New Bob Dylan

The first Rock bootleg is considered to be the Great White Wonder by Bob Dylan. It was a double album with a completely white cover with the words GWW stamped on the cover. It featured studio out takes of Dylan's music, some pre-electric and seven songs he made with the Band that would later surface as the Basement Tapes.

Very few recording artists have been bootlegged as much as Dylan. But than there are probably very few recording artists that have as much unreleased material laying around. Dylan is one of the few artists that can sing a song three times in a row and every version will be completely unique. That's one of the exciting things about seeing Dylan in concert, to see how he is going to interpret his catalog this time.

In an effort to block some of the bootlegging going on Dylan and his record label began issuing a series of official "bootlegs" some years back. This has been a fascinating series with some great material. Hearing some of the songs that didn't make it on some of his albums makes you wonder what they were thinking. He's released one of his most famous concerts in the Bootleg series, the concert where he was called a "Judas" for going electric.

Today the eighth volume of "The Bootleg Series" comes out. (And every volume has been at least a double cd, some three, so that's a lot of bootleg material.) This series, unlike the previous seven which focused on older material, looks at his work since 1989 and his album "Oh, Mercy" which is considered the start of his most recent come back.

The two songs are examples of how he changes his songs. They are two different versions of his song "Mississippi" from his Love and Theft album. The first version is the one that didn't make the album, the second one is the one that is featured on the album.

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