Fri, Dec 19, 2008:
I'm surprised that in all the coverage on the Internet about the newly
discovered Nasville Skyline session tapes that nobody (that I've found
yet) has made the connection between them and Clark Enslin's "Lost
Warehouse Tapes" episode of the early 1990s. I suspect we're starting to
see those tapes appear. I wrote an article for the CD magazine DA BOOT
in about 1995, called "The 25 Best Dylan Ablums that
Don't Exist" regarding that and other lost Dylan materials. Here's the
section on what I suspect is the source for these new Dylan quadraphonic
tapes on eBay:
11. The Lost Warehouse Tapes (1970-71)
The story of this non-album is stranger than most. It begins in
Nashville in the late '70s when thousands of reels of discarded
recording tape, the property of a former Columbia recording engineer,
was auctioned off. For a bid of only $50.00, a local couple received
three-to-four thousand reels of what they believed to be cheap blank
tape, which soon proved to be anything but blank. They purportedly
contain unreleased studio outtakes by Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Hank
Williams, Jerry Lee Lewis, Tammy Wynette, Elvis, and, surprise, Bob
Dylan.
Eventually, a man named Clark Enslin, a music-industry professional,
purchased the tapes with the intention of selling them to major labels
for official release. Before long, however, he found himself embroiled
in a protracted legal battle with Sony, who claimed that the tapes had
been stolen from the CBS archives, an accusation that Enslin, armed with
receipts and canceled checks from the previous owners, was able to
disprove.
Amid continuing legal controversy and handsome offers from major labels,
Enslin decided to start his own recording companyÑRay-Mar RecordsÑto
issue this rare archival material, which is valued at between $50
million to $200 million.
The Dylan-related reels are said to contain twenty to thirty rare studio
cuts, dating from 1962 to 1970, although the specific titles
mentioned - "Blue Moon," "Ring of Fire," "Wild Thing" (yes, the same),
"Take a Message to Mary," and several takes of "Lay, Lady, Lay" - suggest
outtakes from the era of Nashville Skyline and Self Portrait.
At one point Enslin thought that the initial offeringsÑthe Jerry Lee
Lewis and Elvis Presley discsÑmight be available as early as 1993 or
1994, but, apparently, more legal complications and slow negotiations
with the artists' representatives has delayed the process. Furthermore,
it is hard to imagine Dylan allowing the release of such rejected
material, and anyway, it may be more interesting to imagine what it
would be like to hear Dylan sing "Wild Thing" than to actually hear it.
The Lost Warehouse Tapes may be nobody's loss at all.
Bob Hudson in Grand Rapids Michigan
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