Review: Bob Dylan - Bob Dylan (1962)

Tracks: 1) You’re No Good; 2) Talkin’ New York; 3) In My Time Of Dyin’; 4) Man Of Constant Sorrow; 5) Fixin’ To Die; 6) Pretty Peggy-O; 7) Highway 51; 8) Gospel Plow; 9) Baby, Let Me Follow You Down; 10) House Of The Risin’ Sun; 11) Freight Train Blues; 12) Song To Woody; 13) See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.

REVIEW

I suppose that, in retrospect, Bob Dylan’s first album becomes one of the last to which any Bob Dylan neophyte eventually gets around to — the formal reason being that there are but two bona fide Dylan originals on the entire LP, and listening to Bob Dylan covering somebody else’s material would seem to be a pretty kinky affair, based on everything we know (or don’t know) about the man. He was young; he was inexperienced; he was only starting out as a songwriter; he was just discovered by John Hammond; he miraculously got a contract with Columbia which was not to be jeopardized; he was perceived as a promising, but regular legionnaire in the ranks of Greenwich Village, and had to conform to that image. All of this makes Bob Dylan, his staggeringly short (36 minutes — an embarrassingly puny entry in the catalog) debut, a tasty treat for historiographers but a completely passable platter for the regular fan. True Dylan begins with The Freewheelin’, everybody knows that, not with clumsy, freaky covers of Bukka White and Blind Lemon Jefferson.

I would agree with this common point of view — inasmuch as, for instance, if I only had space for three out of four early acoustic albums from Mr. Zimmerman, Bob Dylan would probably have to go feed the fishes (yes, even despite my general cold-hearted reservations about The Times They Are A-Changin’). In the context of Bob’s career arch as a whole, this first attempt at getting up on his feet brings you nowhere close to the levels of originality, wittiness, and confidence that would be achieved just half a year later. But it is not nearly as interesting to me to look at it in the context of Bob’s own subsequent career as it is to rather place it in the context of Dylan’s creative environment back in 1961–62, when he was still an «apprentice», benevolently accepted in the folkie circles of Greenwich Village under the patronage of his «elders» — such as Joan Baez or Dave Van Ronk. If anything, Bob Dylan should be compared not to The Freewheelin’, but to records put out by those two, as well as Odetta, Peter, Paul & Mary, and, hypothetically, all of those other artistic brothers and sisters in residence at The Village Gate who missed their own chance at a recording contract.

Now I don’t want to say that the difference between Bob and all those other guys is as simple as saying that they all merely paid tributes to their source material, while Bob did nothing of the kind. In reality, of course, all of them had their own styles, and when Joan Baez sang an 18th century ballad, she sang it from a modern perspective, to be accessible to and naturally empathized with by a contemporary New York audience, not as a scientifically reconstructed museum piece. But a common characteristic running through most, if not all, of those performances was reverence. The neo-folkies of Greenwich Village, all as one, were riveted and enchanted by the solemn mystique of the material they were covering — as if the spirit really resided within those songs — and did their best to take their craft seriously, the way a Christian priest takes his duties inside the temple even when he dares to slightly modernize his sermon. This is why, unless your own earnestness and seriousness has long ago deprived you of any sense of humor, or any last shreds of healthy cynicism, so many of these records might come across as rather bland and boring, or even artificial — as if the people behind them are too afraid to let their own true selves show up at the wrong moment and interfere with the sacred power of the tunes. The one thing that Bob Dylan did to this vibe was throw a fire hose at it — and this is why, from a certain point of view, Mr. Zimmerman’s first, much-maligned LP is every bit as revolutionary in essence as everything that follows it.

Let’s take one example: Blind Lemon Jefferson’s ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’. More than thirty years after its original recording in 1927, Dave Van Ronk learned the song and recorded it for his second album — in a version whose melody rather faithfully follows Jefferson’s original picking pattern, and whose vocal preserves the steady, solemnly flowing lament of Blind Lemon, but also seeks to intensify and darken it for extra effect. Note, too, that Dave takes the song at a much slower tempo and, more importantly, takes out some of its ragtimey syncopation: you could actually dance, or at least, I dunno, sway to Blind Lemon’s original tune, which might make it seem as if Blind Lemon himself was not taking the song seriously enough; in reality, though, pre-war African-American attitudes toward death were far lighter than what we usually expect them to be, and in some ways, Van Ronk’s version, while certainly honoring the original, loses a large part of its essence, replacing that part with a different vibe — a vibe that seems to have never been there in Blind Lemon’s own heart, and, more essentially, might not actually be the true vibe of Van Ronk’s heart, either. It’s more of a «hmm, well, that’s the way I think ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’ should be played» kind of thing rather than a «fuck you, that’s the way I want to play ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’» kind of thing, if you get my drift.

