blood just red silk scarves. 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. I felt that his voice, which was at one of it's least easy on the ears stages in the mid-1990s, was being propped up, or glossed over, by the production.The more we learn of Dylan's non-recorded history, the more complex he continues to become in our eyes - and the more we are able to better understand the multitudes of expressions he is able to present and represent. For Dylan, the song had always been the thing: His catalog had always boasted the folk virtues of pliability. Disc 4 offers live versions of all the tracks from Time Out of Mind except Dirt Road Blues, but with the addition of Mississipi, which was originally intended for the album.