Great White Wonder | |
---|---|
Compilation album (bootleg)by | |
Released | July 1969 |
Recorded | 1961–1969 |
Venue | Various locations |
Genre | |
Label | Trademark of Quality |
Great White Wonder, or GWW, is a rock bootleg album, released in July 1969, containing unofficially released recordings by Bob Dylan. It is the first notable rock bootleg, and specifically the first release from bootleg record label Trademark of Quality (or TMOQ). Seven of the twenty-four tracks presented here were recorded with The Band in the summer of 1967 in West Saugerties, New York, during the informal sessions that were later released in a more complete form in Dylan's 1975 album The Basement Tapes . Much of the other material consists of a recording (of ten tracks) made in December 1961 in a Minnesota hotel room (referred to as the "Minnesota hotel tape"), studio outtakes from several of Dylan's albums, and a live performance on The Johnny Cash Show . It was the first time that these previously unreleased recordings came to the market; many more would be released in similar formats over the coming years, though most were single albums, not double albums like this record.
The album was nicknamed the "great white wonder" due to the original pressing's plain white gatefold cover; newer pressings contain the name stamped on. This name—or variations, such as "white wonder", [1] "little white wonder"—would surface in later bootleg releases or in the initials "G.W.W." that were printed on record labels or covers.
Released by the infant Trademark of Quality label, created by two Los Angeles-based men, Ken and Dub, Great White Wonder was compiled from multiple sources: an informal ninety-minute tape that Dylan recorded in the apartment of Bonnie Beecher in Minneapolis in December 1961, a radio broadcast in 1962, studio outtakes, the famous Basement Tapes sessions and a TV appearance. It was the seven "basement-tape" cuts that aroused the greatest interest.
"The west coast radio stations were first to pick up on Great White Wonder. Five radio stations—KCSB-FM in Santa Barbara, KNAC in Long Beach, KRLA in Pasadena [1] and KMET-FM and KPPC-FM in Los Angeles—immediately began playing the album. KRLA was the first. Unconcerned with legal niceties, these LA radio stations were quite willing to fuel demand for both Great White Wonder and the spate of bootlegs that soon followed its metal-stamped heels." [2]
Said Dub, quoted in Clinton Heylin's Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry, "Great White Wonder was just this phenomenon. All of a sudden we just started having fistfuls of money. We didn't realize what we had gotten into." The success of this first bootleg may have prompted others to create illicit albums as well, including The Beatles' Kum Back , released later in 1969, and copies of the original album, released by different labels. However, each time the content was copied, there was a reduction in sound quality. [3]
Originally, the cover was a simple white sleeve, until the nickname "Great White Wonder" began to take effect. Later 1970s pressings included a poorly hand-stamped title, or a picture of Dylan playing at the Isle of Wight Festival. Others gave the false artist name "Dupre and his Miracle Sound" (cf. genuine group Simon Dupree and the Big Sound), along with false track titles. [3]
The Great White Wonder sparked a fake bootleg recording that began as a gag by editors at Rolling Stone magazine. The album, The Masked Marauders , was supposedly recorded during a jam session between Dylan, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. [4] A review of the non-existent album ran in Rolling Stone on October 18, 1969. [5] The write-up sparked enough inquiries from readers that a band was hired to record first some singles, then a full album. [6] Released in November 1969 by a Warner Bros. subsidiary created for the stunt, The Masked Marauders topped 100,000 in sales. The album and singles were later re-issued by Rhino Records as a limited edition CD, The Masked Marauders – The Complete Deity Recordings. [7]
Track listing as per original July 1969 release. All tracks written by Bob Dylan, except when noted.
In 1970, TMQ released another version of Great White Wonder, entitled Great White Wonder II. Many of the tracks were lifted from the Stealin' and John Birch Society Blues bootlegs, and seven more tracks from the "Basement Tapes" were featured. However, each track was pressed from a unique source tape, not copied directly from the original LP. This resulted in a rather high-quality release, in terms of sound. [8]
All songs written by Bob Dylan, except when noted.
Highway 61 Revisited is the sixth studio album by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on August 30, 1965, by Columbia Records. Dylan continued the musical approach of his previous album Bringing It All Back Home (1965), using rock musicians as his backing band on every track of the album in a further departure from his primarily acoustic folk sound, except for the closing track, the 11-minute ballad "Desolation Row". Critics have focused on the innovative way Dylan combined driving, blues-based music with the subtlety of poetry to create songs that captured the political and cultural climate of contemporary America. Author Michael Gray argued that, in an important sense, the 1960s "started" with this album.
Music from Big Pink is the debut studio album by Canadian-American rock band the Band. Released on July 1, 1968, by Capitol Records, it employs a distinctive blend of country, rock, folk, classical, R&B, blues, and soul. The album's title refers to a house in West Saugerties, New York called "Big Pink", which was shared by bassist/singer Rick Danko, pianist/singer Richard Manuel and organist Garth Hudson and in which the album's music was partly composed. The album itself was recorded in studios in New York and Los Angeles in 1968, and followed the band's stint backing of Bob Dylan on his 1966 tour and time spent together in upstate New York recording material that was officially released in 1975 as The Basement Tapes, also with Dylan. The cover artwork is a painting by Dylan.
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is the second studio album by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on May 27, 1963, by Columbia Records. Whereas his self-titled debut album Bob Dylan had contained only two original songs, this album represented the beginning of Dylan's writing contemporary lyrics to traditional melodies. Eleven of the thirteen songs on the album are Dylan's original compositions. It opens with "Blowin' in the Wind", which became an anthem of the 1960s, and an international hit for folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary soon after the release of the album. The album featured several other songs which came to be regarded as among Dylan's best compositions and classics of the 1960s folk scene: "Girl from the North Country", "Masters of War", "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right".
