Expecting Rain

There are not reproductions of handwritten lyrics in the book.

The line in "High Water (For Charley Patton)" is now corrected to "throw your panties overboard."

For that matter, "The air is thick and heavy / All along the levee" is now corrected. It had been, incorrectly, "levy" in the 2004 edition of Lyrics and on the bobdylan.com website

My copy arrived today. I've thumbed through it for less than an hour. Here are some first impressions. Massive indeed. A really pretty slab of a book with a nice dust cover and some heft to it. You open it up to the magical words and the iconic album covers. The graphic design is elegant and simple. The book is the size of a vinyl LP and almost three inches thick. The structure of the book is similar to previous Dylan lyric collections. Songs are listed by the albums they were on or associated with and the "chapters" are divided, this time, by full sized reproductions (front and back) of the LP covers. The color album cover reproductions are on heavy paper and the printing is okay. Paper is thick, the lyric's typeface is readable in good light. There are no non-album drawings by Zimmy, no typed or handwritten lyric reproductions in this book. There's an index of songs by title and first lines. Most of the annotations are just lyric variants from released albums. In my brief perusal, the only lyrics that I found from a possibly unreleased recording were in an alternate version of Down Along The Cove. There are very few annotations pointing out anything else interesting. Based on other annotated lyric and literary works I own (Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice and David Dodd's The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, for example) I had expected a song like Desolation Row to have annotations for its literary references and the characters in the song, for a mention of John Wesley Hardin vs. Dylan's Harding, for some context to be provided for historic songs like Oxford Town and Hurricane, etc. There's none of that. I checked out a few of the lyrics that I've seen quoted wrong elsewhere. Found some mistakes like "The Jacks and the River Queen" instead of "The Jackson River Queen" in the Down Along the Cove variant. "If I had a thousand tongues I couldn't count them all" instead of the correct "If I had a thousand tongues I could have held them all" from Narrow Way. Some problems in previous collections are fixed. This one has the complete lyrics for She's Your Lover Now and fixes "the head face down in a grave" line in Foot of Pride, for example. I think that overall it's disappointing as a reference book, but nice as something to throw on the coffee table. I'm a book collector so I'm glad I now have the First Edition but I wish I had waited for a cheaper, more compact version that I'd actually be able to easily pull off the shelf and check out a lyric without getting carpal tunnel syndrome.

Kind of what I had grown to expect, unfortunately; I don't need a slab of a coffee-table book, though I would have liked a book that included numerous lyrical variations (including live concerts) and informative annotations.

Disappointing, ultimately.

Not for me.

High time you dusted that coffee table, young man.

On balance I'd agree with you. But when I think back to my youth I longed for nothing and was satisfied with a reprint paperback Writings + Drawings that fell apart after three long train journeys;)

The alternate Down Along The Cove is in Lyrics 1962-2001 as well. He sang the lyrics like that in the mid-'00s.
What about the Blood On The Tracks songs?



"Count" is correct. It's one of several quotes from The Iliad used on Tempest.
Complete annotations would necessarily have included tracing all the quotations used on his albums back to their original sources, but I guess that's just not going to happen.

A few folk over at Steve Hoffman say they are cancelling their orders due to the poor feedback on this tome.

Good for those who want it.

Not really sure what the poor feedback is.

I was going over it last night and really enjoying it. They set for themselves the intent of providing alternate lyrics for recordings that have been officially released (e.g. Bootleg Series), but even then, there are some important alternates that make it in that I do not think have been officially released. For example, the alternate versions of the Infidels songs (Jokerman, Carribean Wind, and so forth), which I do not think have been officially released, are represented in the book.

Overall, the book is finally providing a text of lyrics as sung on official recordings, including variations. I do not understand what the disappointment would be. If Paul Williams was alive, I am sure he would be very happy to finally have such a collection.

By the way, it is simply not a good coffee table book, as some have half-joked here. It is too big. It falls more in the category of large reference work, something akin to an unabridged dictionary or the Yale Shakespeare.

Can't you use your ears and Google and just save the cash?

If they did a live recordings version that might be interesting, particularly around the late 80s early 90s.

I've spent so much on Dylan this year I'm holding off on this. But I'd like to see how they lay the songs out on the page. I've seen one example, and they let the line go out as long as it needed to. These songs should eat up the page like they devour the air.

You can, but I might not want to.

Is it because you are German?

Yes. I don't understand a word he's saying.

It's funner that way.

Take that song "Tangoed Up Igloo", for example. Best song about a ballroom dancing Eskimo ever.

Yea.... I still love that whirlpool of lies, too.

Well why let truth obscure the facts? Bob never has.

True that.

Complaints about the missing slip-case have been posted to Amazon.com

I'm following it as the Case Of The Missing Bob Dylan Slip-Case http://njnnetwork.com/2014/10/case-of-t ... slip-case/

Funny but not so funny.

Hmmmmm, I too was expecting a slipcase, a book at that price should have the protection of a case at the very least.

Complain to Amazon.com, Sony and Simon and Schuster

Basically they used false advertising to pitch the book.

Blame it on a simple missed of case.

You can view the layout of the book here:

http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/1476797 ... 1476797706

Looks a bit spartan eh?

I was wondering when you'd provide proof of your self-professed German aptitude;)

You are right, Hoss, he didn't even bother to write enough lyrics to fill the book, how rude!