I was attending a birthday gathering for a friend at a local bar a few nights back when I explained to said friend (and fellow Dyan fan) my desire to use my newly minted blog to embark on a career long retrospective of Bob Dylan’s mountainous body of work. Imagine my surprise then, when another member of the party chimed in, with considerable derision, “Yeah, except all his albums sound exactly the same”. I, of course, became immediately defensive and was in turn met with a line of argument so juvenile and problematic that I won’t do said person the dishonour of recounting it here.
Reflecting on it now, I remain baffled as to why anyone would make an accusation of sameness against an artist as consistently complex and challenging as Dylan. This is, after all, the man who was booed and harassed throughout his entire 1965 tour exactly because he refused to stay the same. This is the man who mastered the folk tradition on his first album (
Bob Dylan) and then proceeded to revolutionize it⎯and protest songs in particular⎯on his next two (
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and
The Times They Are A-Changin’) before releasing a dashed-off collection of surrealistic love song (Another Side Of Bob Dylan) and then abandoning the folk scene altogether to completely revolutionize rock and roll on his next three (
Bringing It All Back Home,
Highway 61 Revisited and
Blonde On Blonde). Even John Lennon has been quoted as saying that when he first heard “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, one of Dylan’s first electric singles, he thought it was so “captivating that he wondered how [he] could ever compete”.
And that’s just his career from 1962-1966. In 1967⎯after three straight rock masterpieces⎯Dylan switched gears once again and released
John Wesley Harding, a haunting, biblical country album (whose companion collection of homemade recordings,
The Basement Tapes, is a stylistic wonder in itself).
And that’s just the first five years of a career that has now lasted nearly fifty. In that time Dylan has produced 33 studio albums (not to mention countless live records and B-sides compilations), a highly acclaimed book of memoirs (
Chronicles: Volume One) and a variety of paintings, drawings and other artworks that are frequently exhibited all over the world.
I could, of course, go on and on. But I’ll stop here. And, in the off chance I haven’t yet made my point allow me to assure you that, by the time my 34-post retrospective wraps up, I most certainly will have.
So, without further ado, let us begin:
For some, Dylan’s career begins with
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, his second album and the first on which he wrote all the material (well . . . mostly), but it was actually an album of folk covers (with one very notable original) that introduced Bob Dylan to the world. And so it is with this oft-overlooked LP that we must begin our journey.
Bob Dylan’s first album, self-titled and released in 1962 when he was only twenty years old, didn’t sell very many copies, nor did it garner him that much attention outside of the small circle of dedicated folk fans who, having already witnessed his burgeoning skill as a performer, suspected the young man’s potential and spread the word best they could.
Listening to
Bob Dylan now, it’s not hard to see why this record gets ignored so often, it really is a proto-Dylan record: necessary in order for what came next but in many ways disposable, especially in light of his later work. The voice that barks the title track “You’re No Good” is familiar, but suffers from an affectation that, while harmless and well-emulated, is nonetheless the sound of a confident performer who has yet to fully establish his own distinct voice. Which is fair enough, Dylan had only just begun to pen his own lyrics and had yet to build up the confidence necessary to step out on his own as a songwriter in a scene where most singers just played the old classics. Few dared to write their own material and, whenever they did, well . . . they just stuck to the script.
But it wasn’t the 1920s anymore. The depression was over; the world had changed. And the music had, too. Rock and roll was a living, breathing thing and it was slowly shaping itself into the genre to beat, at least among the younger generation of post-war babes: young men and women that were just about to enter an increasingly troubled, post-atomic society (in which America was slowly becoming a force to be reckoned with; the new global superpower). The folk traditionals and the depression era ballads by men like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger were beautiful and whole and amazing in their own right but these were different times and, in the Greenwich Village folk scene, few had truly realized this.
At least not yet.
As far as an album of folk covers go,
Bob Dylan is perfectly serviceable. The performances are raw and passionate and sparkle with real energy and authentic emotion. But they can’t be more than what they are, which is old, familiar and well-worn folk songs. Songs which, while sturdy and powerful, no longer spoke the language of the world into which they were introduced. That is, of course, with one glorious and unexpected exception.
“Song To Woody” is the first song of any substance that Bob Dylan wrote (as he himself puts it in
Chronicles: Volume One) and it a harbinger of everything that was to come. Though now it might seem like small, even insignificant track, it is argugably the song in which Dylan the performer becomes⎯forever and always⎯Dylan the artist. Even if the song is only a homage to what came before, it is the absolutely the first step toward what Dylan would soon become: an audacious, challenging and strikingly original creator. And, if "Song To Woody" is, perhaps, not quite the total revelation of a fully-formed artist, it is certainly the catalyst for everything that was about to come, for in little over a year Dylan would return his next album, and with it a first single that would leave little doubt to his singular talent--- a song called "Blowin' In The Wind".
The rest, of course, is history. A history which I’ll be revisiting over the coming weeks and months.
So look out.
For now, I’ll leave you with two free downloads (including the aforementioned Guthrie tribute) and the suggestion that you give
Bob Dylan a spin. If only for the sake of introducing yourself to some really excellent old folk songs. The fact that they happen to sung by a man who would soon change irrevocably the very definition of the word “song”, and in the process would alter forever the course of popular music itself, is just icing on the cake.
Enjoy.
MP3: Bob Dylan - "Man Of Constant Sorrow"MP3: Bob Dylan - "Song To Woody"
UPDATE: Part Two is now available. I've updated the link so that it's all one giant file. Enjoy.
