Bob en Espanol

Oh, how I do love technology. I wrote earlier about the release of the newest installment in Bob Dylan's "The Bootleg Series," a collection of more recent outtakes, unreleased songs, and live tracks. And here I am in Guatemala of all places, listening to it streaming from Rhapsody. (This isn't supposed to work, by the way. Rhapsody is supposed to just be limited to use in the U.S.--as are a lot of other online services. But when I fire up my laptop, Rhapsody logs right in, so I get to listen to Bob).

First reactions. The track "Girl From the Red River Shore" is amazing, I don't know how this track was left off Time Out of Mind. By now, it's become a cliche to say that Dylan's rejected tracks would be someone else's greatest hits, but I think that this rejected track would have been one of Dylan's greatest hits. "Born in Time" is a good corrective to the only other version of this song that had been released (I think), a pretty tepid cover by Eric Clapton on his Pilgrim album. The alternate take of "Ain't Talking" (from his most recent studio album, Modern Times) has a better groove, I think, than the album version. I also like "Ring Them Bells" from Dylan's 1993 gig at the Supper Club in NYC. Can some kind soul send me the mp3 of "Tight Connection to My Heart" from this gig? The studio version of that song (from Empire Burlesque) has terrible production, but this live version that I used to have on my computer was great. Needless to say, a live version of "Tight Connection" isn't on this new release, but there's a lot of other great stuff to make up for it. There may be a proper review of this album forthcoming from me. But for now, you'll just have to content yourself with watching the video for "Tight Connection to My Heart." I wasn't kidding about the terrible production choices on this song, but I also think you can hear that it's a good song underneath all of the unfortunate drum sounds and back-up singing. The video is incredibly hilarious, I have no idea whether it's a joke or not. After all, it was the 1980s . . .