May 3, 1969 (Nashville):
- Take a Message to Mary
- Blue Moon
- Folsom Prison Blues
- Ring of Fire
Personnel:
Charlie McCoy (bass)
Pete Drake (pedal steel guitar)
Fred Carter Jr. (guitar)
Robert S. Wilson (piano)
Norman Blake (guitar)
Doug Kershaw (fiddle)
Kenneth Buttrey (drums)
Charlie E. Daniels (guitar)
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March 3, 1970 (New York):
- Pretty Saro
- Little Sadie
- Dock Of The Bay
- Went To See The Gypsy
- In Search Of Little Sadie
- Belle Isle
- Universal Soldier
- Copper Kettle
- When A Fellow's Out Of A Job
- These Hands
- It Hurts Me Too
- The Boxer
- Spanish Is The Loving Tongue
- Woogie Boogie
Personnel:
Al Kooper (organ or piano)
David Bromberg (guitar)
Emanuel Green (violin)
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March 4, 1970 (New York):
- Went To See The Gypsy
- Thirsty Boots
- Tattle O-Day
- Railroad Bill
- House Carpenter
- This Evening So Soon
- Days Of '49
- Annie's Going To Sing Her Song
- Early Morning Rain
- Wigwam
- Time Passes Slowly
Personnel:
Al Kooper (guitar and keyboards)
David Bromberg (guitar)
Emanuel Green (violin)
Alvin Rogers (drums)
Stu Woods (bass)
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March 5, 1970 (New York):
- Alberta
- Alberta # 2
- Little Moses
- Alberta # 1
- Come A Little Bit Closer
- Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies
- My Previous Life
- Gotta Travel On
- Went To See The Gypsy
- Time Passes Slowly
- Come A Little Bit Closer
- All The Tired Horses
Personnel:
Al Kooper (guitar and keyboards)
Emanuel Green (violin)
Alvin Rogers (drums)
Stu Woods (bass)
David Bromberg (guitar)
Hilda Harris. Albertine Robinson, and Maeretha Stewart (vocals)
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After the basic tracks were recorded in New York City, the tapes were
flown to Nashville, Tennessee for overdubbing. These sessions took
place from March 11, 1970 through April 3, 1970.
Personnel:
Charlie McCoy (bass)
Kenneth Buttrey (drums)
Bob L. Moore (bass)
Fred Carter Jr. (electric guitar)
Charles E. Daniels (guitar)
Bubba Fowler (guitar)
Karl T. Himmel (sax, clarinet. trombone)
Ron Cornelius (guitar)
Bill Walker (leader & arranger)
Rex Peer (trombone)
William Pursell (piano)
Gene Mullins (baritone horn)
Dennis A. Good (trombone)
Frank C. Smith (trombone)
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Martha McCrory (cello)
Byron T. Bach (cello)
Gary van Osdale (viola)
Lillian V. Hunt (violin)
Sheldon Kurland (violin)
Martin Katahn (violin)
Marvin D. Chantry (violin)
Brenton B. Banks (violin)
George Binkley (violin)
Solie I. Fott (violin, viola)
Barry McDonald (violin)
Carol Montgomery (vocals)
Dolores Edgin (vocals)
June Page (vocals)
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The Story Behind the Album
One of the oddest chapters in Dylan's career was the recording and
release of the legendary album Self Portrait,
released in 1970 to almost uniformly negative reviews. Many critics and
fans thought they were on the receiving end of a massive joke, or if
not a joke then a seriously deteriorated Dylan who had finally lost all
touch with reality. Or perhaps Dylan was just out of ideas? The lead
track from the album certainly seemed to indicate that with its
repeated chorus "all the tired horses in the sun, how am I
supposed to get any riding done?", which sounded a little like
"how am I supposed to get any writing done"!
Various reasons for the seemingly poor quality of the album were given,
including the idea that all the songs were scraps left over from Nashville
Skyline and New Morning sessions (the latter
album would be released after Self Portrait, but
many of the songs on that album featured the same musicians on many of
the Self Portrait songs, so the sound would fit).
Since so many of the songs on the double album were apparently filler
(four songs from the Isle of Wight festival, different versions of some
songs on the same album, lifeless jams, etc.), the skimpy artistic
nature of the album was clearly highlighted.
And the title of this mess was Self Portrait! This
was supposed to define Bob Dylan? With its cubist self portrait on the
cover (the original cover was reported in Rolling Stone at the time to
be a picture of Bob standing in the window of an abandoned tenement
building - wonder whatever happened to that picture?), and with the
straight faced comical pictures of Dylan hanging around a barnyard with
chickens, the visual impact of the album was jarring. To hear the sound
inside was even more jarring.
