Dylan with clutter

The Bootleg Series Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965-1966, Sony’s latest collection of archival Bob Dylan recordings, comes in three editions: the two-disc, 36-track “Best of”; the six-disc, 110-track “Deluxe”; and the 18-disc, 379-track “Limited.” The last includes every studio Dylan recording—outtakes, false starts, and banter included—from 1965 and 1966. If it seems like overkill, it is.

And if the United Kingdom hadn’t revised its copyright laws in 2013, the set’s unedited bulk might never have seen the light.

The revised laws required record companies to release recordings made before 1963 lest they slip into the public domain. So since 2012 Columbia has annually issued limited-edition “50th-anniversary collections” of everything that Dylan recorded for them in any given year, thus whetting the appetite for such bundles. With The Cutting Edge, this trend meets the 24-year-old Bootleg Series, the undiminished popularity of which suggests that the audience for Dylan arcana has never been hungrier.

The Cutting Edge covers the two years comprising Dylan’s first and most protean period. Musically, he was moving from folk to folk-rock to blues-rock to what he once called that “thin, wild, mercury sound.” Verbally, he was mashing together the language of ballads, poetry, history, and pop culture and swirling them into a surrealistic stew spiced with irony and humor.

The results were the albums Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. It has long been a cliché to call them revolutionary, but they were. And, for the most part, they still sound ahead of their time.

So one would think that an 18-disc box tracing their painstaking, in-studio development would feel revolutionary too. It doesn’t. Tedious is more like it. The six-disc box is less so, pruning as it does much of the cutting-room-floor clutter from around the more interesting alternate versions of long-familiar Dylan staples. But even it grinds to a halt with Disc Three’s 16 or so takes of “Like a Rolling Stone.” The two-disc “Best of” is all that anyone but the most obsessive Dylan fan needs.

There is, however, one fascinating thing about the 18-disc edition: its revelation that, contrary to his prickly public persona, Dylan was apparently a hard-working, cooperative, nice guy in the studio. In none of his interactions with Tom Wilson or Bob Johnston (his producers) or his accompanists does he pull rank. He even apologizes when he blows a take.

More satisfying on the whole where Dylan is concerned is the two-disc, various-artists compilation Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats (Legacy).

The Nashville Cats were the Music City equivalent of Los Angeles’ Wrecking Crew and Alabama’s Muscle Shoals ensembles—contemporaneously efficient studio musicians who could not only play anything and everything but also in many cases turn it into a hit. Hence the inclusion on Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer,” Joan Baez’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold.”

But it’s the way that deep cuts by artists as dissimilar as Wings, Leonard Cohen, Steve Miller, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Ringo Starr, and The Monkees cohere that elevates the collection above the common mercenary denominator.

Dylan gets top billing because he appears thrice solo and once with Cash and because he wrote the songs performed by Flatt & Scruggs, The Byrds, and Ian & Sylvia. But it’s the Cats’ ability to make like folk-country-rock chameleons that holds everything together.