Year: 2014

Talking 1960 Blues

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Moving along with the pre-Bob Dylan Bob Dylan, I’ve had to skip 1959 as I don’t think I have any recording of him from that year. 1960, on the other hand…

The two bootlegs I have from 1960 vary considerably in quality. The first is excerpts from the Karen Wallace tape, recorded in May 1960. This is slow-going as so much of the material is chopped up. Apparently there is a ninety minute tape out there in the world, but that’s not what I heard.

There’s a big distinction between this material and the recordings from 1958, when Dylan was in high school. Here he is playing traditional folk music. He doesn’t sound like a soon-to-be star (at least from what I can tell) but the level of improvement is clearly noticeable.

The better tape is the “Minnesota Party Tape” (not to be confused with the “Minnesota Hotel Tape” from 1961). The sound quality is far superior (though still not great), and so is Dylan’s performance just four months later. Again, a lot of traditional music and Woody Guthrie covers, but you can distinctly hear Dylan becoming Dylan at this early stage. His voice has a strong touch of the Nashville Skyline ring to it, although you can clearly hear the rasp, particularly on the Guthie covers “Talking Columbia” and “Talking Sailor”.

To me the most interesting parts of the Minnesota Party Tape are the four talking blues song at the end. I remember being fascinated by Pete Seeger’s version of “Talking Union” when I was a teenager and got a copy of his Greatest Hits album.

At the time (mid-1980s) rap and hip hop were first becoming popular on top forty radio, and the link between the talking blues, the more political version of it derived from Guthrie, and rap seemed pretty clear to me.

I now learn that the talking blues stems from the comedy country songs of Chris Bouchillon, and that it was adapted by Guthrie (who was erroneously credited with developing it by Seeger and others). Dylan is reportedly influenced by the album “Talking Blues” that Folkways released in 1958, and two of the songs on Minnesota Party Tape can be found on that release.

I searched for articles linking the talking blues to rap, and there looks like there is a lot of commentary out there. I’m going to go read about it.  In the meantime, here’s Woody Guthrie:

Getting Started

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As with many things these days, the idea for this blog came indirectly from my son. Our new car syncs automatically to my phone, and will play its playlist via the power of bluetooth, displaying the track title, artist and album on the dashboard screen. My son read the name from the back seat and asked “Who’s Bob Die-lan?”

“It’s Dylan,” I told him.

“What happened to the Avett Brothers?” he asked, “I like the Avett Brothers!”

“Without Bob Dylan there would be no Avett Brothers,” I told him. “Just listen to this.”

“I want Kick Drum Heart,” he assured me, and began to pout.

What occurred to me was the fact that it had clearly been years since I’d listened to Dylan in any sustained way. The release of Another Self Portrait was what had started this whole conversation, but it had also made me realize how long it had been since I’d listened to any early-1970s Dylan recordings. Another Self Portrait made me think I should re-examine that era. That thought led me to think I should re-examine Dylan as a whole. Which led me here.

Last January I had dinner in Paris with my friend Fredrik, who told me he was spending 2013 listening to The Beatles. He had never particularly paid much attention to them, he told me, and so now he was going slowly through their history – the original mono recordings, remastered versions, alternate takes. Immersing himself in The Beatles. I thought I’d do the same with Bob Dylan.

Unlike Fredrik, I do have a past relationship with Dylan. When I was a teenager in the 1980s I was a serious fan, buying up his back catalogue on vinyl. I recall the Christmas that I got Biograph from my grandparents and listened for the first time to some of the alternate takes and rarities found on that collection. I remember a few years later buying the Zimmerman: Ten of Swords bootleg collection from a record store in Burlington that has long since disappeared. It was the most money I had ever spent on anything.

I’ve seen Dylan perform live about two dozen times in a number of cities, but I’ve been lax about seeing him lately. In the thirteen years I’ve lived in Calgary I’ve only gone to see him once. In a lot of ways I considered myself a former Dylan fan, and while I still listen to bands that are strongly influenced by him (like the aforementioned Avetts), I wasn’t the type of person who rushed out to buy his new releases straightaway.

This is the year that I’ve decided to come to terms with Bob Dylan. 2014 is the fifty-second anniversary of the release of his self-titled debut album in 1962, and I plan to listen to a year’s worth of Dylan recordings every week for the next fifty-two weeks – never skipping ahead. Each new year will begin on a Sunday (1962 on January 5; 1963 on January 12) and will last one week. I’ll be listening to the studio albums, to some bootlegs, and to some live concert bootlegs. And I’ll be writing about it here.

I don’t plan to research Dylan that much, though I have picked up a few books (Robert Shelton, Greil Marcus, Dylan’s own Chronicles) and hope to read them at the appropriate times. I’ve glanced at the Dylanology sites out there and they are, frankly, intimidating. I’m hoping to not go that far down the rabbit hole, although there is no predicting how this all might turn out.

Today, I began by listening to the earliest known Dylan tapes – The John Bucklen tapes made in 1958 while Dylan was in high school in Hibbing, Minnesota. I don’t have much to say about these – they’re muddy and brief, and the type of thing that maybe only a very true die-hard would listen to a second time. I’m not there yet.

Please feel free to join me on this voyage. I think it should be an interesting year.