To stop this proliferation of unauthorized records and to satisfy a broad audience, Sony released the first compilation box of The Bootleg Series in 1991. The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3: Rare & Unreleased, 1961–1991 is composed of fifty-eight songs recorded between 1961 and 1989. The Bob Dylan recording archives subsequently put out other bootlegs. Some are from live performances (volumes 4, 5, and 6), while others consist mainly of outtakes made during recording sessions for official albums and some officially unreleased songs: The Bootleg Series Volume 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack (2005); The Bootleg Series Volume 8: Tell Tale Signs: Rare & Unreleased 1989–2006 (2008); The Bootleg Series Volume 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962–1964 (2010), which includes recordings made at the same time as those for Columbia Records; The Bootleg Series Volume 10: Another Self Portrait (1969–1971) (2013); and the latest, The Bootleg Series Volume 11: Bob Dylan and the Band: The Basement Tapes Complete (2014).
Among Dylan’s recordings before he signed with Columbia Records in 1961, two songs appeared on The Bootleg Series Volume 7: “When I Got Troubles,” recorded in May 1959 in Hibbing, and “Rambler, Gambler,” recorded during the summer of 1960 in Minneapolis.
When I Got Troubles
Bob Dylan / 1:29
Musician: Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar / Recording Studio: Ric Kangas’s home: May 1959 / Set Box: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack (CD 1) / Release Date: August 30, 2005
Ric Kangas, a Hibbing native, met Bob Dylan in 1958. They became close because of their mutual passion for folk and blues. They played together at various events, auditioning unsuccessfully for the Hibbing Winter Frolic, an annual festival attracting a large number of people from the Midwest. In 1959, Kangas bought a small tape recorder and a Shure microphone. In May 1959, he invited Bob Dylan, who had just celebrated his eighteenth birthday, to record some songs at his home. Four songs were recorded that day: Dylan solo for “When I Got Troubles” and “I Got a New Girl,” Dylan and Kangas for “I Wish I Knew,” and Kangas solo for “The Frog Song.”
“When I Got Troubles” is the only song from the improvised recording session included in The Bootleg Series Volume 7. The song reveals the overwhelming blues influence on Dylan, in particular blues songs from the pioneers in the Mississippi Delta. In this first recording Bob does not have the assurance of a professional musician. His voice remains in a lower register, almost confidential in style, and the guitar playing is quite poor. Yet an impression of depth emerges from his interpretation. Dylan believes in his own talent, and, of course, the future will prove him right.
Rambler, Gambler
Traditional / Arrangement Bob Dylan / 2:28
Musician: Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica / Recording Studio: Cleve Petterson: 1960 / Set Box: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack (CD 1) / Release Date: August 30, 2005
MINNESOTA PARTY TAPE
The twelve songs recorded by Dylan at Cleve Petterson’s initiative in 1960 are now identified as the Minnesota Party Tape—not to be confused with the Minnesota Hotel Tape, which results from a recording session in December 1961 with Bonnie Beecher. In 2005 the tapes were consigned to the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS) in Bob Dylan’s home state.
In the early 1950s, Cleve Petterson was a regular in the Minneapolis clubs and, as such, had contact with folksingers hanging out in Dinkytown. During the summer of 1960, he asked Bob Dylan, an unknown folksinger at the time, to record on his tape recorder twelve folk songs from Woody Guthrie and Jimmie Rodgers’s repertoire.
One of the songs was “Rambler, Gambler.” It was known under a variety of titles, such as “The Rambling Gambler” and “I’m a Rambler, I’m a Gambler.” This folk song was first released by John and Alan Lomax on their 1938 album Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. Alan Lomax recorded his own rendition for his 1958 album Texas Folk Songs. Dylan recorded the song two years later, followed by notable performers, including Odetta, Joan Baez, Simon and Garfunkel, Flatt & Scruggs, and the Clancy Brothers. At age nineteen, the singer and guitarist already recognizes in himself the character of a western American—a traveler and poker player, loner and freedom-lover.
