Earlier this month, a handful of lucky Bob Dylan fans in Europe stumbled upon a new release entitled 50th Anniversary Collection 1973 in record stores scattered across the continent. The 28-track collection consists of nothing but studio outtakes from the 1973 Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid soundtrack sessions, but it’s sent the Dylan collecting community into a frenzy. Bids are surging past the $500 mark for the few copies available on Ebay — and fans are combing the shelves of European stores in the hopes of finding one.
Fiftieth-anniversary collections like this are a December annual tradition in the rock world due to a “use it or lose it” provision in European copyrights that sends all sound recordings into the public domain if they aren’t released 50 years after their creation. Over the past decade, this has caused acts like Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, and Dylan to clean large caches of live recordings and studio outtakes out of their vaults to secure their copyrights. Some acts choose to dump them onto streaming services, while others opt for limited physical releases.
Bob Dylan’s team has handled this problem in multiple ways over the years. When the copyright deadline loomed for outtakes from his first three electric albums (Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde), they assembled an 18-disc box set for die-hards along with a two-disc set of highlights for casual fans. When the deadline hit for more obscure periods of Dylan’s career, they’ve simply pressed 300 or so CDs and sent them to random European stores with no advanced notice to technically comply with the law.
The 1973 collection that just hit will be largely familiar to Dylan fans since the Pat Garrett sessions leaked several decades back. Former Old Crow Medicine Show singer/guitarist Chris “Critter” Fuqua picked up a copy of the bootleg during a family trip to London when he was in high school, which he passed along to bandmate Ketch Secor. He became enamored with the song fragment “Rock Me Mama,” which is little more than Dylan and his bandmates messing around shortly after cutting “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.”