On a cold day in January 1961, Bob Dylan, like one of Jack Kerouac’s characters, arrived in New York City and headed straight to the clubs of Greenwich Village. Eight months later, he was discovered by John Hammond and signed a contract with Columbia Records. The folksinger’s first album, simply titled Bob Dylan, was recorded in two three-hour sessions on November 20 and 22, 1961, and released a few months later on March 19, 1962. That marks the beginning of one of the most astonishing and exciting chapters in the history of popular music.
Bob Dylan has long been a mythical figure, a guide, and a reference point. The public knows multiple facets of Dylan: poet, songwriter, musician, singer, actor, and author. The labels are as numerous as they are narrow. It would be pointless to pigeonhole the creator of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “Idiot Wind” in a particular role. He is at once Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, and Little Richard, and he draws poetic and philosophical inspiration from William Blake, Allen Ginsberg, and Arthur Rimbaud, as well as biblical texts. He revisits and then transcends the great maelstrom of musical and artistic sensibilities. “It speaks to me as I listen to some of the political rhetoric,” Barack Obama once said of “Maggie’s Farm.” That is also Dylan’s genius. Everyone finds in his extensive repertoire a song that touches, speaks to, and moves him.
More than half a century has passed since Bob Dylan, a debut album that sounded like a poignant tribute to the pioneers of the blues. Thirty-six studio albums have been released in addition to singles, compilations, soundtracks, and the famous Bootleg Series. After all these years of enchanting and transforming the world, the artist’s popularity is undiminished. Therefore, today, it seems appropriate to go back over his career from the songs first recorded in Minneapolis, well before John Hammond took Dylan under his wing at Columbia, to Shadows in the Night, released in February 2015. This last album is at once an appreciation of Frank Sinatra and a tribute to the Great American Songbook.
Bob Dylan: All the Songs focuses on Dylan’s studio songs, album after album, single after single, outtake after outtake. Indeed, to embrace the totality of his work, albums and singles are not enough. Dylan often recorded many more titles than required for the final track listing on an album. Unsuccessful recordings, designated by the term outtakes, have been released since 1991 in a collection of official records called The Bootleg Series, with the latest installment to date appearing in November 2014. In this book we present the outtakes from each album, indicated by the series number of the corresponding bootleg and a small icon just after the official song. For these outtakes, we omit only unpublished takes of the songs that are not on official albums. It has not been possible for us to write about all 138 takes on The Basement Tapes Complete, released at the end of 2014. However, we do discuss all the songs on The Basement Tapes issued in 1975, except those not performed by Dylan himself. We also present the early songs, written before Dylan signed with Columbia.
A total of 492 songs are discussed. After a chronological presentation of the albums, singles, and compilations to which the songs belong—recording circumstances, technical details, cover design, instruments—each song is analyzed from two perspectives: genesis and lyrics (inspiration and delivered messages) and production (Dylan’s musical approach and recording techniques, including the contributions of musicians, producers, and sound engineers).
For this long journey through Dylan’s galaxy, we relied on interviews with the songwriter himself and his numerous collaborators (musicians, producers, sound engineers, etc.), relatives, and friends, as well as on a large number of books, articles, and websites. Footnotes document each source.
We have undertaken this long exploration keeping objectivity in mind. Information is sometimes unverifiable, especially about the presence and absence of particular musicians, the exact instrument played, what producer or sound engineer worked on which recording session, and the dates of certain recordings. In these cases, we have used a question mark in parentheses (?).
Time to raise the curtain on the theater of Dylan’s work—a theater of emotions constantly transformed, a deeply human drama.