Now in comes Bob, who may have heard the Blind Lemon original, but, more likely, first heard the song as performed by Van Ronk or somebody else in the same cohort. How does he play the song? Well, the funny thing is, he plays it nothing like Blind Lemon Jefferson or Van Ronk, but he also plays it closer to Blind Lemon Jefferson than to Van Ronk — in that the way he plays it, he feels completely unhindered by any sort of strict musical pattern. There is a basic rhythm, sure, but it can get interrupted at any moment by oddly-out-of-nowhere lead sequences, extra chords, unpredictable pauses, fiddling around with the volume, or those almost offensively loud proto-punkish bass plops that feel as if the hyper-energetic Mr. Zimmerman is testing the resilience of his guitar strings for all they’re worth. Blind Lemon never played like that, for sure, but when he was at his best — on such classic recordings as ‘Matchbox Blues’ or ‘Rabbit Foot Blues’ — you could absolutely never predict where his imagination might take him the very next second. Van Ronk — the way any regular folkie did — adheres instead to a disciplined, repetitive pattern, which requires patience and skill to learn but carries the risk of losing the listener’s attention at any moment.

I might be overstating it, of course, but I have a suspicion that Bob’s acoustic playing on those early records actually betrays his earliest years as a rock’n’roller at Hibbing High School, where he and his friends sang Elvis and Little Richard covers — for sure, he had abandoned rock’n’roll for his new-found love of folk music (a fashion change that would be ironically reversed three years later), but Bob was not a «natural born folkie» at all, like so many of his new friends at the Village. One might or might not like what he’s doing with ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’, but one would be totally dishonest not to recognize that he is doing something completely different with it, taking the words and some of the basic chords and pretty much doing a «folk-gone-wild» version of the song. Both the guitar playing and the singing are jumping, jittery, as if the poor song protagonist is on the verge of expiring from an overdose of amphetamines — bursting with hyper-energy while delivering his last will and testament.

Too much energy even, perhaps: compared to the generally druggy-lethargic vocal attitude that Bob would adopt for his electric period (or even a little earlier than that), on ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’, as well as on most other covers on this album, he keeps almost literally jumping out of his pants to convey his heavily adrenalized state to you, the probably comparatively much more passive listener. The nervous, hyper-active trudge of the guitar presages his own work on the much better known ‘It’s Alright Ma’, and the way he swallows every vowel that can be swallowed is a cruel contrast with Van Ronk’s much more careful articulation. It’s all the more curious to witness considering that Bob, by all accounts, was nowhere near that energetic in his real life — at least not physically; for the actual speed of the neurons inside that crazy brain of his, well, there’s no accounting, I guess. In any case, we don’t have that much documentation on him from 1961–1962; all that we have easy access to are these recordings, and they do sound as if the hand of God threw an extra dose of uppers in his coffee that morning.

Whether we actually accept that a song like ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’ is meant to be played that way or not — more accurately, whether it makes any sort of artistic sense to play it like that — is a different matter. Dylan himself must have been convinced of the righteousness of his path, as there is not one, but actually three archaic death blues on the record: in addition to Blind Lemon Jefferson, there is ‘Fixin’ To Die’ from Bukka White’s repertoire and ‘In My Time Of Dying’ from Blind Willie Johnson’s (the original title was ‘Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed’; Dylan’s rendition is rather based on Josh White’s later cover), and even if he agrees to slow down the tempo a bit for the latter, this does not make the performance less aggressive. Josh White actually plays and sings the tune as a peaceful declaration of accepting one’s fate, with a gentle picking pattern and a crooning tone; Bob tears at the strings with full force and sings with so much grudge in his voice, you’d think he was a dying cowboy lying by the river, railing back at the grinning assholes standing over him who just filled him full of lead. This is not a respectful tribute to the solemn gospel-blues tradition; this is some red-hot expression from a spiritually unfulfilled youngster from faraway Minnesota. Kinda strange that the liner notes to the album, written by music critic and future Dylan biographer Robert Shelton, never make a big point of that, as blatantly obvious as it is.