Bob Dylan is the debut studio album by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on March 19, 1962, by Columbia Records. The album was produced by Columbia talent scout John H. Hammond, who had earlier signed Dylan to the label, a controversial decision at the time. The album primarily features folk standards but also includes two original compositions, "Talkin' New York" and "Song to Woody". The latter was an ode to Woody Guthrie, a significant influence in Dylan's early career.
A bootleg recording is an audio or video recording of a performance not officially released by the artist or under other legal authority. Making and distributing such recordings is known as bootlegging. Recordings may be copied and traded among fans without financial exchange, but some bootleggers have sold recordings for profit, sometimes by adding professional-quality sound engineering and packaging to the raw material. Bootlegs usually consist of unreleased studio recordings, live performances or interviews without the quality control of official releases.
The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 is a box set by Bob Dylan issued on Columbia Records. It is the first installment in Dylan's Bootleg Series, comprising material spanning the first three decades of his career, from 1961 to 1989. It has been certified with a gold record by the RIAA as of August 1997, and peaked at No. 49 on the Billboard 200 and No. 32 in the UK.
Live at The Gaslight 1962 is a live album including ten songs from early Bob Dylan performances recorded in October 1962 at The Gaslight Cafe in New York City's Greenwich Village. Released in 2005 by Columbia Records, it was originally distributed through an exclusive 18-month deal with Starbucks, after which it was released to the general retail market. The album release coincided with the release of the documentary No Direction Home: Bob Dylan.
"Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)" is a folk-rock song written and first recorded by Bob Dylan in 1967 during the Basement Tapes sessions. The song's first release was in January 1968 as "Mighty Quinn" in a version by the British band Manfred Mann, which became a great success. It has been recorded by a number of performers, often under the "Mighty Quinn" title.
Big Pink is a house in West Saugerties, New York, which was the location where Bob Dylan and the Band recorded The Basement Tapes, and the Band wrote their album Music from Big Pink.
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter. Often considered to be one of the greatest songwriters, Dylan has been a major figure in popular culture over his 60-year career. He rose to prominence in the 1960s, when songs such as "The Times They Are a-Changin'" (1964) became anthems for the civil rights and antiwar movements. Initially modeling his style on Woody Guthrie's folk songs, Robert Johnson's blues and what he called the "architectural forms" of Hank Williams's country songs, Dylan added increasingly sophisticated lyrical techniques to the folk music of the early 1960s, infusing it "with the intellectualism of classic literature and poetry". His lyrics incorporated political, social and philosophical influences, defying pop music conventions and appealing to the burgeoning counterculture.
The Masked Marauders is a record album released on the Warner Bros./Reprise/Deity label in the fall of 1969 that was part of an elaborate hoax concocted by Rolling Stone magazine.
The Basement Tapes is the sixteenth album by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan and his second with the Band. It was released on June 26, 1975, by Columbia Records. Two-thirds of the album's 24 tracks feature Dylan on lead vocals backed by the Band, and were recorded in 1967, eight years before the album's release, in the lapse between the release of Blonde on Blonde and the subsequent recording and release of John Wesley Harding, during sessions that began at Dylan's house in Woodstock, New York, then moved to the basement of Big Pink. While most of these had appeared on bootleg albums, The Basement Tapes marked their first official release. The remaining eight songs, all previously unavailable, feature the Band without Dylan and were recorded between 1967 and 1975.
"Down in the Flood" is a song by Bob Dylan, originally recorded by Dylan in 1967 with the Band, and copyrighted that autumn. On some albums, it is listed as "Crash on the Levee", an alternate title. One of the 1967 recordings was released on the 1975 album The Basement Tapes and re-released in 2014 on The Bootleg Series Vol. 11: The Basement Tapes Complete, along with a preceding take.
"Big River" is a song written and originally recorded by Johnny Cash. Released as a single by Sun Records in 1958, it went as high as #4 on the Billboard country music charts and stayed on the charts for 14 weeks. The song tells a story of the chase of a lost love along the course of Mississippi River from Saint Paul, Minnesota to New Orleans, Louisiana.
Bob Dylan bootleg recordings are unreleased performances by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, that have been circulated throughout the public without undergoing an official, sanctioned release. It is commonly misconceived that bootlegs are only restricted to audio, but bootleg video performances, such as Dylan's 1966 film Eat the Document, which remains officially unreleased, are considered to be bootlegs. Dylan is generally considered to be the most bootlegged artist in rock history, rivaled only by the Grateful Dead.
"Santa-Fe" is a song that was recorded by Bob Dylan and the Band in the summer or fall of 1967 in West Saugerties, New York. It was recorded during the sessions that would in 1975 be released on The Basement Tapes but was not included on that album. These sessions took place in three phases throughout the year, at a trio of houses, and "Santa-Fe" was likely put on tape in the second of these, at a home of some of the Band members, known as Big Pink. The composition, which has been characterized as a "nonsense" song, was copyrighted in 1973 with lyrics that differ noticeably from those on the recording itself.
Bob Dylan is an American musician, singer-songwriter, music producer, artist, and writer. He has been an influential figure in popular music and culture for more than five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly reluctant figurehead of social unrest.
The Bootleg Series Vol. 11: The Basement Tapes Complete is a compilation album of unreleased home recordings made in 1967 by Bob Dylan and the group of musicians that would become the Band, released on November 3, 2014 on Legacy Records. It is the ninth installment of the Bob Dylan Bootleg Series, available as a six-disc complete set, and as a separate set of highlights – in a two-disc format common to the rest of the series – entitled The Basement Tapes Raw.