Apologies for the long chasm of time between posts. Family and fun can be distracting and babies are cuter than blogs.

Upon my return from the suburban wilderness of New England today, I treated my inner Dylan geek and saw Todd Haynes’ new biopic-al collage film, I’m Not There. For all the disparate strands that were woven into it, the film was surprisingly cohesive and pleasure for this Lumberjack to endure.

I’m not going to lie, however. When I first saw this clip of David Cross playing Allen Ginsberg, my expectations for the film were significantly lowered:

But within the whole, it all turned out quite nicely:

And now for the story behind the unearthing of the version of the title song complete with the Band’s backing:

The Bob Dylan song “I’m Not There” is one of the darkest songs from the 1975 “Basement Tape” sessions. The title track of the Todd Haynes film has been a holy grail among Dylan bootleggers, which was previously unavailable on any official release.

That is until the Haynes camp got the song back from Neil Young.

“We wanted to get it remastered for the film and Jeff (Rosen, Dylan’s representative) said, ‘Use the bootleg, it’s better than anything’,” Haynes said over a recent dinner in Chicago. “Randy (Poster, the film’s music supervisor, also music supervisor for Wes Anderson’s “The Darjeeling Limited”) went on a hunt to find out where the real ‘Basement Tapes’ are. One would think they would be owned by Dylan. It sounds like (the Band’s) Garth Hudson owns the ‘Basement Tapes’ recordings.”

While Dylan was on hiatus from his 1966 motorcycle accident near his home in Woodstock, N.Y., his manager Albert Grossman wanted other artists to cover Dylan’s songs to bring in publishing royalties. Haynes learned that roughly 30 “Basement Tape” songs were re-recorded with the Band and handed over to Elliot Mazer, who had worked with Grossman and who produced Young’s earliest records. Manfred Mann’s 1968 hit version of Dylan’s “Mighty Quinn (Quinn the Eskimo)” also came out of this effort.

“A few years later Neil Young asked Elliot to produce ‘Harvest’,” Haynes said. “As a present, Elliot gave Neil a copy of the 30-song batch. But he got the boxes mixed up. So all this time Neil Young has had the [Band’s] 30 batch.”

And the song itself:

Bob Dylan - I’m Not There (buy)

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