BOB DYLAN : THE WITMARK DEMOS: 1962-1964 - THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 9

 

Disc One

  1. Man On The Street
  2. Hard Times In New York Town
  3. Poor Boy Blues
  4. Ballad For A Friend
  5. Rambling, Gambling Willie
  6. Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues
  7. Standing On The Highway
  8. Man On The Street
  9. Blowin' In The Wind
  10. Long Ago, Far Away
  11. A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
  12. Tomorrow Is A Long Time
  13. The Death Of Emmett Till
  14. Let Me Die In My Footsteps
  15. Ballad Of Hollis Brown
  16. Quit Your Low Down Ways
  17. Baby, I'm In The Mood For You
  18. Bound To Lose, Bound To Win
  19. All Over You
  20. I'd Hate To Be You On That Dreadful Day
  21. Long Time Gone
  22. Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues
  23. Masters Of War
  24. Oxford Town
  25. Farewell

Disc Two

  1. Don't Think Twice, It's All Right
  2. Walkin' Down The Line
  3. I Shall Be Free
  4. Bob Dylan's Blues
  5. Bob Dylan's Dream
  6. Boots Of Spanish Leather
  7. Girl From North Country
  8. Seven Curses
  9. Hero Blues
  10. Watcha Gonna Do?
  11. Gypsy Lou
  12. Ain't Gonna Grieve
  13. John Brown
  14. Only A Hobo
  15. When The Ship Comes In
  16. The Times They Are A-Changin'
  17. Paths Of Victory
  18. Guess I'm Doing Fine
  19. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
  20. Mama, You Been On My Mind
  21. Mr. Tambourine Man
  22. I'll Keep It With Mine

Label : Columbia

Venue : Leeds & Witmark Publishing Company, New York City, New York, USA

Date : January 1962 - June 1964

Release Date : 2010

Review (AllMusic) : Like any fledgling songwriter, Bob Dylan signed with a publishing company at the outset of his career. Publishers are standard practice for songwriters -- it’s where the money comes in, as songs are published, performed, and covered -- but in the early ‘60s there was an expectation that publishers would help place songs in the hands of appropriate singers, a practice Dylan effectively ended by popularizing writers singing their own songs, but in 1962, this self-sufficiency was a rarity. Even his 1962 debut contained only three Dylan originals, which in his case reflected his traditional folk roots, but Dylan needed a publisher for those three songs so John Hammond, who signed the singer/songwriter to Columbia, pointed him toward Leeds Music. Dylan cut a demo session for Leeds between the recording and release of Bob Dylan and when that album wound up stiffing, Leeds let him buy out his contract in the summer of 1962, which then led to him signing with M. Witmark & Sons publishing company. Between 1962 and 1964, a period that roughly spanned “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Dylan cut several demo sessions for Witmark, usually with the intent of the publisher pitching songs to other singers. Many of his early classics were first essayed here -- “A Hard-Rain’s Gonna Fall,” “Masters of War,” “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright,” “Boots of Spanish Leather,” “Girl from the North Country,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’” -- and he also cut songs he never revisited. Some wound up with other artists -- “Seven Curses,” “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” “Mama, You Been on My Mind” -- some were lost to time, leaking out on bootlegs until they officially surfaced on 2010’s The Bootleg Series, Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964. Many of these recordings have been heavily bootlegged, some excerpted on previous Bootleg Series, but they’ve never been presented as completely and in as great fidelity as they are on this two-disc set. Great fidelity seems almost unnecessary for such simple recordings, although the cleanliness enhances the intimacy, so familiar songs are lent freshness when surrounded by the thumping of a microphone or closing of a door. This disarming intimacy -- verging on eavesdropping -- is as attractive as the 15 songs that never appeared on an official Dylan album. Some of these songs are throwaways -- “Bound to Lose, Bound to Win” lacks finished verses, with Bob promising that he’ll write them down later -- but there’s considerable charm in hearing Dylan tossing off a song, plus some of these half-forgotten discards, like “Guess I’m Doing Fine” and “All Over You,” are still quite strong. Nevertheless, the real appeal of this volume of the Bootleg Series is to listen as Dylan develops as a songwriter and artist. The songs spilled forth at an astonishing rate, and the great majority were not only superb, they were different from what came before, with his Woody Guthrie homage quickly replaced by a quick-witted protest singer who then started to delve into the personal in revolutionary ways. At its core, these demos are the sound of Dylan becoming Bob Dylan, and it's an evolution that’s spellbinding.

