Great White Wonder which appeared in the summer of 1969 is often regarded as the first significant bootleg album, a collection of twenty-four tracks which captured Bob Dylan two years earlier with The Band as they recorded what would later emerge as The Basement Tapes, or the fledgling folk singer almost a decade back as he hunkered down in Minneapolis in the winter of 1961 inside Bonnie Beecher’s apartment, with the assemblage rounded out by a few studio outtakes plus the odd radio or television broadcast.
Having inspired the form, the artist’s vital Bootleg Series now stretches back longer than most people’s careers, with the first three volumes of ‘rare and unreleased’ material arriving in the spring of 1991. From pivotal live documents and more basement tapes to a plethora of other offshoots and offcuts, the series has the power to recast Dylan’s catalogue and shed or add new layers to some of the mythology which has built up around his already extensive oeuvre.
As the name of the series implies, most of this music has already been circulating in some form over the years and gets cleaned up and fortified for its official release. Still one of the provisional finds from the impending Bootleg Series Vol. 18: Through the Open Window 1956-1963 is an alternate take of ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ from The Times They Are a-Changin’ sessions which Dylan undertook intermittently in New York City over the late summer and fall of 1963.
The song like Dylan’s earlier classic ‘Girl from the North Country’ draws its melody from the Yorkshire folk ballad ‘Scarborough Fair’, and particularly from the version of that ballad performed by the folk singer Martin Carthy which Dylan had learned during his first visit to England in December and January. A couple of years later Simon & Garfunkel would record their own arrangement of ‘Scarborough Fair’ inspired by Carthy’s rendition of the song, with the English artist’s publisher suing the duo and receiving a substantial monetary settlement, but Dylan in the meantime had taken the tune in another direction by turning its pungent bouquet into something stark and windswept, evocative and transient and snowy.
‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ twists the now familiar tale of heartache imbued with fond reminiscences by adding another voice to the mix. In rare epistolary form, where ‘Girl from the North Country’ traces the shape of an old love, ‘Boots’ in swashbuckling fashion renders in turn the letters sent between two vanishing lovers, flung out across a vast ocean. The folk ballad ‘Scarborough Fair’ tended to be performed in the Dorian mode, and Dylan deftly blurred modes in ‘Girl from the North Country’ while starting the song with a minor chord, with ‘Boots’ retaining some of that musical ambiguity as his bright strums and the intonation of his voice express a mixture of anticipation and anxiety, recurring disappointment mucked together with a fathoms-deep longing.
Whereas the original version of ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ from The Times They Are a-Changin’Ā sounds wistful and plaintive, this newly released alternate take feels more turbulent, with Dylan’s voice a bit rougher and even gravelly at points with the tone especially of the lover left behind more pleading and urgent. The opening to the song is also different, as Dylan first seems to pull from another tune before falling into the familiar fingerpicked melody, his guitar throughout sounding more plangent.
Here the great vocalist and interpreter Dylan drives into the stresses and strains of his song. Where ‘Girl from the North Country’ broadly carries a pattern of alternate stress, here there is a crashing emphasis halfway through every quatrain’s last line, as Dylan introduces an anapaest with the stress falling on the third syllable: ‘From the place that I’ll be landing’, ‘From across that lonesome ocean’, ‘Or from the coast of Barcelona’, etc. Those patterns of emphases are more pronounced in this alternate take as are the various half-rhymes (at best) which characterise each second and fourth line, as we juxtapose for instance ‘morning’ and ‘landing’, ‘ownin” and ‘ocean’ or ‘golden and ‘Barcelona’ whose gilded otherness seems to allow for an extra syllable.
Aside from adding audible interest to the song while further differentiating ‘Boots’ and ‘Girl from the North Country’, the effect of the turn in the last line plus all of those slant rhymes is to suggest ultimately a degree of miscommunication as through choppy waters we take a series of hard turns towards an unexpected if not untimely conclusion.
Hear how Dylan subtly shifts between the two narrative voices or how he leans into that redolent word ‘Barcelona’ now with a bit of a growl. Beyond the opening guitar pattern and Dylan’s intonation, the major musical difference between the original version of ‘Boots’ and this alternate take lies in the short harmonica solo which here separates the first part of the song from its revelatory last three verses.
