Some of these bootleggers make some pretty bad stuff. From the online (but now offline) outtakes of Douglas Brinkley’s interview with Bob Dylan in Rolling Stone magazine, here’s Bob Dylan in an exchange about the recording of his live shows:

Are you recording all of your shows on good digital tape? Is each Bob Dylan show being recorded for posterity?

No. At a certain point we’ll take songs into the studio and we’ll do a television show. Television. [Laughs.] Like that still exists — with this band performing some kind of a repertoire of these particular songs. And they’ll be recorded properly. The other [bootleg] recordings, they aren’t recorded properly. You have no idea the stuff I deal with. Why are people compelled to think I’m just a public figure going around doing shows they think they can record what they want? You have to go deal with the people who are actually there from night to night. But most of those people aren’t there to record or to take pictures. They’re there for enjoyment reasons. They are a lot of people who are having a night out. If you’re doing something else while we’re playing [shakes head]. I say it’s like going to a Shakespeare play and taking pictures. You’re not going to feel the affect.

I had thought for a while now that Dylan had chilled out with regard to the recording of his shows. I thought he was perhaps happy on some level that all these years of touring were being documented. But, apparently not. We ought to be grateful, I guess, that he and his people don’t put more effort into stopping it, and into stopping the online sharing of the recordings. You can’t eliminate it, but you can make it a whole lot more difficult, as Van Morrison fans would be aware.

Dylan denies what had been rumored, namely that all his live shows were being put on tape. And so he instead makes a vague promise of going into a TV studio to record live versions of his songs with his current band. I don’t think anyone will be waiting with baited breath for that to actually occur, but it would be nice if it did. Of-course he did something like that with the band that included Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell, when they were filming Masked And Anonymous. There are said to be many more performances than the ones we saw in the movie, but no sign of that stuff ever being released. (Now that would make a nice DVD to package with a new album, wouldn’t it?)

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Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. (That way, when you do criticize him, you’ll be one mile away and you’ll have his shoes.) Also from the online/offline outtakes, here’s some of what Bob Dylan said about music critics and about pop music generally:

In jazz or classical music you have critics who understand the music. Like in modern jazz, I mean you’ll read reviews of, you know, Charlie Mingus or Dizzy or somebody. The critical language is not a more conventional language. It’s written for a music person to appreciate. Well pop music isn’t written like that. Pop music seems to be right down there on the bottom of the street. It’s almost worthless. The critics aren’t necessarily good writers. They don’t have to really take any type of college course in it because the songs themselves are really simple. And they have generations of musical idioms to look at. And … it’s called popular music.

But you know Bob Willis? I saw a statement from Bob Willis one time and he said that, “Each aspect of pop music reflects on the other.” And that, “Each aspect of popular music affects the other.” He said the kind of music he played, which was called Western Swing music, was only in one area of popular music. He considered himself a popular music man. Just like the Memphis Jug Band, they thought they were playing popular music. They didn’t have any skills I guess. I saw an interview once with Riley Puckett. He claimed they were playing popular music just like Bing Crosby singing it or Ella Fitzgerald or anybody. And I feel the same way. It’s popular music. You can’t break that. Some of it is stronger and harsher than others. But somebody I knew broke the pop music stereotype. That guy was Woody Guthrie. But his songs in one form or another are still popular music.

This clarifies a little what he said in his interview with Bill Flanagan about not being a “mainstream artist” and not ever fitting into the mainstream. (A lot of non-mainstream artists would be pretty happy to have two number one albums in a row.) It’s not that he considers himself somehow too good to be called a pop musician. He knows that he is one, that Bob Wills was one, and even Woody Guthrie was too on some level.

Dylan’s attitude to the critics is nothing new. In 1985 he described rock critics as “40-year-olds writing about records that are geared for people that are 10 years old.” But obviously he doesn’t think too much of pop music critics even when they’re writing about more adult kinds of popular music. It would be interesting if, one time, he named a critic or writer that he liked. On so-called “Dylanologists” generally, there’s this exchange from the online outtakes:

Does it please you or does it seem strange for somebody to be microstudying you like that?

Nooo! It’s outsiders, again. Anybody inside would know what it is that we do and what makes it tick. And you could write volumes on it. I could teach a course on it myself, on how to play this type of music. You know teaching enough young guys who want to play it. But you know, popular music. It doesn’t attract people who are in it for the right reasons. They’re not called to do it. It’s not their destiny. They weren’t born for it. …But you know even then… aren’t there thousands of books written on Shakespeare’s works? And Shakespeare too? How many do you need to read? I’ll tell you wouldn’t you rather see a Shakespeare play than read a critical analysis on him? I know I would!

(Again with the Shakespeare comparision!) The last point hard to deny, and yet, if you read the right stuff or have the right teachers, you can learn to appreciate different levels of what’s going on in a play by Shakespeare, and enjoy it all the more when you see it.

I think that Dylan just doesn’t want to get into any discussion about his own critics, or any books that have been written on his music, so he finds it more convenient to just dismiss the whole shebang. It’s understandable, actually.

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