The Bootleg Series Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965–1966 is a compilation album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on Legacy Records in November 2015. The tenth installment in the ongoing Bob Dylan Bootleg Series, it comprises recordings from 1965 and 1966, mostly unreleased demos and outtakes from recording sessions for his ground-breaking albums Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde…
November sees the release of the latest, lavish archeological survey of Bob Dylan’s archive – More Blood, More Tracks – The Bootleg Series Vol. 14, devoted solely to his 1975 masterpiece, Blood On The Tracks. To celebrate this momentous event, I’m delighted to unveil this month’s free CD – Dylan: The Best Of The Bootleg Series, a unique 12-track compilation featuring a track from each instalment in the Bootleg Series and an exclusive preview of More Blood, More Tracks. I humbly think it’s one of the best CDs we’ve ever produced and I’m thrilled to finally be able to share it with you. This issue is in shops now – and you can order a copy here to be delivered to you at home.
A companion to the 2015-2016 Country Music Hall of Fame exhibit of the same name, Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats: A New Music City is a double-disc history of the moment when country met rock – or when rock met country, as the case might be. In this particular reading of country-rock history, the movement begins in 1966, when Bob Dylan headed down to Nashville to cut Blonde on Blonde with a crew of the city's renowned studio musicians. Prior to that, country could be heard in rock & roll mainly through rockabilly, a music that functions as prehistory on this collection, present through the presence of Sun veteran Johnny Cash but not much else.
A 19-CD box set? Twenty one and a half hours of music? A 72-page book? Artefacts that include a receipt for her first piano? Who said the music industry no longer had money to burn?
For anybody unfamiliar with Sandy Denny’s yearning, evocative songs, her teeteringly vulnerable vocal style and the erratic contours of a career that ended shockingly in a fall downstairs in 1978 when she was 31, this eye-watering project may seem like ludicrous indulgence.