One particularly self-aware Bobhead summed up the situation concisely: "we are just all insane..."
Nothing definite in this world
“You’re talking to somebody who doesn’t comprehend the values most people operate under,” Bob Dylan said once to an interviewer. "Greed and lust I can understand, but I can’t understand the values of definition and confinement.” The man who since his very early 20s has been at the center of an industry of self-ordained professors peddling explanations and exegeses of his words and deeds has little time for that line of work. “Definition destroys,” Dylan insisted to the probing interviewer. “Besides,” (and here comes the clincher from one of the masters of the “third line,” the implacable B in the AAB of the ancient blues) “there's nothing definite in this world.”
Especially performances. Ever since the underage Dylan signed with Columbia Records in 1961 he has periodically fulfilled his contractual obligations with studio recordings of his latest material. Again and again the singer has protested that these recordings, however cherished by several generations of nostalgic audiences, are not “the” songs but just performances of them that happened to be recorded by competent producers, to be played on the radio and purchased by his fans. They are in no way, as far as Dylan is concerned, more or less definitive than any other performance of the songs, be it by him, by another professional entertainer, or by, say, a pubful of drunks.
Dylan's conception of songs as endlessly mutable—one predating notions of folk-song scholarship and copyright law by several millennia—is key to his practice of composition and performance. Studio outtakes show him radically changing arrangements and lyrics on the fly, trying different tempos, and returning to material throughout and across specific album sessions. Once the songs are released, Dylan often continues to alter both music and lyrics according to his mood or particular circumstances.
Over the years, concertgoers have been treated to, for example, reggae versions of “Don’t Think Twice It's Alright” (1978 tour, officially available in Live at Budokan), a vicious rewrite of “Lay Lady Lay,” where the titular lady’s wooing has degenerated into “let’s go upstairs, who really cares” (1976 tour, Dylan was going through a difficult divorce at the time), and a stately, almost unrecognizable 7-minute-long “Blowin’ In the Wind” (2000 tour, officially available on a UK bonus disc with Best of, Vol. 2). The many versions of the kaleidoscopic masterpiece “Tangled Up In Blue” have ranged from the romantic view of a breakup on Blood on the Tracks (1975) and the Rolling Thunder Tour (“there was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air”), to the brilliant cynicism of the Real Live version (1984, same line: “there was snow all winter and no heat, revolution was in the air”), passing through the thoroughly bizarre 1978 version—a sax-heavy ballad featuring an exotic dancer with a Bible fetish.
It’s with this knowledge that one should approach Tell-Tale Signs, as a way to bypass the awkward situation Columbia created with the 27-track vs. 39-track versions. The 2-CD and 3-CD sets tell the same story at different lengths; regardless of what Mikal Gilmore (in Rolling Stone) or Greil Marcus (on the Barnes and Noble website) would have you believe, you’re not missing any pieces of any puzzles by not paying 130 dollars for the deluxe version, only 12 good tracks from the same vintage.
