Dylan’s credentials as a roots artist are reconfirmed with an unsurprisingly solid cover of Robert Johnson’s “32-20 Blues” (a leftover from the 1993 trad-folk labor-of-love World Gone Wrong) and “The Lonesome River,” a collaboration-cum-tribute to bluegrass elder statesman Ralph Stanley that shows his reverence for the great American rural songbook.
Tribute albums and soundtracks, in fact, have been consistent and relatively unheralded venues for Dylan's experimentation pretty steadily since the early 1990s. That vein of his career (one that yielded him an out-of-left-field Oscar for 1999's “Things Have Changed”) is here represented with outtakes for the beautiful “Huck’s Tune” (you might have missed this—it was on the Lucky You soundtrack) and the countrified “Tell Ol’ Bill” (from the sexual-harassment-in-the-iron-range Charlize Theron vehicle North Country). Columbia could have released a pretty entertaining—and much more cohesive—“Bootleg Series” CD with 20 years of tribute and soundtrack work alone, saving the fans the trouble of tracking down a CD of the Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood soundtrack for the one Dylan track.
The two studio tracks that don't come from any of the official album sessions are the most surprising of the whole set and the only ones that fully justify the “rarities” tag in the title. In 1992, Dylan recorded a few songs produced by guitarist David Bromberg for an aborted album. These “Bromberg Sessions” have circulated among the fans in dubious sound quality and would have all been welcome on this set—especially their cover of Bromberg’s Washington Irving-inspired “Catskills Serenade.” The compilers instead decided to whet the fans appetite with only one track, a gorgeous version of Jimmy Rogers’ “Miss the Mississippi and You,” one of the very few moments on Tell-Tale Signs underscored by Dylan’s famous harmonica.
Hands down the strangest track (even the liner notes admit it) is the obsessed “Can't Escape From You” from 2005, which is almost a doo-wop sketch. Dylan had previously played with the genre in “Seven Deadly Sins” (from the second Traveling Wilburys album), but that had been a jokey pastiche. Here, he revisits the melody of his 1981 folk gospel gem “Every Grain of Sand,” experimenting with form and arrangement, unafraid to attempt odd, repetitive figures and unleash his most gravelly voice. By the time Modern Times was unveiled the following year, the performances were much more restrained, polished and familiar, firmly under the spell of the professional sounds of his childhood, from Muddy Waters to Bing Crosby. The contrast with the sketchiness of the earlier track is what makes “Can’t Escape From You” so haunting and special, the only track here with a mystique comparable to the recently released “I'm Not There” from 1967.
Field recordings
A few years ago, for a short while, live recordings from the Dylan vault were quietly “released” as free streams on bobdylan.com, cutely dubbed “Field Recordings.” Tell-Tale Signs offers just a few samples from the massive collection of soundboard and fan recordings from Dylan’s so-called “Never Ending Tour.”
