Guilty of discarding some of his best work: Bob Dylan

When Bob Dylan makes his only UK appearance this weekend at the Hop Farm Festival, it is anyone’s guess which songs he will and won’t pull out of the bag. With any prolific writer, there is much that slips between the cracks.
In Dylan’s case, the periods when the songs flowed free and easy (notably 1961-67 and 1974-83) produced far more songs than his record label could comfortably accommodate on their annual album release. But he has also been guilty of discarding some of his best work because he felt it “wasn’t recorded right” (his own description of the immaculate Blind Willie McTell).
These songs have not been completely lost to posterity because they still exist in manuscripts, studio logs, out-takes, rehearsal track listings, session musicians’ memories or, in some cases, because they have been performed in concert.
Here, then, is just a sampling of some of the songs that got lost in the shuffle, plucked from some 610 song histories in my recently completed two-volume study of Dylan’s remarkable output.