Olof's Files and Bobserve

The Next Phase of the Online Bob Dylan Sessionography

Olof’s legacy

When Olof Björner sadly passed away in 2023, he left behind a monumental legacy for the Bob Dylan community. Olof’s Files contain just about everything you’d ever want to learn about Bob Dylan’s performing career, all laid out in great detail for our perusal; live performances, studio recordings, demos, TV appearances, soundchecks and even backstage guitar noodling. Entries list not only which musicians participated but on what instrument and on which tracks. BobTalk exhaustively documents spoken utterances in concert across the decades.

Olof’s dedication not only to put all of this together but, perhaps more impressively, keep it painstakingly updated for decades is an unquestionable achievement.

There have been questions about how, or even if, his work would continue in some form. Daniel Mackay, who shares publishing credit with Olof on the last several of the Yearly Chronicles, has publicly stated that plans are in development to continue the work into the future.

These plans are the subject of today’s newsletter.

Olof Björner, photograph as published in Nya Wermlands-Tidningen

Daniel Mackay’s collaboration with Olof

Daniel may be known to you via his radio show/podcast, Hard Rain & Slow Trains: Bob Dylan & Fellow Travelers, which presents him with an opportunity to share his thoughts about Dylan's music. A fan of Olof's work since the mid-1990s, Daniel noticed in 2019 that the Yearly Chronicles had not been updated in a while and wrote to offer assistance.

Olof immediately wrote back that he would love some help. At that point, starting with the 2017 Yearly Chronicle, I began writing the Calendar, Introduction, Tour Information, and New Books chapters for the Chronicles. I began doing a little more and began to compile the Still on the Road information also. This increased as Olof became more ill.

We did not meet in person, although our families talked about getting together some year in Sweden. That would have been great. We occasionally would have a Zoom meeting in addition to corresponding via email.

I asked Daniel for some insight into what Olof was like to work with:

Olof's distinguishing characteristic from our time working together was patience. Still on the Road grew into a massive archive. Creating and maintaining a work that vast was not necessarily Olof's vision when he first started and it is a tremendous amount of work to maintain. Olof was very patient working with all of the errata that would be sent in from people.

His interest was in Dylan, both as a musician and as a fascinating character. He expressed genuine curiosity about American phenomena that had not made it to Sweden. He wanted to know more about John Prine after Prine passed and I remember him asking me, "what is a fountain side" (lyric from "False Prophet")?

Family was important to Olof and he loved sending me photos from his life, whether it be his youngest grandchild skiing or an apple tree blossoming in his yard.

Daniel describes Olof’s legacy as “inestimable.”

What Olof provided -- via the democratic form of the Internet -- might best be summed up as "context." Without introducing too much editorial opinion (although there is a little bit of that), Olof provided a context in which and by which to understand Dylan's massive, sprawling achievements over the past six decades, whether it be his recording work in the studio, his live performances on stage, or the highlights of his career year-by-year in the Yearly Chronicles.

OK, but who are you and what is bobserve?

On the Internet, I go by the name dylyricus, intended as a playful contraction of “Dylan” and “lyrics,” since tracking Dylan’s changing lyrics in concert has been my passion for decades.

I’ve been hooked on Bob Dylan online ever since I sat down at my first internet-connected terminal in the early 1990s and typed “Bob Dylan” into whatever search tool I could find back then. It didn’t take long to discover Olof, whose work had already begun to be published at that time.

I’m no stranger to making Bob Dylan websites, my first in 1995 at around the same time the giants of Expecting Rain and Boblinks were established. I run dylyricus.com which allows me to share my obsession for lyric variations.

Bobserve came out of a desire for easier access to setlist data and to support my lyric variation habit, which by this time had grown to tracking every single version of specific songs. I wanted the site features to exist badly enough that I finally decided to roll up my sleeves and learn from scratch how to code. It was rough going but thankfully I was steered in some crucially helpful directions by the folks at jerrybase.com.

Coding is only part of the story, however, with data being the other. I’m so grateful to work with a really talented team who live for this stuff. This is who is verifying long-established details and updating entries based on new information, such as fleshing out incomplete or missing setlists from the ‘60s using contemporary newspaper reviews. It’s how we found a lost 1965 interview while checking into midnight rehearsals in Toronto. It’s who compiled a list of support acts for all Dylan concerts. It’s a never-ending labor of love.

The way forward

I came to know Daniel Mackay in 2021 through sending him BobTalk updates and other information helpful to the Files. I also suggested a database approach, which Daniel in turn raised with Olof directly. Some time after Olof passed, Daniel and I started talking about how bobserve and Olof’s Files might go forward together. It seemed a natural fit to Daniel and I was of course very interested indeed. From these beginnings, I eventually ended up in communication with Olof’s family and, with their very kind support, I was able to obtain the files necessary to manage Olof’s Files on the web.

Daniel’s hopes for the future of this work intersect with my own vision for the bobserve performance database. He explains here why we have been so aligned in our thinking on this.

There is so much more content-for-profit on the Web than there was when Olof began his work. Sometimes ads seem to be the dominant feature. My hope is that Olof's legacy as the archivist of Dylan's work available online for free will be able to continue in an easily accessible format. Lacking programming skills, neither Olof nor I were able to translate his data into databases, which was a necessary step for making his information not only available but more useful. My hope is that Bobserve will be able to continue Olof's documentation work, perhaps even becoming more of a hub for the online community of people who appreciate Dylan's music. There are so many people doing fantastic work, the more that work can be accessible from a central location, the more that work will be available to others.

Let’s get specific

• Olof’s Files are now available in their most recently published form at bobserve.com/olof. You can also access these via the “Olof’ Files” menu at bobserve.com

  • The bjorner.com domain will no longer host the Files as of the end of 2024.

  • Any existing links to the site can be updated to the new location simply by replacing “bjorner.com” with “bobserve.com/olof”.

  • The only exception is that the About Bob page (“bob.htm”) is now the main home page (“index.htm”).

• There is now a cross-reference link on bobserve event pages back to the relevant entry in Olof’s Files, where one exists. This allow you to most conveniently access information that is not yet integrated into bobserve. Find this listed in the “research” tab underneath bobserve setlists.

• As much of Olof’s Files as possible will be integrated into the main bobserve database and site, where it makes sense to do so. This will take time as it requires a significant effort. I am open to offers of assistance!

• Certain limited enhancements have been and may be made to Olof’s Files pages, such as to lightly modernize key pages while staying true to the original design. In particular, I wanted to make index pages work better on mobile. New information and any corrections will be processed only into the bobserve database going forward. There will, however, still be a 2024 Yearly Chronicle!

Bobserve is for the Bob Dylan community

Bobserve is intended to meet the needs of the Bob Dylan community, and so I’m always interested to listen to suggestions, feedback and offers of assistance. If you have data you think may be of interest, please reach out. If you have taken any concert photographs yourself which you’d be willing to grant permission to include on bobserve please let me know; an upcoming redesign will allow for captions and links back to your own site. If you are skilled in bootstrap/css web page layouts, I am particularly interested to hear from you!

Onward!

When Olof began compiling his Dylan Chronicles, he was carrying forward the work of renowned collectors who had gone before. It is my hope that through bobserve we can do justice to this never-ending project by carrying this torch forward. Not just preserving but building on it.