In this traditional folk song, he offers an interpretation with a Woody Guthrie style. Country guitar, lyrical voice, reconciliation—the progress is obvious. He has already mastered a very credible sort of finger-picking, and the quality of the recording is much better than “When I Got Troubles.” He still, however, needs to find his own identity.
The Minnesota Hotel Tape
Bob Dylan arrived in New York City in January 1961 with a dual purpose: meeting Woody Guthrie and making a name for himself in the clubs of Greenwich Village. However, he still stayed in touch with his friends in Minneapolis. During his first year in New York City, he returned to Minnesota twice, in August and in December.
Recordings at Bonnie Beecher’s
During his second trip to Minneapolis on December 22, 1961, Dylan recorded several songs on a reel-to-reel tape recorder at his friend Bonnie Beecher’s apartment. The session was prompted by Tony Glover, a blues musician, author, and music critic Bob Dylan had met a year earlier in a club in Dinkytown. All the songs recorded are listed under the name Minnesota Hotel Tape, from which three recordings were selected for The Bootleg Series: “Hard Times in New York Town” for The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3: Rare & Unreleased, 1961–1991, and “Dink’s Song” and “I Was Young When I Left Home” for The Bootleg Series Volume 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack.
WHY THE NICKNAME “HOTEL TAPE”?
Bonnie Beecher’s apartment was frequented by so many people passing through, among them many musicians, that the apartment was nicknamed “the Hotel.” Bonnie Beecher might be the mysterious girl in “Girl from the North Country,” a song Dylan wrote in December 1962 for his second album.
FOR DYLANOLOGISTS
A one-minute excerpt of this song appears on the 1995 CD-ROM Highway 61 Interactive.
Dink’s Song
Bob Dylan / 5:03
Musician: Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar / Recording Studio: Bonnie Beecher’s apartment, Minneapolis: December 22, 1961 / Sound Engineer: Tony Glover / Set Box: The Bootleg Series Volume 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack (CD 1) / Release Date: August 30, 2005
This American song, originally titled “Fare Thee Well,” was renamed “Dink’s Song” when the ethnomusicologist John Lomax recorded it in 1904 as he heard it sung by a young woman named Dink as she washed her husband’s clothes on the bank of the Brazos River in Texas. John Lomax and his son Alan published the music of “Dink’s Song” in 1934 in American Ballads and Folk Songs. Afterward the song was performed by many folk musicians, notably Pete Seeger, Dave Van Ronk, and, more recently, Jeff Buckley. The song is also featured in the soundtrack of the movie Inside Llewyn Davis by the Coen Brothers in 2013, an excellent version interpreted by Marcus Mumford and Oscar Isaac.
Dylan, singing with feeling, offers a very personal interpretation of “Dink’s Song.” His guitar playing is quite surprising, very rhythmic and played with a kind of palm mute, giving an interesting interpretation. He sets the tempo with his foot. In this he may have been influenced by John Lee Hooker, whom he had accompanied a few months earlier at Gerde’s Folk City in New York City.
During his career, he performed “Dink’s Song” just once, on April 25, 1976, with Joan Baez in Gainesville, Florida.
Hard Times In New York Town
Bob Dylan / 2:17
Musician: Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar / Recording Studio: Bonnie Beecher’s apartment: Minneapolis: December 22, 1961 / Sound Engineer: Tony Glover / Set Box: The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3: Rare & Unreleased, 1961–1991 (CD 1) / Release Date: March 26, 1991
“Hard Times in New York Town” is an original composition dating from November 1961. In it Dylan borrowed heavily from a traditional song popular among farmers in Southern states in the early twentieth century, “Down on Penny’s Farm.” Dylan did not hesitate to appropriate th
e version the Bentley Boys recorded for Columbia Records in 1929: same melody, same accompaniment style (guitar and banjo for the Bentleys, finger-picking guitar for Dylan), and a very similar tempo. He kept the first two lines of the song unchanged and was inspired by the line “It’s hard times in the country” for the text and title of his own version. Showing his own creativity, Dylan transformed “Down on Penny’s Farm” into an urban song evoking New York City, which he had just discovered.
