Fragments - Time Out Of Mind Sessions (1996-1997): The Bootleg Series Vol. 17

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The playbacks were a disaster, musicians crashing audibly into one another as they struggled to adapt.

Critics even suggested it might be the final great Bob Dylan album – it wasn’t of course, but, as it turned out, Time Out of Mind, was the last album Dylan made with a producer – all his records since have been self-produced, under the pseudonym Jack Frost.The making of this album was protracted, painful, and in all ways alive, and the album’s dour countenance was largely the product of theater and shadow. The latest chapter in Columbia/Legacy's highly acclaimed Bob Dylan Bootleg Series takes a fresh look at Time Out of Mind, Dylan's mid-career masterpiece, celebrating the album and its enduring impact 25 years after its original release on September 30, 1997. This was Dylan clearly facing a crisis of sickness and aging with Lanois' murky production adding to the gloom.

Disc 5 ("bonus") disc has already attracted a lot of flack, as all of it has been previously released on an earlier bootleg series set.The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. They decamped instead to Criteria Studio in Miami, a space with a hallowed history ( Aretha Franklin’s Young, Gifted and Black, the Allman Brothers’ Eat a Peach) and the ambiance of an airport security detention center.

But it was the beginning of a split between the two that would define and nearly overwhelm the sessions. You could speed his songs up, slow them down, throw rock drums behind them or do any old thing, and the songs would remain, somehow, themselves: “Desolation Row” remains recognizably “Desolation Row” on take 5 and Take 13. That’s one for Dylanologists and diehard fans to debate long into the small hours of one too many mornings but it certainly lets you hear and appreciate the songs and the instrumentation in a whole new light – just listen to the drums on the new mix of ‘Standing in the Doorway’, the organ on ‘Tryin’ to Get to Heaven’ and the dirty blues of ‘Cold Irons Bound’, which will rattle your bones even more than the original.

But although you get a tantalizing glimpse of its potential, the view is blocked by a marching-band triplet fill on the drums and some Hornsby-esque piano trills.