hi philmh: thanks for the link to the rolling stone piece: i s'spect both were "right" in that geffen's asylum records, inc. did pretty well by bob, as well as for him(them)self(ves), with those lps of his that he(they) released - and merkin columbia as an organisation and culture never cared very much for dylan or his music - it hadn't been until well after other artists' had started making successful covers of his songs, that his own records started to get much more than critical acclaim, and he lose the tag of "hammond's folly"; and clive davis' ousting from columbia records was very much part of the organisation (and its culture)'s determination to head back to the middle-of-the-road fare it knew best and turn its back upon the invention, experimentation, adventure and (sometimes wild) diversification of the mid-to-late sixties° with which davis had reawakened the sleeping giant°°.
(° - the few truly gigantically-financially-successful blockbuster rock acts aside, of course; personal musical taste and moral high ground don't count for much when set against mega-profits...)
- but dylan's asylum records deal was evidently for just five years, which i hadn't known, or else had long since forgotten... (island's licence appears to've allowed them to release/sub-licence in yugoslavia, at least - unless that's an unauthorised misuse of island properties, as well as of asylum's recordings... :-)
(°° - they also tore up his agreement with stax records, which was unprecedentedly generous to stax - but had also been immensely profitable for columbia; this crippled stax's and enterprise records' finances which, together with fraud by a high-placed manager at the planters bank, eventually sank stax).
Hi ppint, reverted was a poor choice of words; what seems to have happened is that Columbia (Clive Davis in particular) realized that letting Bob go was a mistake, and that they would "spare nothing to get him back'; Dylan, for his part, was annoyed that Asylum had only managed to sell 700,000 copies of Planet Waves at a time when there were millions of unfulfilled requests for his concert tickets, so he negotiated a new more favourable contract with Columbia and got the rights to Planet Waves and Before The Flood back in the process. And I think Island only had the rights to these albums in the UK (and probably Ireland)* - they were certainly Asylum/WEA releases here in Oz, and in most other countries too.
*Though Discogs has a Planet Waves Island copy that has been made Netherlands, I think because the inner sleeve was printed by a Dutch company! The UK Island entry on the same site has the same printer credit.
hi philmh: it can't've been a reversion to columbia, else asylum (and island)'d've had to credit columbia (or cbs) on their original 1974 releases; but yes, asylum/wea/warner communications/warner music group must've allowed the rights to revert to dylan rather than pay whatever he/his manglement were asking for a renewal of their licence. and then, of course, it'd've been a more-or-less open auction...
"nice price" mid-price "reissue", not originally having been released by cbs. . .
cbs' release doesn't appear to've included dylan's notes printed on the original card sleeve.
(never did really understand why/how cbs got their hands on this album after island'd paid asylum for the uk (? and some yeurppean, and commonwealth ?) (and asylum (later asylum/wea) for the merkin (and canadadian, and mexican and world?) rights to it. . .)