When Bob Dylan recorded “Hard Times in New York Town,” Robert Shelton had already written a positive review in his column for the New York Times, and John Hammond, after making Dylan sign a contract, took him to Columbia Records Studio A for his first opus. A major step had been taken, which explains why the song was “forgotten” for his first album.
I Was Young When I Left Home
Bob Dylan / 5:25
Musician: Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar / Recording Studio: Bonnie Beecher’s apartment: Minneapolis: December 22, 1961 / Sound Engineer: Tony Glover / Set Box: The Bootleg Series Volume 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack (CD 1) / Release Date: August 30, 2005
BLAST FROM THE PAST
Tony Glover crossed Dylan’s path again in 2000, when he was awarded a prize for writing the liner notes for The Bootleg Series Volume 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966: The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert at the 32nd Annual ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards.
“I Was Young When I Left Home” is not a simple autobiographical ballad. Bob Dylan gave it a message that relates to the Beat movement: we must leave the family nest and return is only possible after we have completed our own experiences. Coincidence? This song echoes the famous parable of the prodigal son in the New Testament, but a connection can also be drawn to Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim, in which the hero, after abandoning his ship and its passengers in the Red Sea, searches for redemption in Indonesia.
After the first notes on his guitar, Dylan presents his song: “I sorta made it up on a train. Huh, oh I’m here. This must be good for somebody, this sad song. I know it’s good for somebody. If it ain’t for me, it’s good for somebody.” He uses an open tuning of G to accompany himself on his Gibson J-50. He finger-picks and develops a palette of melancholy sounds that perfectly highlights the lyrics. He probably pushes himself a little to let the emotion come through in his voice, but he seems to be moved by some of the images that he evokes.
Bob Dylan
You’re No Good
Talkin’ New York
In My Time Of Dyin’
Man Of Constant Sorrow
Fixin’ To Die
Pretty Peggy-O
Highway 51
Gospel Plow
Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
House Of The Risin’ Sun
Freight Train Blues
Song To Woody
See That My Grave
Is Kept Clean
THE OUTTAKES
He Was A Friend Of Mine
Man On The Street
House Carpenter
(As I Go) Ramblin’ Round
DATE OF RELEASE
March 19, 1962
on Columbia Records
(REFERENCE COLUMBIA 8579)
Bob Dylan
Before His Time
The Album
This first album, simply titled Bob Dylan, was recorded in two three-hour sessions on November 20 and 21, 1961. During these two sessions, Dylan recorded seventeen songs, including four outtakes: “He Was a Friend of Mine,” “Man on the Street,” “(As I Go) Ramblin’ Round,” and “House Carpenter.” The first three songs were subsequently released on The Bootleg Series, Volumes 1–3: Rare & Unreleased, 1961–1991.
The album, which cost Columbia Records only $402 to record, was released three months later, on March 19, 1962. In this first opus, Dylan gave his interpretation of mainly traditional songs from blues, gospel, country, and folk. “Later, when I would record my first album, half the cuts on it were renditions of songs that [Dave] Van Ronk did,” he says in the book Chronicles.1 “When I did make that first record, I used songs which I just knew. But I hadn’t really performed them a lot. I wanted just to record stuff that was off the top of my head, see what would happen.”6 The album features only two original songs, “Talkin’ New York” and “Song to Woody,” which were included in his subsequent albums. Robert Shelton said: “The first album was the last will and testament of one Dylan and the birth of a new Dylan.”7
From an artistic point of view, his first album was already a masterpiece. Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran had tragically disappeared; Elvis Presley interpreted original, but mediocre, songs; and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had not yet launched the great British Invasion. The young songwriter said it all: the future of American music inevitably involved revisiting the musical legacy of the founding fathers, whether white or black. Except for the two original compositions, the songs sound like a replay of blues and folk numbers, as well as a tribute to Woody Guthrie. Bob Dylan may well have been only twenty years old when his first album was released, but he was already “A Man of Constant Sorrow”—to borrow the title of one of the songs on the disc—haunted by death and the inconsistencies and injustices of the modern world. The emotional strength of the songwriter is expressed throughout these thirteen songs. This emotional strength soon found a positive echo among young people of the sixties.