The solo makes perfect sense: where the previous verses alternate between the ‘voices’ or pens of the two lovers, the one out at sea who keeps offering to send back exotic gifts or keepsakes and the homespun and homebound dreamer, the final three verses are all voiced by this now abandoned lover who receives ‘a letter on a lonesome day […] from her ship a-sailin’ / Saying I don’t know when I’ll be comin’ back again / It depends on how I’m feelin”. There is therefore a natural break in the song between those exchanged missives which are still written in a language of promise or hope and the final three despondent verses which come after the jilted lover has received his letter.
Maybe Dylan felt like the harmonica solo had been overplayed at this point, and wanted to further distinguish ‘Boots’ and ‘Girl from the North Country’. From my own perspective, I’ll take that harmonica solo every time especially where it makes for a more compelling narrative. The addition of the harmonica solo in this alternate take adds about thirty seconds to the song but its effect is more dramatic, turning ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ from a heartfelt epistolary quarrel into more of an epic sprawl, even though both versions summon in the end many of the same thoughts and feelings.
‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ is one of Dylan’s greatest love songs. He wrote it after embarking on his own epic voyage, as he left England, where he had learned ‘Scarborough Fair’, in January of 1963 and set out for Italy in a bid to reunite with his on-off girlfriend Suze Rotolo. Unbeknownst to him, Rotolo who had just spent six months studying art at the University of Perugia had already returned to the United States, but it was in Italy that he put together the first draft of the song.
Aside from ‘Scarborough Fair’, in the early 2000s the Dylan scholar Michael Gray suggested that he may also have been inspired by the popular Scottish border ballad ‘The Raggle Taggle Gypsy’ or ‘Blackjack Davey’, a song he interpreted for his 1992 album of traditionals Good as I Been to You. In his version of the song Dylan incorporates a couple of lines about ‘high heeled shoes made of Spanish leather’, with other renditions instead referring to gloves and other finery made from the same stuff.
For its own part ‘Boots’ has been performed and reinterpreted to great success by Joan Baez on her 1968 double album of Dylan covers Any Day Now, by Nanci Griffith on her Grammy-winning tribute record Other Voices, Other Rooms, where Dylan himself lent a helping hand on the harmonica, and on numerous occasions by Patti Smith who has sometimes incorporated the song as part of her live set, for instance alongside her guitarist Lenny Kaye to mark Dylan’s 77th birthday in 2018.
Another version of ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ can be found on The Bootleg Series Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos 1962-1964, a collection of the demo recordings which Dylan made for his publishers so that they might hawk his songs to other artists. That demo version of ‘Boots’ stems from April of 1963, the same month that Dylan performed the song live during a celebrated concert at Town Hall in New York City. At that point Dylan’s future as a solo artist remained uncertain in so far as his self-titled debut had not met with much success, but if the thought of writing songs for others ever flashed through his mind, the release of his second studio album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in May would set the singer on the path to stardom.
The Witmark demo of ‘Boots’ is looser, lilting and less pronounced with a preamble in which Dylan ponders the difference between ‘imposes’ and ‘supposes’. He would set down the master recording of the song on the second day of sessions for The Times They Are a-Changin’ on 7 August. An especially cherished rendition of the song was captured live at Carnegie Hall in late October, with Dylan prefacing his performance by describing it as a ‘when you can’t get what you want, you have to settle for less kind of song’ to laughter from the gathered audience. But it was not until 1988 that ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ became a regular part of Dylan’s unorthodox stage routine.
From his pen on a lovelorn trip to Italy (where Dylan completed ‘Girl from the North Country’) to a demo in a Madison Avenue publisher’s office, and from those early renditions around the time of his record’s release to its long history on stage or from the lips of other artists, still this newly released alternate take of ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ has a bite and pungency which seems to set it apart, animating the tale as it reaches out across swaggering and love-strewn seas, ultimately burnishing the song’s legacy.
Rooted in the tradition, whether borne of inspiration, personal turmoil or the careful honing of his craft, it’s one of those songs where the artist seems to get every phrase and inflection just right, from the page to his mouth and back again: the emphatic and in retrospect highly suggestive ‘landing’ at the end of the first verse, the reversal of the ‘ownin” and ‘ocean’ half-rhyme come the fourth verse, the use of ‘golden’ rather than simply ‘gold’, those glimmering stars or glittering diamonds and last but not least perhaps his most trenchant and touching couplet as he sings (more general than the direct address on the page) ‘The same thing I would want today / I would want again tomorrow’.
