I Was So Much Younger Then
5
By JJodice
I put off getting this, assuming it would be, well, different. Instead, it has be completely re-thinking his earliest work (which has until now been my least favorite part of his catalog, as I wrote it all up to "folk music" until at least the second side of Bringing It All Back Home, when things started getting interesting. But listening to these demos he made for his music publisher between 1962-64 has been revelatory.
First, it's now clear that with just his voice and guitar (and occasionally piano), these versions as in some ways stronger than the released ones, because they were cut in a literal office, with no thought of production values or radio play, but rather as demos for potentially selling his songs to other people. As such, the performances are stunning: he's not playing for a crowd, he's playing for his peers, a much more demanding audience. He's also playing for posterity, as these would become the officially transcribed, definitive version of these songs, no matter how much he himself may have changed them in the ensuing years. So he's got a real incentive to get it right.
And he does, starting with a stunning version of "Boots Of Spanish Leather," a song as naked and autobiographical — not to mention poetic — as he would ever sing (and to think he was 22 at the time of the recording). There are some of what would become his canon, including "Blowin' In The Wind," "Hard Rain," 'Masters Of War," "Don't Think Twice," "Mr. Tambourine Man," etc. But it's the other songs that really impress, from the talking blues of "Hard Time In New York Town" and "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" to the country blues of "Mama You've Been On My Mind' and "Poor Boy Blues" to the Child Balladesque "Seven Curses."
I keep coming back to "Gypsy Lou" and "Rambling Gambling Willie," both of which could have been lost Woody Guthrie classics — but aren't. In the year-plus he'd been in New York, Dylan went from being a Guthrie clone to not just an individual but and innovator. It's easy to see Dylan's most creative and fertile period as 1965-66, when he transcended folk to rock, or even the summer and fall of 1967 when he wrote and recorded more songs than in any comparable period during his Basement Tapes recordings and return to the studio with John Wesley Harding.
But listening to these, his earliest songs, makes a strong argument for the first two years of his career as being his most revolutionary, showing just how powerful a man with voice and guitar and a vision can be. I thought there would be a monotony of sound here, but it's just the opposite. It's stunning to hear how much musical ground could be covered so sparely.
