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Dylan's 'There' found in Neil Young's Lair

Bob Dylan's recording of "I'm Not There" that appears on the soundtrack to Todd Haynes' film sounds plenty different from the version that appears on "Basement Tapes" bootlegs. Thank Neil Young's fanaticism and pack rat mentality for that.
The newly unearthed version clearly has the Band backing him as opposed to the popular bootleg version, a mostly acoustic reading by Dylan with a bit of rhythmic thumping in the background.

"It's pretty much just a sketch," Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo said in an interview for a piece on the soundtrack. "The lyric is open ended. It's hard to tell if (the words) make any sense."  Sonic Youth recorded a version of the song that runs over the end credits.
 
Soundtrack producers and Haynes were creating 5.1 mixes of songs and still using a bootleg copy of the tune when the suggestion arose that they find a better copy of the title track.
Joel Bernstein, a rock photographer who has been shooting Dylan and Young since the early '70s, was working with the team as an archivist and he suggested contacting Elliot Mazer. Mazer, who has produced a number of Young's albums, had worked with Dylan's manager in the '60s, Albert Grossman.

After Dylan's period of inactivity following his 1966 motorcycle accident, Grossman began to work on the publishing side for Dylan and started amassing a collection of tapes of songs that were not released over the next several years. Naturally, copies of the tapes were made; the Band's Garth Hudson even brought in a collection for the "I'm Not There" team to sift through.
Mazer, it turns out, had made a copy for his friend Young, who had tucked it away.
Randall Poster says his partner on the soundtrack, Jim Dunbar, "had to be Sam Spade, trying to make all these connections. What helped us get it quick was having the support of the Dylan camp."

What struck recording engineer Greg Calbi, who has worked extensively with Dylan, was the distinctiveness of the version in Young's vault.
"Every engineer who ever got a copy would put their stamp on it," Poster said, relaying Calbi's observation. "It was mutated over the years. We got the raw version."
Coincidentally, Young revisits his unreleased past with "Chrome Dreams II," which was issued last week;

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