CD Odyssey Disc 653: Bob Dylan

A hard day in the family today, as Sheila’s Mom had to put down her cat, Harlequin. Seventeen years is a good run, but that doesn’t make it any easier to say goodbye. For my part, I’ll miss Harlequin too, and wish Helen all the best. Cats are part of our families too.

Disc 653 is…. Bob Dylan (Self-Titled)

Artist: Bob Dylan

Year of Release: 1962

What’s up with the Cover? A very young Bob Dylan – twenty-one to be precise – poses with his guitar. It is still an acoustic as this is before Bob learned to grow a beard and piss people off full-time. 

How I Came To Know It:  This was just me being a Bob Dylan fan and drilling through his collection. It took me a while to buy this one because it didn’t have any songs I recognized. Eventually I figured every other early Dylan album was great, so it was likely this would be a good one as well.

How It Stacks Up:  I have 19 Bob Dylan albums. I came in expecting his self-titled debut to disappoint but it surprised me. I wouldn’t say it is top half, but it is respectable. I’ll go 13 out of 19.

Rating:  3 stars but almost 4

With the exception of two songs, Bob Dylan’s first album is a bunch of traditional songs and blues covers. Even so, his appreciation for musical construction shins through, and it is no surprise he would go on to become one of the biggest influences on modern music.

Whenever I put this record on I check the track listing and I expect some by the numbers covers record. Instead, while the songs may be blues and folk standards, Dylan combines the two styles in a way that is fresh and original. His singing and playing style is solidly Americana folk music, but the grit and hurt he infuses into the songs speaks of dirty dustbowl blues.

Traditional songs like “In My Time of Dying” and “Fixin’ to Die” are as gritty and dirty as any version you’ll hear, and Dylan makes them his own. The guitar work on the surface is raw but it hides a complexity of light and heavy tones that give the songs dig down inside you. As for Dylan’s famously raspy voice, what he lacks in range he more than makes up for with enthusiasm and commitment. Even “Freight Train Blues” where he really pushes his voice past any semblance of reasonable, is still fun. Later in his career he’d learn to let the harmonica fill in the long windy notes. Good career move, Bob.

There is a revolutionary spirit to this music as well, which leaves you thinking equally of a dusty rural road cutting through a corn field, and a paved walkway through the shady groves of an Ivy League campus. Dylan even notes that he got one of his songs – “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” from blues guitarist Rick Von Schmidt on the “green pastures of Harvard University.”

It is a testament to Dylan’s brilliance that on an album with eleven timeless folk and blues classics, his two original songs – “Talkin’ New York” and “Song to Woody” are two of the record’s best.

“Talkin’ New York” is the beginning of Dylan’s rambling rap style. Dylan delivers his social commentary with a sardonic smile as he makes you laugh and wince at the same time with lyrics like:

“Now, a very great man once said

That some people rob you with a fountain pen

It don't take too long to find out

Just what he was talking about

A lot of people don't have much food on their table

But they got a lot of forks and knives

And they gotta cut something.”

“Song to Woody” is the other side of Dylan’s brilliance, where he foregoes the sly wink and just lets you have a double-barreled dose of somber contemplation. The song’s construction has a gentle roll, much like the character singing, lost on the road-life of the folk singing troubadour.

“Song to Woody” signals Dylan’s arrival as the next folk icon, but even more it shows that he has a keen sense that he is just walking a few more steps down a road built by generations of troubadours before him:

“Hey Woody Guthrie but I know that you know

All the things that I'm saying and a many times more

I'm singing you the song but I can't you sing enough

'Cause there's not many men that've done the things that you've done.

“Here's to Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly too

And to all the good people that travelled with you

Here's to the hearts and the hands of the men

That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.”

It’ll be some time before Bob himself is ever gone with the wind.

Finally, a note on Dylan’s cover of “House of the Rising Sun.” I’ve never liked the Animals version of this song (which came two years later) but couldn’t put my finger on why until recently when I read a Cracked.com article about it. The article explains that the Animals had switched the gender of the narrator from a woman to a man, somehow changing the song to a cautionary tale about gambling.

Dylan’s version is the original, singing as a woman who falls down on her luck and ends up in prostitution and despair. His frail, quavering thin voice is the perfect match to the despair of the lyrics; it is like listening to the Angel of Death himself recounting the poor woman’s tale of misery.

The only bad thing I can say about this album is that all the covers takes away from hearing even more of Dylan’s own compositions. Plenty of time for that over the last fifty years though, I suppose.

Best tracks:  Talkin’ New York, Pretty Peggy-O, Baby Let Me Follow You Down, House of the Rising Sun, Song to Woody