Someone Who Has Had You On His Mind

My dive back into Bob Dylan's back catalogue took me into the triple CD release The Bootleg Series Volumes 1- 3 (Rare and Unreleased) 1961- 1991, released in January 1991. Across three CDs, presented chronologically, there are fifty eight at the time previously unreleased Dylan songs. Some are offcuts, songs abandoned partway through- in the case of Suze (The Cough Song) because he started coughing. Some are embryonic versions of songs that were finished differently (there are alternate versions of Like A Rolling Stone, The Times They Are A- Changin' and Tangled Up In Blue for example). And some are songs that for whatever reason, didn't make it onto the album that came out of the period of time that Dylan recorded them. There was always a bootleg industry around Dylan, lost and missing songs passed around on illicitly pressed vinyl and cassette. In 1991 Dylan and CBS decided they may as well have a cut of the action (previously, in 1985, with the release of the Biograph box set, eighteen then unreleased songs saw the official light of day). Of the fifty eight songs on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1- 3, forty five are session outtakes for Dylan studio albums including these two which I've been pressing play on repeatedly. 

Worried Blues is from an April 1962 session for his second album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Bob playing in the fingerpicking style he used at the time and subsequently abandoned. Worried Blues was written by Hally Wood, a singer, musician and folk musicologist, who was part of the New York folk scene of the 1950s and 60s, and who played with Pete Seeger and Leadbelly. The line 'I'm going where the climate suits my clothes' appears, a line that later on crops up in Fred Neil's Everybody's Talkin' from Midnight Cowboy. Worried Blues is a good song that just didn't make the cut for the album- it wasn't alone, there are a further twenty three songs recorded during the sessions that didn't get onto Freewheelin' also. 

Worried Blues

This is the song that jumped out at me most during my immersion into The Bootleg Series Volumes 1- 3 is this one from disc 2, a heartfelt and genuinely great 'lost' Dylan song...

Mama, You Been On My Mind

There are loads of covers of Mama, You Been On My Mind including one by Joan Baez, various live versions, another demo on piano and a 1970 version with George Harrison playing along, but this is the one, recorded in 1964 during a studio session for what became Another Side Of Bob Dylan. It was written while on tour in Europe after breaking up with Suze Rotolo, probably while on holiday in Greece after a tour of England in May. Dylan's words, five verses each ending with the title of the song, are perfectly weighed and measured, poetic and colloquial- 

'Perhaps it's the colour of the sun cut flat
And covering the crossroads I'm standing at
Or maybe it's the weather or something like that
But mama, you been on my mind'

The descending chord sequence and vocal melody are gorgeous, yearning for lost love and maybe containing an admission of responsibility for the break up. It's a truly great Dylan song.