The one thing that really separates Bob Dylan from every other Bob Dylan album, though, is not even the focus on covers: rather, it is the only Bob Dylan album ever recorded on which the artist feels like he is in desperate need of proving himself to the audience. Fast forward to the sessions for The Freewheelin’ and you are already in the presence of someone who literally knows he’s a genius and whose confidence needs no extra boost, even if he is still a dirt poor folkie with little-to-none critical recognition. But here, in the middle of his very first sessions for a major label, he is not quite so sure of it yet, and almost everything he does, guitar-wise or vocal-wise, comes with at least a secondary — and often primary — goal of getting himself noticed. Both the guitar and his vocal cords must have taken a serious battering on those two days in November 1961. In the short run, this did not help, because originality of artistic approach actually had to be matched with originality of songwriting before people would start paying attention. But in the long run, I am so very glad this album even exists, because in some ways, Bob’s creative genius is just as beautifully — albeit differently — expressed in his reinventions of old blues classics as it would soon be in his own songs (which, come to think of it, from a certain point were also really just reinventions of old blues and folk classics — admittedly, on a more radical scale).

Take ‘Highway 51’, for instance. This was originally an urban-style piano blues by Curtis Jones, then reworked into more of a Delta format by Tommy McClellan (as ‘New Highway No. 51’), a poorly remembered artist from Mississippi in the vein of Robert Johnson, but with a grittier singing style. The 12-bar blues tells a slightly confusing tale about reconnecting with the protagonist’s baby, with the two lovers symbolically separated by the same road that ties together the Delta and Chicago — but there are also occasional references to Death ("Now, if I should die, before my time should come / I want you to please bury my body out on Highway 51") which are most likely precisely the ones that caught Bobby’s attentive ear. If you look at the original lyrics to either Jones’ or McClellan’s recordings, both of which also contain verses omitted from Dylan’s cover, they seem to contain significantly more logical non sequiturs than the average blues number, reflecting a sort of semi-improvised stream-of-conscious attitude, veering from travelog to romance to comedy to morbid lamentation, that would be very influential on Dylan’s own lyricism — no wonder the vague symbolic meaning of Highway 51 stuck with him long enough to eventually morph into the even more vague and befuddling symbolism of Highway 61.

But the most befuddling thing about his cover is that, when it came to the main melody, he just straight out dropped the generic 12-bar blues pattern and replaced it with a mischievous little riff nicked directly from the Everly Brothers’ ‘Wake Up Little Suzie’ (this explains the potentially confusing "a Diesell-tempoed Highway 51 is of a type sung by the Everly Brothers, partially rewritten by Dylan" bit in the liner notes) — I have already mentioned that it also makes random appearances in ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’ and would later be re-appropriated for ‘It’s Alright Ma’. How the heck did he get that idea in the first place? No doubt the old school repertoire from Hibbing had an invisible hand in this, once again, but is there something in this gesture beyond the sly "let’s bring a little rock’n’roll into the relaxing world of the Village" attitude? Could it, perhaps, be triggered by some strange association that somehow tied the story of the highway-separated lovers to the unfortunate teenage couple falling asleep in a movie theater? Because there is nothing in the original versions of the song that would, in any way, suggest the necessity of throwing in that riff — and yet, somehow, it works quite admirably, making Bob’s recording of the song ultimately more outstanding and memorable than those of either of his predecessors. And note that while he does take the ‘Wake Up Little Suzie’ riff with him, he takes nothing else, ditching the overall lightweight-comic aura of the song and only borrowing its single «heaviest» aspect. In the end, ‘Highway 51’ is left as arguably the most «mysterious» inclusion on the album — it’s the one song on here that could have easily fit in on any of Bob’s classic period records without feeling old-fashioned.

