Bob Dylan geeks will love new boxed set, in glorious mono
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Dylan+geeks+will+love+boxed+glorious+mono/3689212/story.html
By Bruce Ward
October 18, 2010
When Bob Dylan wrote Blowin' in the Wind in 1962, veteran folksingers
in Greenwich Village weren't impressed. Dave Van Ronk, Dylan's close
friend, dismissed it as "dumb."
But Van Ronk changed his mind a few weeks later when he heard a group
of college students singing a parody of the song in Washington Square
Park with the altered lyric, "The answer, my friend, is blowin' out your end."
Van Ronk recognized that if a song was being parodied even before it
had been recorded, then "the song is stronger than I realized."
Dylan's first legendary song wasn't triggered by a specific incident
or issue. And that's what gave it such power as a protest song. Over
the years, it has become a universal anthem for anyone struggling for
justice or freedom.
One of the joys of Bob Dylan: The Original Mono Recordings the new
boxed set collection of Dylan's first eight studio albums, released
in mono for the first time on CD is how the songs send you back to
a time of profound social change in the West. The collection ranges
from Bob Dylan in 1962 to John Wesley Harding in 1968.
The mono collection, in stores Tuesday, includes a separate bonus CD,
a newly discovered live concert album titled Bob Dylan: In Concert,
Brandeis University, 1963. It's a seven-song set and includes Masters
of War, a diatribe against the arms industry and war profiteers.
Dylan's "finger pointing" songs, as he called them, were ripped from
the headlines. A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall was a reaction to the Cuban
missile crisis in 1962, and his prophetic The Times They Are
A-Changin' became the battle hymn of the new generation fighting for
civil rights.
"The truth rang out so loud in his words. Not just for me, but for an
entire generation," Arlo Guthrie once said, summing up Dylan's influence.
In his protest songs, Dylan took on racists, corrupt politicians,
cold war generals, and all those who stood in the way of change.
Looking over the albums, it's astonishing how quickly he progressed
as a songwriter.
Side one of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, his second album, contains
four mainstays of his career Blowin' In The Wind, Girl From the
North Country, Masters of War and A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall.
Side two opens with Don't Think Twice It's All Right, one of his most
wistful love songs. (It also shows off his new finger-picking guitar
style.) The album ends with I Shall Be Free, which ranks as one of
his wittiest songs. It name checks JFK, Brigitte Bardot, Sophia
Loren, and "the great-granddaughter of Mr. Clean."
Dylan was still only 21.
The boxed set, which is also available on eight vinyl LPs, has
fancy-schmancy features a rigid slipcase, a 60-page book, and
wrapped LP-replica jackets with reproductions of original inner
sleeves and inserts. For Dylan geeks, this is heavenly and well worth
the $100-plus pricetag.
But why reissue the albums in mono?
As Greil Marcus writes in the liner notes, most fans first heard the
albums "as they were expected to be heard, and as most often they
were meant to be heard: in mono."
Meaning, at a guess, that the albums were produced and engineered to
be played on cheap record players owned by teenagers, and not the
fancier hi-fi sets in their parents' living rooms. These days,
producers mix music specifically for iPods and MP3 players.
Another Side of Bob Dylan, his fourth album from 1964, was a
transition for Dylan. He was moving away from protest songs, and the
"spokesman of his generation" role he hated.
"There ain't no finger-pointing songs in here," he said. I don't want
to write for people anymore. You know, be a spokesman. From now on I
want to write from inside more."
Leftist critics in New York pounced on Dylan for daring to change.
Irwin Silber, editor of Sing Out!, complained in an open letter to
Dylan that his new songs were "all inner-directed now, inner probing,
self-conscious." The songs were intensely personal and Dylan was
moving away from the overt political songs and finding a new, more
personal style.
In My Back Pages, he seemed to step away from the protest songs: "Ah,
but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
And Dylan had no intention of going back.
"I've stopped composing and singing anything that has either a reason
to be written or a motive to be sung . . . The word 'message' strikes
me as having a hernia-like sound," he said.
When the second Beatles tour reached New York in August, 1964, John
Lennon asked journalist Al Aronowitz to set up a meeting with Dylan.
They got together in the Beatles' hotel suite. According to legend,
Dylan brought marijuana and everybody got stoned.
After that historic meeting, as Dylan biographer Howard Sounes wrote,
Dylan "integrated a Beatles-like use of rock 'n' roll in his music,
and the Beatles began to write lyrics that had the depth of
seriousness of Dylan songs."
Pop music would never be the same again.
The Beatles seemingly awakened Dylan's love of early rock and his
piano pounding days with his high-school bands the Shadow Blasters
and Elston Gunn and His Rock Boppers. One teacher described Dylan's
singing as "African shrieking."
Dylan had grown dissatisfied with his acoustic guitar sound after
Another Side. "I ask myself, 'Would you come see me tonight?' And I'd
have to truthfully say, 'No, I wouldn't come, I'd rather be doing
something else,'" he admitted to a friend in 1964.
"That something else is rock. That's where it's at for me. My words
are pictures, and rock's gonna help me flesh out the colours of the pictures."
Dylan's next three albums Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61
Revisited and Blonde On Blonde changed the face of rock music
forever. The albums, released over the span of 14 months beginning in
March 1965, fused rock with poetry.
Even Dylan was impressed with himself.
"The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on the
Blonde On Blonde album. It's that thin, wild mercury sound. It's
metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up."
As one reviewer wrote: "Dylan used to sound like a cancer victim
singing Woody Guthrie. Now he sounds like a Rolling Stone singing
Immanuel Kant."
The mono set shows off Dylan in all his guises, from Guthrie acolyte
on Bob Dylan to Old Testament outlaw on John Wesley Harding.
There's Dylan the Advocate for the Downtrodden. Dylan the Icy
Hipster, master of the verbal put-down. And Dylan the Inscrutable:
"Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial," as he sings on
Visions of Johanna.
On the Time Out Of Mind album in 1997, Dylan intoned, "It's not dark
but it's gettin' there."
But when he made these mono recordings, the sun was shining brightly
overhead. Dylan's genius was illuminated for all to see.
--
Sources: Positively Fourth Street by David Hajdu; Down The Highway
The life of Bob Dylan by Howard Sounes; The Rough Guide to Bob Dylan
by Nigel Williamson.
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