What follows is a sort of insider's look into the making of this album.
Rather than taking quotes from reviews, I chose to use actual quotes
from people involved in the making of the album, or those close enough
to Dylan to know what may have been going on in his mind during this
strange period.
From Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography by Anthony
Scaduto, 1971
At the same time, Dylan had just completed another album. The reports
coming out of Columbia were too incredible: Dylan had put together an
album tentatively called Blue Moon, filled with
his interpretations of other artists' works, songs by Rodgers and Hart,
Paul Simon, Gordon Lightfoot, and a large number of the old traditional
country and folk things he had been doing back in Minnesota. Bob had
cut a couple of dozen songs in New York and had to discard many of them
because they simply didn't turn out well at all. He then went to
Nashville for some help from the country boys, but things were only
slightly better down there.
When the album was finally released in June, 1970, the most insane
rumors seemed to be true: Bob Dylan had put out a product, a
two-record set mysteriously called Self Portrait,
filled mostly with the works of others and some examples of Americana,
produced in a style that appeared to be almost Mantovani music, dreary
enough to pipe into elevators or corset shoppes. You laughed when you
first heard it - Bob Dylan trying to turn his nasal twang into a bass
baritone, in the style of Johnny Cash. It seemed to be a huge joke. Bob
Dylan as commercial popular songwriter and singer, a one-man Simon and
Garfunkel. Or, perhaps, the Dylan Brothers - his version of Simon's The
Boxer, Dylan dubbing harmony with Dylan, sounded so
lame at first hearing that it had to be a parody of Simon, except that
Dylan was spending a lot of time with Simon in New York and out on Fire
Island, and parody doesn't make sense.
...
Dylan is somewhat defensive about the Stone
interview, while sounding absolutely certain about the worth of Self
Portrait: "It's a great album," he said to
me. "There's a lot of damn good music there. People just didn't
listen at first."
notes:
The quote from Dylan indicates that he was surprised at the negative
response and felt at the time that the album was a genuine worthy
effort. The Rolling Stone review is worth seeking out. It features a
round table discussion between several prominent Rolling Stone critics
and pretty much trashes the album without mercy. [JH]
From No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan
by Robert Shelton, 1986
I told Dylan that Self Portrait confused me. Why
had he recorded "Blue Moon"? He wouldn't be drawn out,
although obviously he had been stung by the criticism. "It was an
expression," he said. He indicated that if the album had come from
Presley or The Everly Brothers, who veered toward the middle of the
road, it wouldn't have shocked so many.
notes:
Again, an indication that Dylan was serious about the nature of the
album and was disappointed at the criticism. [JH]
Roger McGuinn interview with Ed Ward in Rolling Stone, 1970
EW: Does the latest Dylan puzzle you any?
RM: Not at all. I understand it thoroughly.
EW: Really?
RM: Well, I'm more on the inside of it than most people because we were
supposed to work with Dylan at the time. I got a call from Clive Davis,
president of Columbia, saying, "How would you like to work with
Dylan?" and we'd previously discussed doing albums with other
Columbia artists and so I said, "Sure thing, let's get together.
Just tell me when and where." So I called Dylan and he wasn't
there, but he returned the call and said, "Did Clive Davis call
you about doing an album?" and I said, "Yeah, but I don't
know what we'd do. Do you have any ideas?" and he said, "No,
I haven't thought about it myself. Maybe if you come in with some of
the old stuff and I do too that'll be all right." I think he meant
some of his old stuff, so it would be all his publishing. So I said,
"Well, the only thing we could do is go into the studio and see
what happens, right?" And I asked him if he had any material to
spare and he said no, that he was kind of hard up, that he hadn't been
writing as much as he used to and I mentioned that we all get fat and
lazy and he laughed. And we wound up the conversation by saying that
we'd be in touch with each other, nothing definite.
So we got to New York and did a couple of gigs - Felt Forum and Queens
College - and that took care of the weekend. By Monday we were still in
town, but waiting for some kind of word. Finally the guys took a 12:00
plane back to the Coast. And at 1:00 I got a call from Billie
Wallington, a friend of mine at Columbia, and she said that the session
was in Studio B at 2:30. Well, I explained to her what the situation
was, and she called Dylan and he was pissed off that we didn't have the
courtesy to sit around and wait for his phone call. Well, the crux of
it all was that Clive was supposed to come down to the show the night
before but he didn't show up, and we could have settled it all right
there. The other thing was a political thing with Bob Johnston. We'd
fired him as our producer, right, and Bob Johnston, as producer, is
responsible for notifying the musicians of the time of the session
within 12 hours. It's a union regulation. He knew where we were, but he
didn't call us and Clive didn't call us. Like I say, it was political.