It is possible that one of the reasons why Bob would rarely speak about this record in fond overtones in the future were all these Delta covers — he would never return to these songs again, and even thirty years later, when he was setting his career back on the right track with two albums of old covers, he would prefer to stay on the playful and lightweight side of Delta blues than on the morbid and morose. But in all honesty, I don’t see any serious reasons to be ashamed or embarrassed: the vocal, instrumental, and (sometimes) lyrical reinvention of this material more than makes up for any potential sacrilege. Had any 20-year old white boy, up to that point, managed to muster up the courage to go into the studio and sing so vehemently and arrogantly about embracing his own mortality, tearing at those strings as if they were David’s sling itself, hurling lethal pellets at the Goliath of death? When you think of it this way, you might feel the well of respect naturally filling up, well over the damning line of «this is just a mediocre debut with very little original material».

Granted, as a white boy (okay, even as a white Jewish boy) from Nomansville, Minnesota, Bob may have been a bit more comfortable with the Appalachian material covered here than the Delta stuff — at the very least, these were songs that he performed more often in his early folkie days, such as ‘Man Of Constant Sorrow’, which he would play for his first TV appearance in 1963. This is where his dusky, nasal voice really gives him the edge, as it is barely possible to imagine a 21-year old with some lilting, beautiful tenor delivery suspending the wall of disbelief over lines like "I’ve seen trouble all my days" or "perhaps I’ll die upon that train". (Actually, for some reason the song was more popular among young lady singers at the time — be it Joan Baez’ ‘Girl Of Constant Sorrow’ or Judy Collins’ ‘Maid Of Constant Sorrow’, both of which sound lovely but rather belong to some alternate medieval fantasy universe than the gritty realities of ours).

Bob also takes care to rewrite and restructure the lyrics so that they sound more like a regular breakup song than an epic anthem of toil-and-trouble: "your mother says I am a stranger" (rather than ‘friends’ in the original lyrics) is a veiled reference to Suze Rotolo’s mother, and "if I’d knowed how bad you’d treat me, honey I never would have come" is a brand new couplet to finish off the song. For some reason, he also changes "ol’ Kentucky" to "Colorado" — which may, on one hand, be a subtle parodic take on Joan’s and Judy’s "California" (yeah, these posh maidens may associate themselves with the idyll of the West Coast for all they’re worth, but Bob’s heart is in the highlands, you know), but, on the other, might just be a last minute rhythmic change from "I’ll say goodbye to Minnesota" because Bob Dylan refuses to let his songs be that blatantly autobiographical — at the very least, they have to be that strictly on his own terms.

That said, it is hardly a coincidence that travel seems to be the second favorite theme of the album after death, because Dylan’s own journey from Minnesota to New York clearly left the freshest and strongest impression on him in all of his life up to that moment. ‘Freight Train Blues’, which Bob inherited from Red Foley and, more recently, from Roy Acuff, but sped up even further, possibly taking the actual musical cue from Woody Guthrie’s instrumental ‘Train Blues’. Makes perfect sense, too, as the song chugs along at the near-actual speed of a puffin’-’n’-huffin’ freight train, rather than at the relaxed, nonchalant «cowboy tempo» of the country originals. Amusingly, the most distinctive thing about the song is Bob’s take-it-or-leave-it attempt at yodeling, as he takes the falsetto hooks of Red and Roy’s deliveries and... well, take it as a lithmus test: if you can physically stand the sandpaper-on-chalkboard high note on "I got the freight train bluee-ooo-ooo-ooo-[n times ooo]...", you are officially immune to the Robert Zimmerman Long Range Attack for the next 60 years. (The challenge does go through a reboot once the man hits 80, though).

It’s quite a meaningful venture, though, because what does a regular guy do when he cannot yodel? That’s right — a regular guy refrains from yodeling. What does a stupid guy do when he cannot yodel? That’s right — he yodels. What does a Bob Dylan guy do when he cannot yodel? That’s right — he takes that note and holds it for fifteen seconds, long enough to make your next door neighbors think there must be something wrong with their electric wiring. This turns the whole experience into a gleeful, fuck-y’all deconstruction of the entire philosophy of yodeling, painful to the ear, perhaps, but delightful to the uplifted intellect. I fail to see any specific contribution that this little trick makes to the song as such, but it sure makes a big one to the establishment of the Bob Dylan legend. And this phrase makes a lot of sense. You couldn’t seriously argue that Bob Dylan does not love these songs — the way he picks them and sings them, and then also the ways in which he talks and writes about them in subsequent years confirm directly the opposite — but he has absolutely no interest whatsoever in playing and singing them the way they are «supposed» to be played and sung. «Reverence for source material» does not even begin to exist as a concept in Dylan’s creative toolkit. Source material only exists inasmuch as it acts in the interest of American taxpayers, that is to say, one particular American taxpayer who may not yet be totally sure whether he packs deliriously megalomaniac ambitions but who’s still been wired by Nature for this very purpose.