The album contained mostly folk songs and did not sell well. US sales totaled about five thousand copies. Could the oracle of Columbia have been wrong? At the label, reactions were mixed. If everyone recognized the value in the content of his songs, they also all qualified his guitar playing as rudimentary, and his voice squeaked. The young A&R vice president, Dave Kapralik, wanted to drop Dylan’s contract because he did not see any future. John Hammond replied, “You’ll drop him over my dead body!”5 He vigorously defended Dylan’s contract. He was also supported by Johnny Cash. The contract was not broken. Dylan himself was disappointed by the result: “When I got the disc, I played it, and I was highly disturbed. I just wanted to cross this record out and make another record immediately.”6 That’s what he did eight months later…
Cover
The cover photo was taken by Don Hunstein, a talented American photographer who worked for thirty years at Columbia Records. Besides Dylan’s first two covers, Don Hunstein took photographs for album covers for Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, Jaco Pastorius, and Simon & Garfunkel.
The cover of the first album is a portrait of the twenty-year-old Dylan, wearing a sheepskin jacket and a hat and holding his acoustic guitar. Under the pseudonym Stacey Williams, Robert Shelton, author of the article published in the New York Times on September 29, 1961, wrote the notes on the back of the record. Amusing detail: to avoid obscuring the CBS logo in the upper left corner of the image, the cover features a reversed photo!
At Columbia, the young musician was difficult to record and appeared somewhat docile. John Hammond recalls: “Bobby popped every p, hissed every s, and habitually wandered off mike… Even more frustrating, he refused to learn from his mistakes. It occurred to me at the time that I’d never worked with anyone so undisciplined before.”4 Mitch Miller, director of A&R, later said, “He was singing in, you know, this rough-edged voice. I will admit I didn’t see the greatness of it.”6 But for the young Bob, entering the studio produced an indescribable effect: “The mystery of being in a recording studio did something to me, and those are the songs that came out.”6 From the first song, there is an aggressiveness that can be felt afterward. He admitted in a 1962 interview with Edwin Miller, “There was a violent, angry emotion running through me then,” which explains his often-nervous guitar and harmonica playing, and a voice close to breaking.
Although his studio facility remained inadequate, he provided a good interpretation of all seventeen tracks recorded (including the four outtakes), did not exceed eight takes of a song (“You’re No Good”), and did many of them in a single take. After thirty-six minutes and fifty seconds of music, Dylan became a le
gend.
Technical Details
Studio A, located at 799 Seventh Avenue in New York, was the first Columbia Records studio, becoming active in the 1930s. When Bob Dylan entered Studio A on November 20, 1961, the recording equipment at his disposal was a “homemade” Columbia console, an RCA Type 77-DX ribbon microphone for voice and harmonica, a Neumann KM 54 or 56 for the guitar, a Fairchild limiter, a Pultec equalizer, and an Ampex 200 or 300 tape recorder. For reverb and echo, the engineers of the time were using a particular method. Frank Laico remembers: “For echo, we’d turned the stairwell into a live chamber, with a mic right outside the seventh-floor landing, and an Altec loudspeaker way down below. That setup worked nicely: it provided some nice natural delay with the echo.”8
Instruments
Instruments are obviously limited in this first album. For the two previous years, Dylan had played a 1949 Martin 00-17. He acquired a Gibson J-50 shortly before entering the studio—he is holding this new guitar on the cover album. John Hammond Jr. confirmed this in an interview with the Telegraph. Dylan used a pick to scrape the strings and did not use the then-current finger-picking technique common in folk music. His harmonica is a Hohner Marine Band. He uses three on the album: in C, D, and G. For his harmonica holder, he tells us in the book Chronicles how he found it: “Racks were impossible to find. I’d used a lopsided coat hanger for a while, but it only had sort of worked. The real harmonica rack that I found was in the basement of a music store on Hennipen Avenue, still in a box unopened from 1948.”1
Bob Dylan All the Songs Page 2