Bob Dylan’s musical career has spanned five decades, he is known as one of the most prolific singer-songwriters of the 20th century and he continues to tour at the age of 69. For many fans, however, it is his earliest work that is the most intriguing since it shows the true transformation of Dylan from a traditional songwriter to a cultural poet, whose lyrics contained social commentary about his generation.
Now, those earliest works will be released in their purest form by Columbia Records and Dylan himself. In an announcement on Dylan’s website, the singer revealed that one previously unreleased “bootleg” of his earliest recordings that Dylan made for his music publisher would be available on October 19. On that same day, the singer will also re-release The Original Mono Recordings, which “is comprised of Bob Dylan’s first eight long-playing albums, painstakingly reproduced from their first generation monaural mixes as the artist intended them to be heard.”
The first bootleg, called The Bootleg Series Volume 9 — The Witmark Demos, feature 47 Dylan recordings on which the artist accompanies himself on the acoustic guitar, piano and occasionally, the harmonica. He made the recordings for his first music publisher, Leeds Music, in January 1962, and for his second publisher, M. Witmark & Sons, between ’62 and ’64. Songs on the album include “Blowin’ In The Wind,” “The Times They Are A Changin’,” “Man On The Street” and “Masters of War.” Dylan recorded all the music on The Witmark Demos before he turned 24 years old.
Fans will be glad to get their hands on previously unreleased Bob Dylan music, which will be available in both compact disc and vinyl (that’s tangible, non-mp3, kids) formats and come with a souvenir t-shirt. Music aficionados, however, are also hailing the release of the demos for their turnkey moment in music publishing history.
Prior to The Witmark Demos, music existed in the Tin Pan Alley structure: songwriters recorded songs for commercial music publishers, who then assigned the songs to recording artists on their labels who matched a given tune’s sound and lyrics. Dylan broke this mold by writing, recording, publishing and releasing his own records.
“Bob Dylan almost single-handedly eradicated Tin Pan Alley,” song-spotter Artie Mogull recalls in The Daily Beast, “because he was the first artist who could record an album of 10 or 12 songs and be the writer and publisher of all the songs. Previous to that, if Nat Cole recorded an album of 12 songs, 12 different writers and 12 different publishers wrote those things. In Bob’s case, he wrote these great original songs, and we [and him] owned all the publishing and all the writing. It was the beginning of the end of what used to be known as Tin Pan Alley.”
Since the demos were made for music publishers, many of the songs went on to be recorded by other artists in the traditional Tin Pan Alley style. Listeners’ first exposure to “Blowin’ In The Wind,” for example, may have been from recordings by Peter, Paul and Mary or Stevie Wonder. Listening to these new “bootlegs,” fans will be able to hear and identify with a young artist trying to get on publishers’ radar while also crafting his own voice and style.
Photo via SonyMusicDigital.com.