In one case and one case only does this strategy seem to lead our boy somewhat astray. Bob’s cover of ‘House Of The Risin’ Sun’ arguably remains the most famous inclusion on this LP, mainly because it helped inspire the Animals’ classic rendition from two years later — but while it is definitely impressive, my own feelings about it have been off and on, on and off over three decades of occasional listening. Like most of the other stuff on here, he learned the song from his brothers and sisters at the Village (apparently pilfering Dave Van Ronk’s arrangement and releasing it before Dave had an actual chance to do it himself), and like most of the brothers, he does not flinch away from singing it from a woman’s perspective (Eric Burdon would flinch away — but he’d also give the whole work a completely different meaning anyway). His own guitar pattern, while not as complex and impressionistic as Van Ronk’s would be, carries the somber, there’s-no-way-out mood of the tune splendidly. But the vocal performance... this is one particular spot on the album where he seems to be taking his mission more seriously than he usually does, gradually whipping himself into a howling, growling, screechy, over-emotional trance that is not only far more than his limited voice can bear, but also just does not seem to be «true Bob Dylan».

On no other track for the rest of his life would he allow himself to get so blatantly dramatic, to the point of giving the impression of bursting into actual tears. There would be plenty of grim, dark, depressed tunes in his catalog, but all of them would be tempered with stately self-control. The reason, for instance, why that "oh I awoke in anger, so alone and terrified... I put my fingers against the glass and bowed my head and cried" verse hits so doggone hard at the end of ‘I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine’ is precisely because the emotional timbre of the voice betrays nothing that we commonly associate with «anger» or «crying», yet suggests both genuine anger and genuine crying all the same. Compared to this exquisitely refined anti-display of emotion, ‘House Of The Risin’ Sun’ feels like a slightly ridiculous overstatement, born out of relative inexperience.

That said, at other times, when I put the song on and try to block off any context pertinent to Dylan’s career, I can’t help but admire the dynamics, the build-up from whisper to scream, the grating, but perfectly sustained operatic notes, and even the pure entertainment factor — at over five minutes long, this is the largest number on the album and Bob makes sure to keep the listener intrigued from first to last second. (For all the glory of infinite epics such as ‘Desolation Row’ and ‘Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’, they are defiantly static, with Bob’s narrative mode kept steady and unflinching all the way through; but in 1962, he could not yet afford himself the luxury of not giving a damn whether the listener simply falls asleep in the middle of the song or is instead transported to an alternate dimension of existence). As an artistic performance, his ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ is thus an unparalleled early achievement; as a convincing tale of personal tragedy beyond redemption, it has to be ruled a failure — bring on The Animals to elevate it to properly Shakesperian heights. (There are a couple live recordings from 1963, though, where Bob sings it in an entirely different manner, more in tune with his common style.)

For now, let us dispense with the gloominess and move on to the humor: after all, Bob is every bit as much influenced with the comic tradition of American folk singing as he is with the melancholic or macabre aspects of it — not coincidentally, the album opens with ‘You’re No Good’, a fresh adaptation of an as-yet-not-released humorous description of man-woman relationship by the recently-blossomed songwriter Jesse Fuller (best known for ‘San Francisco Bay Blues’), and at least a good third, if not half, of the songs on here could be described as little musical humoresques (one more reason why ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ stands out rather clumsily from the rest, by shifting the vibe in such a different direction that it almost sounds coming from an entirely different artist).

The humor comes in diverse flavors, too. For instance, Bob’s cover of ‘Baby, Let Me Follow You Down’ — a permutation of an at least thirty-year old tune that earlier came under such titles as ‘Baby Don’t You Tear My Clothes’ (by Big Bill Broonzy) or ‘Mama, Let Me Lay It On You’ (by Blind Boy Fuller) — is relatively simplistic and unremarkable, though catchy enough to the point of also later being reworked by The Animals, and symbolic enough to have been retained by Bob in his repertoire after he’d switched to electric arrangements (on all the live versions from 1966, he sings the song with twice as much passion as he sang it in his acoustic period). But the most memorable bit about it is, by all means, the spoken introduction: "I first heard this from Ric von Schmidt. He lives in Cambridge... Ric’s a blues guitar player. I met him one day in uh... green pastures of uh... Harvard University!"