What I think it would have amounted to is that we would have been
backup musicians for Dylan, like the Band, on a couple of cuts on his
new album, which he never mentioned to us. He said it could be a
separate album, the Byrds and Dylan, and I asked him what kind of
billing we'd get on it and he said well, he didn't know, but Clive
assured me that we'd be getting at least 33 percent billing on it.
I would have liked to have done it, if it had worked out at all. In
view of the circumstances, I'm just as glad that we didn't get
on...this...particular...album...that came out, because it was poorly
prepared, that's my opinion. He came into the studio prepared to use a
lot of outtakes from Nashville Skyline and a lot
of the Isle of Wight stuff, which is just a remote, just a live
recording rather than anything musically good. The New York stuff,
"Wigwam" and a lot of those, are pretty good.
So I understand the album thoroughly. I understand why there are
repeats to fill time because he didn't have enough new material to do
it, why he used a lot of old folksongs that everybody's known for 10 or
12 years.
EW: Why is he claiming he wrote them?
RM: He's probably taking publishing on them as re-arrangements of
public domain material. It's a standard trick. I've done it myself. But
I usually make a few changes. "Old Blue." That's one.
notes:
The above is an insight into why the album may have turned out as
poorly as it did. If the original concept had been to have Dylan record
some traditionals with the Byrds, it would have been truly great, but
because of confusion and misdirection it never happened, and Dylan was
forced to rely on outtakes from Nashville Skyline
instead, the first indication that this is indeed what he may have
been planning in the early stages. The mystery for me is how he could
have ever thought this would result in a decent album. [JH]
Bob Dylan interview with Kurt Loder in Rolling Stone, June 1984
KL: It always seemed to me that you where sort of infallible in your
career up until Self Portrait in 1970. What's the
story behind that album?
BD: At the time, I was in Woodstock, and I was getting a great degree
of notoriety for doing nothing. Then I had that motorcycle accident,
which put me outta commission. Then, when I woke up and caught my
senses, I realized that I was workin' for all these leeches. And I
didn't wanna do that. Plus, I had a family, and I just wanted to see my
kids.
I'd also seen that I was representing all these things that I didn't
know anything about. Like I was supposed to be on acid. It was all
storm-the-embassy kind of stuff - Abbie Hoffman in the streets - and
they sorta figured me as the kingpin of all that. I said, "Wait a
minute, I'm just a musician. So my songs are about this and that. So
what?" But people need a leader. People need a leader more than a
leader needs people, really. I mean, anybody can step up and be a
leader, if he's got the people there that want one. I didn't want that,
though.
But then came the big news about Woodstock, about musicians goin' up
there, and it was like a wave of insanity breakin' loose around the
house day and night. You'd come in the house and find people there,
people comin' through the woods, at all hours of the day and night,
knockin' on your door. It was really dark and depressing. And there was
no way to respond to all this, you know? It was as if they were
suckin' your very blood out. I said, "Now wait, these people
can't be my fans. They just can't be." And they kept comin'. We
had to get out of there.
This was just about the time of that Woodstock festival, which was the
sum total of all this bullshit. And it seemed to have something to do
with me, this Woodstock Nation, and everything it represented. So we
couldn't breathe. I couldn't get any space for myself and my family,
and there was no help, nowhere. I got very resentful about the whole
thing, and we got outta there.
We moved to New York. Lookin' back, it really was a stupid thing to do.
But there was a house available on MacDougal Street, and I always
remembered that as a nice place. So I just bought this house, sight
unseen. But it wasn't the same when we got back. The Woodstock Nation
had overtaken MacDougal Street also. There'd be crowds outside my
house. And I said, "Well, fuck it. I wish these people would just
forget about me. I wanna do something they can't possibly like,
they can't relate to. They'll see it, and they'll listen, and they'll
say, "Well, let's get on to the next person. He ain't sayin' it no
more. He ain't given' us what we want", you know? They'll go on to
somebody else. But the whole idea backfired. Because the album went out
there, and the people said, "This ain't what we want," and
they got more resentful. And then I did this portrait for the cover.
I mean, there was no title for that album. I knew somebody who had
some paints and a square canvas, and I did the cover up in about five
minutes. And I said, "Well, I'm gonna call this album Self
Portrait."
KL: Which was duly interpreted by the press as: This is what he is...
BD: Yeah, exactly. And to me it was a joke.
KL: But why did you make it a double-album joke?
