Is Bob Dylan's latest album the craziest box set ever?

By Allan Campbell | 28 September 2015

In another edition of our occasional series examining some of the odder stories from the arts world, BBC Arts turns its attention to a mind-boggling new box set from 74-year-old songwriter Bob Dylan.

Bob Dylan’s recording career has never followed a predictable path. In the Sixties, he was the most bootlegged artist of his generation. Some songs he’d never released himself even ended up as hits for other artists.

But his latest release, The Cutting Edge 1965-1966: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 12, has been met by fans with both excitement and bewilderment.

This 379-track collection sprawls across 18 CDs, nine mono 45 RPM singles and includes, it is claimed, absolutely everything Dylan recorded in the two-year period when he released Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, some of his greatest albums.

But here’s the catch: when the box set appears - in the US only - it will be as a limited edition of only 5,000 copies selling at around £400. Everyone else will have to make do with the pared-down 6-CD version.

Now, giant CD box sets aren’t unusual; Charles Aznavour recently issued a career-spanning 60-CD set, while King Crimson has released a 27-disc live set. But why should Sony, Dylan’s label, make his new 18-CD set so limited? Well, they do have some history with this.

In 2012, Sony released a 4-CD box set of previously unreleased Dylan material, The 50th Anniversary Collection, limited to just 100 copies, which were only available in a handful of selected outlets in Europe.

So what gives? The answer lies in the alternative title to this collection: The Copyright Extension Collection, Vol 1. Put simply (and this is a complex area) if Sony had not made this material commercially available before the end of 2012 within Europe, they would have lost the copyright on the recordings within that territory.

"This isn't a scheme to make money," a Sony Music representative told Rolling Stone at the time, referring to this as a ‘use it or lose it provision’ and adding: "The whole point of copyrighting this stuff is that we intend to do something with it at some point in the future."

So, therein lies hope for Dylan fans who may not be able to buy the complete, limited edition Cutting Edge collection, as it will almost certainly all become available sometime later.

And for those who can’t wait to hear every detail of Dylan’s evolution from folkie to mercurial electric rocker, the set will likely be bootlegged. And it does promise to be mind-boggling; one CD alone is devoted entirely to the development of just one of his finest songs - Like A Rolling Stone.