I mean, it’s perfectly possible that Bob didn’t mean anything offensive here, but to my ears it sounds like a bit of a sarcastic jab, maybe even a double one at that. "Green pastures of Harvard University" must certainly poke a bit of fun at the folkie scene, most of it represented by socially conscious white-collar college students rather than the true «salt of the earth» (ironically, Robert Zimmerman with his Hibbing roots was arguably the most «authentic» representative of them all). In addition, the innocently-sounding lyrics of ‘Baby, Let Me Follow You Down’ ("yes I’ll do anything in this God almighty world if you just let me come home with you") are a far, far cry from the sexually suggestive verses of past renditions, which implies that if Eric Von Schmidt is truly responsible for the words, then he must have carried out a rather ignoble sanitizing function — and from that point of view, Dylan’s introduction can almost be taken as an apology: "hey guys, I’d like to sing this with the original lyrics, but I learned it from this good friend of mine, so I’m going to have to honor his take on it! (Also, I’m still a virgin, so what do I really know about laying it on anybody?)".

[Fact-check: No, Bob Dylan was most likely not a virgin by this point, but neither did he share the Gene Simmons attitude to sex life, so the point sort of stands. Did you know, by the way, that there was a Portland-based band for a few years named after Bob’s first girlfriend from Hibbing — Echo Helstrom? They played a rather boring version of violin-enhanced alt-rock, though, so they missed a perfectly good chance to properly immortalize the lady. Suze Rotolo still remains much more of a household name, probably because of her appearance on The Freewheelin’ cover.]

The common brand of Dylan humor, however, has more to do with the influence of Woody Guthrie, as do both of his original contributions on the record. The first one is ‘Talkin’ New York’, a fictionalized and humorized retelling of Bob’s arrival in the Big Apple, trimmed and tailored to the shape of the classic talkin’ blues form in precisely the way we hear it on old Woody Guthrie recordings — he may not have invented the genre, but he is probably the figure that is most commonly associated with it. Just like Woody, Bob delivers his rhyming couplets, each one followed by a non-rhyming «punchline», in the same fashion, but already on his very first album you can hear how much he expands the style. Guthrie’s talking blues, as a rule, are witty and sarcastic, but most of them are in the «lyrical hero fights stupid social system» vein, even something as innocently titled as ‘Talking Fishing Blues’. Meanwhile, ‘Talkin’ New York’ is not so much directly political as it is simply an account of a country boy struggling to get by in the big city — fairly autobiographical until it gets to the end, when the lyrical hero ultimately decides to try his luck elsewhere ("So long, New York — howdy, East Orange!"; for the record, East Orange, New Jersey is not just a randomly chosen toponym — East Orange was the actual location of Woody Guthrie’s hospital where Bob came to meet his idol, and, ironically, it produced an even worse impression on Dylan than New York ever did, as you can hear in a surviving recording of one of Bob’s early poetic ramblings.)

That said, on the whole the lyrics of ‘Talkin’ New York’ are fairly straightforward. "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" is certainly a verse that could easily be slipped inside any Woody Guthrie song without people taking much notice of the stylistic difference. Less than a year later, the wordsmithery of Bob’s talking blues would be modernized beyond recognition, but here he is still an apprentice, writing a bittersweet little travelog with mostly vocabulary from the 1940s and 1950s. Well, other than, maybe, the disturbing bit about "come back some other day / you sound like a hillbilly / we want folk singers here" — another little jab at the scene, barely felt by anybody at the time but seen in an entirely new light, perhaps, after Bob taking his «revenge» on the folk scene in 1965 (or, even worse, going back to his «hillbilly roots» in 1967–1970).

