Great White Wonder

Infobox Album
Name = Great White Wonder
Type = studio
Artist = Bob Dylan

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Released = July, 1969
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"Great White Wonder" or "GWW" was a double album bootleg recording of Bob Dylan, released in July 1969 and famous for being the first bootleg of the rock music era. Some of the tracks came from Dylan's and The Band's legendary Basement Tapes sessions, recorded in the cellar of The Band's upstate New York home, while others were supposedly recorded in a Minneapolis hotel room on December 22nd, 1961. The tape was never approved by Dylan or his record company. The only identifying mark on the album cover is the text GF 001/2/3/4, and later, after a repressing, gwa 1Aa version 2, leading to the nickname "Great White Wonder".

Released by the infant TMQ label ("Trademark of Quality"), created by two Los Angeles-based men, one a military deserter, Ken and Dub, it was a cut'n'paste bootleg, compiled from multiple sources. "Sides one and three of "Great White Wonder" were entirely given over to songs from an informal ninety-minute session Dylan recorded in the apartment of an old girlfriend, the 'real' 'Girl from the North Country', in Minneapolis in December 1961, while side two was a cut-up of miscellaneous studio outtakes. However, it was seven basement-tape cuts that filled up the end of side two and all of side four which caused the great fuss.

"The west coast radio stations were first to pick up on "Great White Wonder". Five radio stations – KCBS ["sic – should be KCSB-FM"] in Santa Barbara, KNAC in Long Beach, KRLA in Pasadena and KMET-FM and KPPC-FM in Los Angeles – immediately began playing the album. KRLA was the first. Unconcerned with legal niceties, these LA radio stations were quite willing to fuel demand for both "Great White Wonder" and the spate of bootlegs that soon followed its metal-stamped heels." [cite book|last=Heylin|first=Clinton|title=Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry|publisher=St. Martin's Griffin|date=1996|location=New York|pages=46|isbn=0-312-14289-7]

Said Dub, quoted in Clinton Heylin's "Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry", " ["Great White Wonder"] was just this phenomenon. All of a sudden we just started having fistfuls of money. We didn't realize what we had gotten into."

Track listing

Side One:
Candy Man
Ramblin' 'Round
Black cross
Ain't Got No Home
Death of Emmett Till
Poor Lazarus

Side two:
New Orleans Rag
If You Gotta Go, Go Now
Only a Hobo
Sitting On a Barbed Wire Fence
Mighty Quinn (take 1)
This Wheel's On Fire

Side three:
Baby Please Don't Go
Interview by Pete Seeger
Dink's Song
See That My Grave Is Kept Clean
East Orange New Jersey
Man of Constant Sorrow

Side four:
I Shall Be Released
Open The Door, Homer (take 1)
Too Much of Nothing (take 2)
Nothing Was Delivered (take 1)
Tears of Rage (take 2)
Living the Blues

References

External links

* [http://www.bobsboots.com/boots/bt-g009.html Bob's Boots]
* [http://www.punkhart.com/dylan/disco/gww.html 1969 "Rolling Stone" Article]
* [http://www.phil.vt.edu/JKlagge/BootleggingBob.pdf Great White Wonder: The Morality Of Bootlegging Bob]