BD: Well, it wouldn't have held up as a single album - then it really
would've been bad, you know. I mean, if you're gonna put a lot of crap
on it, you might as well load it up!
notes:
By 1985 Dylan was in a revisionist mode and confessed something that I
had long suspected anyway: that the album was a deliberate joke.
Perhaps at the time he didn't really want to believe it, but by this
time Dylan was no longer interested in defending the album on its own
merits and was ready to admit that he put it out to test the limits of
his fans' credulity. [JH]
From Record Collector magazine, September 1992 - "In the Studio:
Al Kooper on Dylan"
RC: How did that [Blonde on Blonde sessions] compare with the sessions
for the next album you worked on with Bob, Self Portrait in
1970?
AK: I don't know what he was looking for on Self Portrait.
We'd just go in and do 'cover' songs, all day long.
RC: Wasn't it obvious to everyone that the stuff you were cutting
wasn't up to scratch?
AK: By this time we were really good friends, so his charisma had worn
off for me. He was just this guy, you know, not some superhuman. But
the other people on the session were really excited just to be there,
and so everyone approached it with the enthusiasm they would have done
if it was a new Dylan song they were doing.
notes:
So, according to Kooper they were recording the cover songs all along
and nothing here to indicate that there was any actual original
material being worked on, which is contrary to what Dylan will say
later on. More on this later. [JH]
From Record Collector magazine, September 1992 - "In the Studio:
Charlie McCoy on Dylan"
RC: The last album you did with Dylan was Self Portrait. Do
you have any idea what he was trying to create out of that strange
mixture of covers and new songs?
CM: In my estimation, Bob had already decided by that point that he
wasn't going to work with Bob Johnston any more - for what reason, I
don't know. Bob Johnston brought us a tape full of demos that Dylan had
done - just guitar or piano and vocals - and on a lot of the songs,
Kenny Buttrey and I simply overdubbed drums and bass. Dylan did do a
couple of sessions here for that album, but he wasn't here for the
whole thing, by any means.
I'm not sure, actually, that Self Portrait was a 'mutual
agreement` project. Either Dylan told Bob to just go ahead and finish
it up, by taking those demos and patching them up; or else maybe Bob
Johnston still had to come up with some more tracks to complete his
production contract with Dylan, and he just did them off his own bat.
We never knew what the deal was.
notes:
Hmmm. The mystery deepens here. McCoy claims that they were really just
overdubbing acoustic demos that Bob delivered and that he was rarely in
the studio for much of the album. This makes great sense to me, because
an awful lot of the album sounds like it may have been done in this
way. Possibly the sessions that Kooper attended were different and Bob
really played in the studio with the rest of the musicians, but I can
see where songs like "It Hurts Me Too", "Alberta",
and others may have been demos with later overdubs. [JH]
From Rolling Stone, November 26 1970 -
"The Man Who Did Self Portrait" (David Bromberg article)
"On the Self Portrait album I was sitting right across from Dylan
and I played whatever came to mind and there was hardly any
discussion. On the new one [ New Morning] there were more
musicians in the studio - Dylan had the songs pretty well worked out
beforehand. What they did was sit me in a corner where I had dobro,
mandolin, mandocello, electric guitar, acoustic guitar and nylon string
guitar. Usually I did rather than the solo things on Self
Portrait was a lot less obvious things. Most tunes were first
takes, sometimes second, because Dylan likes a spontaneous sound.
Maybe the best thing I did on the album was not to play too much."
[Bromberg describes meeting Dylan and making vague plans to record
together]
"...I didn't hear from him for about a month and then he called me up
about two o'clock one afternoon and asked me what I was doing. He said
he was going to test out these studios and would I like to come along,
and I said sure. It turned out we had to be in the studio in half an
hour and that was the beginning of the sessions for Self Portrait."
Bromberg remembers the sessions as "stream of consciousness things" -
one song after another for hours, and he was sick with a high fever. He
would work all day, go home, fall asleep and wake up in time to go back
to the studio.
"I didn't remember anything we'd done until after the album came out. It
was really a challenge, for instance, working on Little Sadie.
You can tell if you listen to it that he's improvising almost
everything he does and even he doesn't know what he's going to do next.
All I can say about him is he's a good man, I get good vibrations from
him, I like to play with him. That he's a genius, I don't question for
a minute."
Bromberg's statement that Dylan was testing out studios would
indicate that he was less interested in putting down great music
and more interested in finding a good sounding studio in which to
record his next album. Maybe Dylan didn't consider Self Portrait
to be anything more than a warm-up for his next "real" album? The
description of Dylan improvising throughout the sessions certainly rings
true when you listen to the album.