All of which leads us to the very first «real song» that Bob put to tape in a recording studio, conveniently titled ‘Song To Woody’ and just as conveniently consisting, essentially, of a set of new lyrics set to the tune of Woody’s own classic ‘1913 Massacre’. It’s an early, inexperienced, imperfect set, marred by occasional lapses in rhyming and containing way too much clichéd imagery even for Dylan’s starry-eyed acoustic period ("here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men / that come with the dust and are gone with the wind" is such a slavish Guthrie imitation it almost hurts), but two moments stand out. The line about "a funny old world" that "looks like it’s a-dyin’ and it’s hardly been born" definitely suggests that this young man is poised on the threshold of going much further than his chief influence. And at the end of the song, "the very last thing that I’d want to do / is to say I’d been hittin’ some hard travellin’ too" is a flat-out humble admission of coming from a different world — a world that may yet beat The Greatest Generation in terms of knowledge, enlightenment, and progress, but which has no right to claim superiority through suffering and struggling to survive. It goes along very well, too, with Bob’s quite, muffled picking and mumbling vocal delivery, as opposed to the way Woody usually sang his songs — loud and proud, with head held high and that simple, but powerful acoustic guitar sound resonating as hell. All in all, ‘Song To Woody’ is a cool study in «epic humility» or «humble epicness» — not a great song, but certainly a rather unique one in Bob’s early catalog. Together with ‘Talking New York’, the two tunes actually tell us, in fairly direct terms, more about Bob’s real story and Bob’s real views on the world than any number of the songs that would follow, where it would often be impossible to say which ones are «genuine» and which ones are «acting».

As you can see, despite being so often viewed as merely an unimportant footnote in Dylan history, there are plenty of things to say and thoughts to think about Bob Dylan — and I haven’t even discussed a bunch of «lesser» numbers such as ‘Pretty Peggy-O’ or ‘Gospel Plow’, though they have their own petty charms as well. The moral of the story is simple enough: the revolution starts now, right here in November 1961, even if it might have taken the none-too-bright universe until at least ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ to realize it. The legendary John Hammond, who fished Dylan out of the folkie pond and arranged him a contract with the mighty Columbia itself, was seriously brighter than everybody else in this respect, but maybe even he did not realize the magnitude of the problem as he struggled, mostly unsuccessfully, to keep Bob in check and obey the general rules of the recording studio as he "habitually wandered off mike" and "refused to learn from his mistakes", according to Hammond’s own memories. (Sweet, I like to refuse to learn from my mistakes, too — not always, but every once in a while, you know).

Of course, those of us who view Bob first and foremost as a future Nobel laureate will shrug their shoulders and say, "what good is there in an album of Blind Lemon Jefferson and Jesse Fuller covers, with two half-baked and straightforward Woody Guthrie imitations / tributes on top?" I am and always will be, however, on Bob’s side whenever the old guy ardently insists that he is a musician first and foremost, rather than a «poet» as such. But maybe even musician is not the right word here; perhaps, first and foremost, Bob was essentially what they nowadays call an influencer — in a potentially good, pre-social media sense of the word, that is — somebody who was capable of taking established traditions (of blues, folk, various styles of poetry, rock and roll, you name it) and showing how you could transform them, mix them, modernize them, and set them to serve your own individual purpose, yet for the sheer communal delight of the recipient audience. Words were an essential device for that magic, but so was phrasing, playing, arranging, and combining the carefully crafted with the spontaneously improvised.

And much, if not most of it, starts here, on this atypically short record that predates both The Beatles and The Beach Boys. On the album cover, a young boy dressed in a raggedy winter coat ("New York Times said it was the coldest winter in seventeen years!") is staring at you with the faintest sign of a smile on his lips (surely a catastrophic mistake, one that would be strictly rectified and kept in check for the rest of his life) and a strangely mixed look of curiosity and contempt in his eyes. On the back, "Stacey Williams" (really just a pseudonym for the abovementioned Robert Shelton) gushes about the influence of Charlie Chaplin and the use of odd tricks such as sliding guitar strings with a metal lipstick holder (look out below, a new Blind Willie Johnson comes from the North!). But until you actually take the record out and immerse yourself in its content, neither the photo nor the liner notes provide any true clues about its real nature. And even when you do immerse yourself, these clues might be hard to pick up at first. Over time, though, I found it possible to enjoy the aura of Bob Dylan almost as much as anything else the man released in his guitar-and-harmonica-over-flannel-shirt days. At the very least, I am not aware of any argument that convincingly proves Bob Dylan singing ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’ is somehow inferior to, say, John Lennon singing ‘Twist And Shout’. Let me know if you come across one.

• Only Solitaire reviews: Bob Dylan