Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 05/09/05
Label: Columbia

To the outsider, the Bob Dylan catalogue may seem daunting and rife with pitfalls and dead ends. Where do you start? This, the soundtrack to the mouth-watering Scorsese documentary "No Direction Home", might be a good place. It's a collection of moments spanning 1959 to 1966. Neither comprehensive nor cohesive, yet it captures the essence of Bob.

Bob Dylan is about moments. Moments where the times change, moments that blow in the wind and moments that are just "Einstein disguised as Robin Hood". Dylan never hangs around an idea too long so the decades of illegal bootlegs have become as integral to an appreciation of his art as anything officially sanctioned. Fortunately, Sony have realised this and are slowly releasing recordings even the most ardent tape collector won't have heard.

The first moment is a never before heard 1959 recording of a seventeen-year-old Bob hamfistedly strumming his way through what may be his first attempt at original composition "When I Got Troubles". There's no genius evident, yet it's charming and magical in the way that the scratchy blues 78s that so captivated his imagination are, in all their lost-world mystery.

Bob wouldn't be the first and certainly wouldn't be the last singer to cut his teeth on Woody Guthrie's protest folk but here we get an unheard 1961 version of "This Land Is Your Land" that really is the birth of Bob Dylan. It's played slowly and deliberately in such a way you can almost hear him thinking "So that's how you write a song, huh?" After that things moved pretty quick, in two years he'd be writing classics and singing them in a voice that's all his own.

Anyone still trotting out the received opinion that Dylan can't sing needs to hear the publishing demo of "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right". Present is a vocal of controlled sweetness to back up his oft repeated boast he could "sing as good as Caruso". It was all true.

On CD two of this selective history lesson, Bob goes electric. First at Newport where the crowd were supposed to have booed (this may be myth). "Maggie's Farm" is the sound of something happening and no one, least of all "Mr Jones", knows what it is. The late Michael Bloomfield's ferocious guitar tears open a hole to the future and Bob sings as if he can't get there fast enough.

If disc one is the sound of an artist steadily becoming, disc two is an artist expanding at speed. These are mostly alternate takes of the 'hits' of '65 and '66. An alternate take from Dylan may mean an entire unused verse, a complete rephrasing or an entirely different tune to the released article.

If it's possible to pick a highlight, then the soft piano driven "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" is superior to its "Highway 61" brother if only for the reflective vocal we wouldn't hear again until 1975's "Blood On The Tracks". There's a calm within it that suggests anything is possible. The next forty years would prove it was. "Visions Of Johanna" is presented in unfamiliar "thin wild mercury" style. A howling electric blues, the same sound that would accompany Bob on the infamous '66 tour where some fool shouted "Judas" and had to spend the rest of his life being wrong.

These aren't just treats for the trainspotters but the sketchbooks of da Vinci or the discarded parchments of Shakespeare…Michelangelo's whittlings! Think that's going too far? Then name a greater artistic mind alive today. Name a greater exponent of the English language. Name a more important, influential and endlessly rewarding musician, songwriter and performer. And now we get to root through his tape drawer. How does that feel?

    by Tom Townsend