Fragments Preview (Part Two): What Does 'Bootleg Series' Mean Anyway?
The Pre-Release Series
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When The Great White Wonder (the first bootleg) was released it was a ragtag dump of unauthorized studio outtakes and live tracks. And that’s largely what bootlegs recording have remained even as hundreds of thousands of releases became available.
It’s also pretty much what the Dylan camp was doing on the The Bootleg Series Vol 1-3 box when they playfully stole the name ‘bootleg’ back — even if their ‘ragtag’ collections happened to be magnificent and sourced (mostly) from master tapes. The next eight releases of The Bootleg Series continued in this model, with outtakes as well as previously unreleased live performances.
But at Vol. 10 - Another Self Portrait, The Bootleg Series evolved. They refined and extended beyond this simple model, using some (but not all) of the volumes in the series to ‘re-examine or re-imagine’ albums or periods. They were now not just supplementing or surrounding an old record with bonus tracks but instead they were…