It is just over 25 years since the release of Time Out of Mind, in September 1997, rekindled Bob Dylan’s career. He was then 56, a legend with a glorious past behind him and a much less auspicious future. The 1990s had not been good to him. The songs had stopped flowing. He had not released any original material since the rightly slated Under the Red Sky, in 1990, recording just two albums of traditional material, Good as I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993).
In addition, his close friend Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead guitarist, had died in 1995 from a heart attack. “To me he wasn’t only a musician and a friend,” Dylan said at the time. “He was more like a big brother who taught and showed me more than he’ll ever know.”
This was the backdrop to what is now recognised as one of his greatest albums, what the historian and fan Douglas Brinkley describes in the sleeve notes as “11 of the most profound and poetic laments in the American songbook”. The album was “about personal survival in a world where dreams drown in black holes and quicksand and time is running out”.
Fragments is part of the remarkable Bootleg series of recordings that have revealed so much of this enigmatic artist’s back pages. Vol 17 comes in two flavours: a two-CD boxset and a five-CD boxset. Both include Michael Brauer’s remix of the original album plus some outtakes and early versions. The bigger boxset, aimed at the completist, also includes live material plus more earlier takes with lyrics later deleted.
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Boxset producers Jeff Rosen and Steve Berkowitz spread the multiple versions of songs such as Lovesick and Not Dark Yet across the discs. “Fragments is about the process, the journey the songs travelled on their way to becoming the finished album. In order not to repeat the same songs over and over, we realised that presenting the songs on separate discs would be the optimal way to appreciate them.” They have a point: the more random approach allows each version to stand on its merits.
The original album has its own fascinating history. Dylan and his producer Daniel Lanois clashed over the sound. Dylan wanted to echo early earthy blues; Lanois heard it differently. They compromised and Time Out of Mind won the Grammy for album of the year. But Dylan was not happy; he has self-produced since then, and it is no surprise that the Lanois influence is less evident on the remixed album, though it remains a singular work: defiant, intriguing, moving – a man confronting life’s vicissitudes in a manner only Bob Dylan can.