Review (Pitchfork) : In his 2004 memoir, Chronicles, Volume One, Bob Dylan writes of encountering Mike Seeger in the early 1960s in Greenwich Village, and being left spellbound by the effortless mastery the folk legend exhibited in his interpretations of a dizzying array of traditional American song forms. "He played these songs as good as it was possible to play them," Dylan writes, adding that, "What I had to work at, Mike already had in his genes, in his genetic makeup... The thought occurred to me that maybe I'd have to write my own folk songs." The 47 songs collected on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964 allow us to witness how Dylan went about doing just that. Representing the fruits of his first two publishing contracts (with Leeds Music and with M. Witmark & Sons), the set reveals a much subtler and more fascinating journey than the popular shorthand myth of Dylan's shifting cleanly from folk apprentice to political firebrand to poetic rock'n'roller. For starters, a great many of the songs to which Dylan first affixed his name as writer were simply his own original lyrics atop traditional folk melodies. Not all of these words excoriated social injustice either-- far from it. Even from the beginning, there were love songs and outlaw songs, moodily poetic songs and broad jokes. Still, The Witmark Demos does demonstrate an evolution in songwriting genius, and one that took place in a frighteningly short period of a time by a young man who'd yet to turn 24 when the last of these recordings were made. On this set, you can hear Dylan moving past the bedrock melodies of folk and crafting indelible ones of his own ("Don't Think Twice, It's All Right"). You can hear him perfecting the protest song ("Blowin' in the Wind", "Masters of War"). And you can hear him falling in love with the music of words and beginning to invent a new vocabulary for pop music (a scratchy, nascent piano-only take of "Mr. Tambourine Man"). Only 15 of the set's 47 songs are unheard in any incarnation on a previous Dylan release (more on them later). The other 32 are split fairly evenly between germinal takes on songs from early-60s Dylan albums and alternate rough cuts of tunes that appear in equally embryonic states on the first Bootleg Series issue, 1991's Volumes 1-3. You might think auxiliary efforts would be of interest only to Dylan obsessives-- and in some cases these readings scarcely differ from others in his catalogue. Still, there are revelations: The oft-covered "Tomorrow Is a Long Time" has appeared previously only in live form on Dylan's second greatest hits compilation, and the version here is far richer, the guitar playing lovely and sublime. The classic protest song "Oxford Town" may be less immaculate here, but it's more bracing and insistent. The readings of "Mama, You've Been on My Mind" and "I'll Keep It with Mine" are especially pained and plaintive, while the bitingly satirical "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" and "Rambling, Gambling Willie" are looser and more ebullient here than anywhere else they've appeared before. As for the 15 "new" songs, a few are mere fragments and a few others are fairly boilerplate, but again there are real treasures. "Farewell" haunts with its melody while "The Death of Emmett Till" haunts with its words, yet both are outshone by the bitterly ironic tour de force "Long Ago, Far Away", where Dylan enumerates social injustices ostensibly relegated to the distant past that were in fact still occuring in his own time, witheringly spitting the refrain, "Those things don't happen no more nowadays." "I'd Hate to Be You on That Dreadful Day" and "All Over You" further display comic sides, and then there's "Long Time Gone", which shows us an initial flowering of the unflappably cool mythical icon Dylan would fully become in the mid-60s. The song's refrain offers a perfect summation of how this set reveals the historical depth of Dylan's musical education as well as the lengths to which he would eclipse it. "I'm a long time a-comin'," Dylan sings, "and I'll be a long time gone."