Initially I decided to break from my normal rule (loosely enforced, as I am policeman, judge and jury as well as offender) of listening to the original album. My copy is the five-disc vinyl release from 1985, but it would be another three years before I lived again in the same house as my turntable. So my experience of Biograph was almost completely mediated by a TDK SA C90 cassette onto which I recorded the songs that met three criteria: (a) previously unreleased (in any version), or (b) released on an album I didn't have at the time, and (c) neither annoying nor boring.
I still have the cassette, and it's that I listened to first. The tracklisting was/is:
- Lay Lady Lay
- If Not For You
- I'll Keep it with Mine
- Lay Down Your Weary Tune
- Every Grain of Sand
- Abandoned Love
- Carribean Wind
- Heart of Mine
- Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?
- Up to Me
- Positively 4th Street
That tape (along with the Sanyo C3 radio cassette I played it on, which still serves us in the kitchen) was a good friend to me. It was Up to Me that I fell in love with first; those very clever lines about it being a Revelation when you betrayed me with you kiss, and the "old time melody" that "no one else could play" but "I blew it for you free". In the long run, though, Every Grain of Sand was my banker, in the days when a banker was someone you could rely on.
It kept me going through my revision for my finals in May '86. Day after day of staring at the same old notes. I just couldn't focus. I set myself a very low target to try and avoid disappointing myself: four hours work a day. And still I failed to meet it. I would return to my room from the college library after little more than an hour, maybe open the door onto Buckingham Court if the weather was good, fire up a John Player Red, and wind the tape to part way through Lay Down Your Weary Tune, then let Every Grain of Sand play right through. If you're stressed about something — like exams, or career — Every Grain of Sand reminds you just how much, and how little, your life and its worries count for. A bit like what I said about John Wesley Harding, but different.
If I was feeling lazy, I'd light another and let the tape run on to Abandoned Love. I love(d) the sound of the snare on that track, how it's up front in the mix. "I've been deceived by the fool inside of me / I thought that he was righteous, but he's vain."
Remembering all that was a fun way to spend last Sunday morning, with a latte on the go — no John Player Red.
Then I checked the full tracklisting and listened to much of it on We7. I was mostly curious to hear the tracks I'd left off that tape. Percy's Song: long and repetitive and the justification, a traffic accident in bad weather, is hardly up there with Hattie Carroll, Hurricane Carter or even Davey Moore. Mixed-Up Confusion: just fooling around; not what the earnest student wanted. Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar: bluesy rock; I could never appreciate that stuff until much later, and then only under specific conditions. Solid Rock: not sure why that was left off, as I like it, and included it on a companion Dylan tape that I made just a few months later.
As with the subsequent first instalment of the Bootleg Series, I first heard most of these songs in your room from your collection when bootlegs were still bootlegs.
 MusicBrainz entry for disc 1, disc 2, disc 3Wikipedia entry for this album Rate Your Music entry for this album Listen to bits of disc 1 at Last.fm, disc 2, disc 3 Listen to this album in full at We7 |
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