Bob Dylan

As anyone who has ever been to a Bob Dylan concert knows, Dylan rarely performs a song the same way twice and is a firm believer that the object of performing a song shouldn't be to make it sound as close as possible to the recorded version but to breathe new life into it every time - adapting it to suit the venue, the audience, his band, his mood etc.

He was just as restless a performer when he was in the recording studio. The latest installment of the bootleg series gathers together alternative versions of tracks recorded in 1965 and 1966 for what many consider his creative peak, the albums 'Bringing it all Back Home', 'Highway 61 Revisited' and 'Blonde on Blonde', and it makes for a fascinating listen.

During this period he hardly did any overdubs and pretty much everything was recorded as a live performance. He was constantly trying out different ideas - different phrasings, different combinations of instruments etc. so what ended up on the albums and by default became the 'definitive version' owed as much to chance as anything and a song as strong as 'She's Your Lover Now' didn't make it on to 'Blonde on Blonde' simply because Dylan and his band never made it to the end of the song on any of the takes and eventually gave up and moved on to the next one.