He couldn’t work this close to his home and his family, which, by now, included six children and multiple grandchildren. The mighty, roaring sound that emerged spooked everyone to attention: “The hair on my arms went up,” recalled sound engineer Mark Howard.īut Dylan, predictably, wasn’t settling in. Accompanied by bassist Tony Garnier and drummer Tony Mangurian, they built the tracks on top of those primordial beginnings. Dylan and Lanois started with looping jams inspired by Charley Patton’s old 78s. The story began, appropriately enough, in a picaresque old playhouse Lanois dubbed the Teatro, filled with storybook touches-cob-webbed 16mm projectors, dusty mirror balls. But-as the new mix on Fragments underlines-his baleful pallor was stagehand’s makeup, the gushing blood just red silk scarves. Lanois accentuated the gloom and submerged the album in a damp chill of effects pedals and reverb until Dylan seemed to be speaking to us from the beyond. Dylan, ever the role player, was inhabiting a persona, slipping into a black jacket and working the character for fresh angles. The making of this album was protracted, painful, and in all ways alive, and the album’s dour countenance was largely the product of theater and shadow. What becomes abundantly clear over the course of the set’s six hours is that Time Out of Mind is primarily the story of a mood, and one ensemble’s single-minded pursuit of it. The remaining four discs-two of unreleased outtakes, one previously available, and a live set-repositions Time Out of Mind as a rebirth rather than a farewell. The series can feel overwhelming by design or aimed only at the highest-security-clearance Dylanologists, but Fragments presents us with a clear chronology: Disc One gives us the final studio album, remixed and scrubbed fresh so we can avail ourselves once more of its glorious shadows and submerge ourselves in its delicious mood. Fragments might be the first release that manages both. Typically, his Bootleg Series either subverts received knowledge ( Trouble No More, Another Self Portrait) or magnifies legends ( More Blood, More Tracks, The Cutting Edge). Like all of the stories surrounding the creation of Bob Dylan albums, this one bears traces of myth and marketing.

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