Bob Dylan - Wallflowers (1971)

Bob Dylan released his eleventh studio album, New Morning, on October 21, 1970, through Columbia Records. Considered a return to form after the controversial Self Portrait, it was moderately successful both critically and commercially, setting detractors from the former significantly at ease. 1969 and 1970 were busy years for Bob, where he recorded and released three albums in 18 months, one of them a double. He had done quite a lot of recording, and so he spent the following year of 1971 working under a far less productive rhythm, tracking the occasional song or two without an album in mind. The first example of that came in March, when with Leon Russell in the producer's chair, "Watching the River Flow" and "When I Paint My Masterpiece" were made, with the former getting released as a single in June. From there, his next spurt of activity came a few months later that August, when he performed live at George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden, his first concert in the United States in six years and one of the greatest performances of his career, as you can see in the film.

Hot from the Bangladesh performance, he made four recordings that September with folkie Happy Traum on banjo and backup vocals. They were all re-recordings of older songs of his that he never got around to releasing on an album, there of them dating back to the Basement Tapes. These recordings were meant to enhance his Greatest Hits, Vol. II compilation, one Dylan had unusually agreed to cooperate with. At year's end in November, he was reunited with Leon Russell, taping two versions of the protest song "George Jackson", and another song that would remain unreleased for the time being. As 1972 rolled around, he performed at The Band's New Year's gig at the Academy of Music, debuting "When I Paint My Masterpiece" and ending with a rousing version of "Like a Rolling Stone". It might've seemed like the beginning of a busy year, but Dylan didn't do anything at all in 1972, going further and further into semi-retirement before being brought back to play a cowboy in a movie. It marked the end of a three-year hiatus between his albums that was nearly unheard of at the time.

But what if Bob Dylan had released a new studio album in 1971? To create this missing link between New Morning and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, we will take all the songs Bob recorded throughout the year and piece them together in the best manner we possibly can. Since "George Jackson" was released in two different versions in the same single, it shows that Bob considered both of them worthwhile, meaning we can include either of them on the record. As for the others, we will use the more common studio versions of them, one of each to avoid (too much) repetition. We will also not include any outtakes from either Self Portrait or New Morning, even though an abundance of them exist out there. It would dilute too much the purpose of our reconstruction, and Dylan didn't have the habit of putting things from the vault on new records. Older songs re-recorded during these sessions are fair game, as long as they were unreleased. This record is also studio-only, so even though he performed live twice that year, nothing from those can be included. With that, here's our album:

Watching the River Flow (Greatest Hits Vol. II)

Wallflower (The Bootleg Series Vol. I-III)

Only a Hobo (Another Self Portrait)

George Jackson (Side Tracks)

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George Jackson (Side Tracks)

When I Paint My Masterpiece (Greatest Hits Vol. II)

I Shall Be Released (Greatest Hits Vol. II)

You Ain't Goin' Nowhere (Greatest Hits Vol. II)

Down in the Flood (Greatest Hits Vol. II)

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Bob Dylan - Wallflowers (1971)

Dylan and the Band performing live, December 1971.

Our choices for this album are quite simple: every single song Bob recorded in 1971. From the March sessions produced by Leon Russell, we have "When I Paint My Masterpiece" and "Watching the River Flow". From the September session with Happy Traum we have re-recordings of "Only a Hobo", "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere", "Down in the Flood" and "I Shall Be Released". And finally, from the November sessions, we have both the solo acoustic and "Big Band" versions of "George Jackson" and "Wallflower". With that, we have eight songs and nine versions, clocking in at 31 minutes. That might not seem like much, but it's already longer than Nashville Skyline, meaning it's well within the realm of possibility. We could have included some New Morning outtakes such as "Tomorrow is a Long Time", which was featured on Greatest Hits in a live version from 1963, or his cover of "Spanish is the Loving Tongue", which was the b-side to "Watching the River Flow", but the fact that we've managed to break the 30-minute barrier tells us to keep well enough alone.

Including two versions of "George Jackson" might seem like cheating on our part, but the fact that Dylan later did the same thing with "Forever Young" on Planet Waves sets a precedent that we'll be happy to indulge in, given the dearth of material available to us. When it comes to sequencing, I mostly followed the track listing to Greatest Hits Vol. II, as that's where the vast majority of the songs here were released, and shows us how Dylan might have dealt with that material, as well as giving us a nice framework from which to start. With that in mind, we also kick things off with "Watching the River Flow", and side two has the four last songs on GH2 in the very same order they were featured there, making "Down in the Flood" the album closer. The big band version of "George Jackson" closes off side one, and the acoustic version opens side two, again taking a cue from "Forever Young"'s placement on Planet Waves. With that, all we need to do is fill out the first side with "Wallflower" and Greatest Hits Vol. II outtake "Only a Hobo", which only saw release twenty years later, and our work is mostly done.

Wallflowers is a transitional album, his first not to be produced by Bob Johnston since Bringing it All Back Home and part of a move away from straight country music started on New Morning the previous year. The fact that this album features four re-recordings of older material, which weren't released in any other Dylan studio album before this one but were already widely known through other artists' recordings. For that reason, I can see contemporary critics labeling it as lazy or uninspired, which is a fair criticism, even though all four of those versions are quite good. You could even make the argument that this is a sequel to Self Portrait, only this time he's paying homage to his own past work and not other people's. It was titled after what I think is the best song on the album, a gentle country ballad that was inexplicably the only 1971 original composition Bob didn't release at the time. It would surely be interesting to see this coming out instead of Greatest Hits Vol. II, filling a pretty big hole in Bob's life where he had become reclusive and unproductive, himself a Wallflower.

Sources:

- Still on the Road: 1971 Recording Sessions

- Clinton Heylin - Revolution in the Air