From Biograph notes, 1985
Self Portrait, Dylan explained recently, "was a bunch
of tracks that we'd done all the time I'd gone to Nashville. We did
that stuff to get a (studio) sound. To open up we'd do two or three
songs, just to get things right and then we'd go on and do what we were
going to do. And then there was a lot of other stuff that was just on
the shelf. But I was being bootlegged at the time and a lot of stuff
that was worse was appearing on bootleg records. So I just figured I'd
put all this stuff together and put it out, my own bootleg record, so
to speak. You know, if it actually had been a bootleg record, people
probably would have sneaked around to buy it and played it for each
other secretly. Also, I wasn't going to be anybody's puppet and I
figured this record would put an end to that...I was just so fed up
with all that who people thought I was nonsense."
notes:
Now Dylan was revising the story once again. He now claims that the
tracks were warmups for the real material they were going to do. As
Paul Williams asks in Performing Artist: the Early Years,
where is this material? Is there a whole bunch of unknown recordings
laying around that no one knows about? It's doubtful for several
reasons. First of all, if this material exists why hasn't it been
talked about by the musicians involved in the sessions? Second, Dylan's
typical "good stuff" from the time was pretty mediocre, so I
wouldn't hold out much hope for anything better than what we hear on Nashville
Skyline or New Morning. But this leads me to
what I've suspected all along: that Self Portrait
was a collection of warmups recorded during sessions for both of those
albums. The statements by Kooper and McCoy would seem to contradict
this, though. [JH]
So, there you have some of the background surrounding Dylan's strangest
album. If anyone has any more quotes by people involved with the
sessions, or any other material that may shed light on what went on
during the recording of this unique album, please drop me a line!
UPDATE: With the release of Another Self Portrait (volume 10 of the
Bootleg Series), this seems like a good time to re-evaluate this period. One
thing Another Self Portrait shows is that there was always the potential
for Dylan to make a great album, but he either chose not to or was thwarted by
circumstances beyond his control. Looking at the session details at the beginning
of this article, it
seems clear that the material that eventually wound up on Self Portrait
spanned from the tail end of the Nashville Skyline sessions to the very
beginning of what would become New Morning. The fact that songs from both
album sessions show up on Another Self Portrait further emphasizes the
connection. Self Portrait, therefore, was a sort of placeholder, and
perhaps it was never intended to be a "real" album. The early sessions in
Nashville were really more Nashville Skyline sessions, even though that
album had already been completed. "Living the Blues", "Take Me As I Am", "I
Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know", "Let It Be Me", "Take a Message To Mary",
and "Blue Moon" were recorded at these sessions. Those songs, along with the
ones that didn't make the final album, would have made an interesting follow-up
to Nashville Skyline. There are bootleg versions of several of these
songs without the eventual overdubs, and they sound quite nice.
However, it's likely that the feeling was that Dylan didn't need another album
just like Nashville Skyline, and so Dylan set out on a different path.
He took to New York (see the comments from David Bromberg above) and informally
recorded some demos of traditional and modern folk songs with minimal accompaniment.
These sessions, with just Bromberg and Al Kooper, in early March, make up the
best material on Another Self Portrait and show what the album could have
been. This material is so good that it's unlikely to me that Dylan intended to
do anything other than make a great album along the lines of John Wesley Harding
or the unreleased Basement Tapes, but somehow the misguided notion of sending
the unfinished demos to Bob Johnston to overdub in Nashville led to one of the
most disastrous decisions of his career (although later Dylan would try to spin
this as a deliberate attempt to alienate his fan base).
The New York sessions, with the minimal accompaniment supplied, would have made
a great single album, but for whatever reason the decision was made to also use
the Nashville songs from April and May. The two sounds did not merge well, in my
opinion, and to make matters worse it was also decided to use some of the Isle
of Wight live tracks for filler. At one time the plan was to release Isle of
Wight as a live album, but that was nixed when it was decided the quality wasn't
good enough. Instead, we get Self Portrait. Luckily, now we get the entire
Isle of Wight concert as a bonus to the 2-CD Another Self Portrait, so we
can hear it in its proper context.
So, to sort this all out, there were three different potential albums here: a
set of country standards; a set of traditional and modern folk standards; and
a live album with The Band. At the same time, toward the end of the Self
Portrait sessions, a new sound was emerging which would become New
Morning - probably released much sooner than anticipated due to the anger
unleashed at Self Portrait. I would love to someday hear all of the
Nashville and New York sessions without the massive overdubs which ruined this
great material.
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