#twncvs

Bob Dylan used to play an old folk blues song called Roll On John. He never recorded it, but it's there on the well known, much-bootlegged Cynthia Gooding radio show, Folksinger's Choice, from March 11 1962.

Move forward a full 50 years and he recorded a song, this time of his own, called Roll On, John. It has no connection with the other except the almost-identical name, and is a tribute to John Lennon. He's only ever played it live twice, both in England last year.

The Folksinger's Choice tape has been widely circulated for years and is even easier to obtain now, as it's on open sale on CD. This is partly due to an unproven but widespread belief that recently arose, that performances broadcast on the radio in the US are copyright only in the US. Check Amazon and you'll see scores of CDs, by all kinds of people, of tapes that were previously bootlegs but originally legitimate concert broadcasts.

Another reason is that everything Bob Dylan recorded more than 50 years ago is out of copyright unless the record company have renewed it - and they can't really do that with stuff they've never released, such as the Gooding tape, unless they release it, in however limited a way. (Some strange collections of CD-Rs surface now and then, in editions of 100 or so with no artwork, which are believed to be official Sony products. They will include, for example a Dylan album from nearly 50 years ago plus everything from the relevant sessions that's still in the vaults. The fact they were released to that extent renews copyright. Or it might do. Sony think it's worth a try, anyway...)

And a third is, I think, that Amazon have given up trying to tell which CDs of old and/or live stuff are legit and which are not. It's not that surprising - for years they've allowed people on the Marketplace to sell a CD (called Dylan and sometimes referred to as A Fool Such As I)  that has bonus tracks that have only ever been released on bootlegs - just in case it wasn't already obvious enough that it was a pirate, as the album had long been deleted. (It finally got resurrected last year, but only as part of the Complete Album Collection box set.)

When violent, mouthy cop show The Sweeney got a spinoff film - made by the same production company - it was called Sweeney! On the posters, the dot of the exclamation mark had an X in it, for the rating (equivalent to an 18 rating now.) The sequel was Sweeney 2 - maybe they weren't confident enough about it to give it an exclamation mark.

Kate Bush's "Tour Of Life" 1979

There are some confusing points about Kate Bush's tour in 1979, which launched while the second single - Wow! - from her second album Lionheart was in the charts. At the time, tours having titles wasn't that common: this wasn't called the Lionheart Tour, as it's sometimes called now, on any merchandise or advertising; and it certainly wasn't originally The Tour Of Life, as it's now called. That name only arose among the crew and dancers as the tour progressed, and Bush then adopted it herself, as signalled in her messages in the fanclub newsletter.

The first proper date was in Liverpool. Before that there was a semi-secret preview gig in Poole, when the lighting designer for the show fell through a trapdoor and died. The date of that gig seems to be wrong on Wikipedia, as other sources say there was a free evening in Liverpool before the date at the Empire on April 3, so Poole can't have been on the 2nd.

When I arrived there was a lot of stuff about the Kate Bush Club on my seat, including a letter outlining the rules for the show. Apart from the no photos/recordings bit, it asked us not to leave our seats during the first brief interval, and pointed out that one song only - Hammer Horror - would be danced to a backing track.

One of the dance sequences, for the chorus of Them Heavy People, got its own spontaneous round of applause. The choreographer, who was also one of the dancers, was Anthony van Laast, who went on to choreograph many West End and Broadway musicals. He did the original production of Mamma Mia, and the film.

The Bob Dylan song that used to be called Freeze Out, or possibly Seems Like A Freeze Out, became Visions Of Johanna when released on the Blonde On Blonde album. But the most talked-about change came in the lyrics: one studio version contains a line no other version does, "He examines the nightingale's code," and the meaning of that line has been discussed for decades.

Many people - including Joan Baez, apparently - think Johanna is in fact Joan Baez. But another theory has her as Johanna Gezina van Gogh-Bonger, sister-in-law of Vincent Van Gogh. Supposedly Dylan admires her for her contribution to establishing the painter's reputation after his death.

Quite a few Bob Dylan songs made it to record with different titles than the bootleggers gave to earlier working versions or outtakes (or to unreleased songs.) This doesn't necessarily mean Dylan ever used those other names; but in some cases the working titles come from studio session sheets, for example, so someone involved must have thought they were the titles. Others were made up by early bootleggers and stuck, such as the unreleased song variously called The Painting By Van Gogh or Positively Van Gogh or Definitely Van Gogh or Seventeen Windows, or even Most Definitely Not Van Gogh.

The title Spuriously Seventeen Windows was suggested by a friend of his for a quite different song - Tell Me Momma. And, confusingly, Dylan has also performed a song called Vincent Van Gogh, but he didn't write that one.

The eponymous heroine of Bob Dylan's song Rita May has always been called that - not Rita Mae, with an e - ever since the Desire outtake was released on an Australian compilation and a Japanese single in 1978. So why is she so often spelt wrong by bootleggers and people writing about Dylan?

Maybe just because people with double names like that - eg Anna Mae Bullock (who became Tina Turner) and Fannie Mae (who became a weird kind of US government bank or something) - tend to spell it Mae. But also, probably, because there's a theory the song is about the most famous person of that name: Rita Mae Brown, the American writer and prominent feminist who co-writes detective stories with her cat and is an unlikely advocate of fox-hunting.