Record Reviews - RecordDB

Artist	Title	Review
Bob Dylan	Another Side Of Bob Dylan	<p>The other side of Bob Dylan referred to in the title is presumably his romantic, absurdist, and whimsical one -- anything that wasn't featured on the staunchly folky, protest-heavy <i>Times They Are a-Changin'</i>, really. Because of this, <i>Another Side of Bob Dylan</i> is a more varied record and it's more successful, too, since it captures Dylan expanding his music, turning in imaginative, poetic performances on love songs and protest tunes alike. This has an equal number of classics to its predecessor, actually, with "All I Really Want to Do," "Chimes of Freedom," "My Back Pages," "I Don't' Believe You," and "It Ain't Me Babe" standing among his standards, but the key to the record's success is the album tracks, which are graceful, poetic, and layered. Both the lyrics and music have gotten deeper and Dylan's trying more things -- this, in its construction and attitude, is hardly strictly folk, as it encompasses far more than that. The result is one of his very best records, a lovely intimate affair.</p>— <b>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</b>
Bob Dylan	The Emmet Grogan Acetates	<P>Sometime in late 1965 or early 1966, Bob Dylan gave a cache of acetates from the recording sessions that yielded his classic LP Another Side of Bob Dylan to Emmett Grogan, a co-founder of the radical Haight-Ashbury community group the Diggers as well as the author of the cult-classic memoir Ringolevio. Although Grogan died in 1978, the tapes in question did not resurface until early 1995, at which point they were the subject of furious pirating among Dylan bootleggers; the two-disc As Good as It Gets remains the definitive compilation of this material in terms of both sound and packaging, adding demos from the legendary Highway 61 Revisited sessions to paint an authoritative portrait of Dylan's evolution from folk to rock & roll. The revelation of the set is a version of "Mr. Tambourine Man" that is far slower and more melancholy than the official release, complete with harmonies from Ramblin' Jack Elliott. "All I Wanna Do" is similarly fascinating thanks to the inclusion of an extra verse excised from subsequent renditions.</P><P>— <B>Jason Ankeny</B></P>
Bob Dylan	The Times They Are A-Changin'	<p>If The Times They Are a-Changin' isn't a marked step forward from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, even if it is his first collection of all originals, it's nevertheless a fine collection all the same. It isn't as rich as Freewheelin', and Dylan has tempered his sense of humor considerably, choosing to concentrate on social protests in the style of "Blowin' in the Wind." With the title track, he wrote an anthem that nearly equaled that song, and "With God on Our Side" and "Only a Pawn in Their Game" are nearly as good, while "Ballad of Hollis Brown" and "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" are remarkably skilled re-castings of contemporary tales of injustice. His absurdity is missed, but he makes up for it with the wonderful "One Too Many Mornings" and "Boots of Spanish Leather," two lovely classics. If there are a couple of songs that don't achieve the level of the aforementioned songs, that speaks more to the quality of those songs than the weakness of the remainder of the record. And that's also true of the album itself -- yes, it pales next to its predecessor, but it's terrific by any other standard.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p>
Bob Dylan	Live 1964	<p>It does seem strange, very strange indeed, to be hearing an official release of this historic concert, which has been available as a bootleg for decades. The Halloween gig at Philharmonic Hall in New York was a special part of the tour for <i>Another Side of Bob Dylan</i>, arguably his greatest acoustic recording. What's more poignant, however, is how it previews the material on <i>Bringing It All Back Home</i>. While the songs on Another Side hinted at things to come, nothing could have prepared audiences for the dreamy surrealism of "Mr. Tambourine Man," or the nightmarish abstract poetry of "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," and "Gates of Eden" -- all of which appear on Disc One. The remainder of the material comes from Dylan's preceding catalog; there are stirring protest and topical songs, folk songs, humorous narratives, love songs, great wisecracks, and talking blues -- "Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues!"), most of them classics -- "With God on Our Side," "Hard Rain's Gonna Fall," "Times They Are A-Changin'," "Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," "Mama You've Been on My Mind," "All I Really Want to Do," "It Ain't Me Babe" -- all of these songs and many others (there are 17 in all) are delivered with the confidence of the seasoned performer; a man who knows his audience and how to handle them. It's not cynical, not detached, just masterful. For those unfamiliar with this set, Joan Baez makes an appearance near the end of the show, and duets with Dylan on four cuts including an amazing read of "Silver Dagger." It is true that if you possess the boot, you have all the music here, and chances are, it has some pretty good sound. But you'll need this version, too. For starters, the sound is spectacular, wonderfully warm and immediate, and the transfer is extremely clean with wonderful dynamics. Secondly, the package is deluxe. In addition to a fine essay by Princeton historian and author Sean Wilentz (he made the gig when he was 13), there are a truckload of killer photos from the show and the period, along with complete discographical information that puts the bootleg packages to shame. For those interested in the acoustic Bob Dylan, this concert is like the grail; his voice is in impeccable shape, and his delivery is revelatory. For those interested in the transition from acoustic to electric, this show is the seam, and for those who are die-hard fans, this is another welcome item in the official catalog.</p>— <b>Thom Jurek</b>
Bob Dylan	The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964	<h4>The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964</h4><p>Like any fledgling songwriter, Bob Dylan signed with a publishing company at the outset of his career. Publishers are standard practice for songwriters — it's where the money comes in, as songs are published, performed, and covered — but in the early '60s there was an expectation that publishers would help place songs in the hands of appropriate singers, a practice Dylan effectively ended by popularizing writers singing their own songs, but in 1962, this self-sufficiency was a rarity. Even his 1962 debut contained only three Dylan originals, which in his case reflected his traditional folk roots, but Dylan needed a publisher for those three songs so John Hammond, who signed the singer/songwriter to Columbia, pointed him toward Leeds Music. Dylan cut a demo session for Leeds between the recording and release of Bob Dylan and when that album wound up stiffing, Leeds let him buy out his contract in the summer of 1962, which then led to him signing with M. Witmark & Sons publishing company. Between 1962 and 1964, a period that roughly spanned "Blowin' in the Wind" to "Mr. Tambourine Man," Dylan cut several demo sessions for Witmark, usually with the intent of the publisher pitching songs to other singers. Many of his early classics were first essayed here — "A Hard-Rain's Gonna Fall," "Masters of War," "Don't Think Twice It's Alright," "Boots of Spanish Leather," "Girl from the North Country," "The Times They Are A-Changin'" — and he also cut songs he never revisited. Some wound up with other artists — "Seven Curses," "Tomorrow Is a Long Time," "Mama, You Been on My Mind" — some were lost to time, leaking out on bootlegs until they officially surfaced on 2010's The Bootleg Series, Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964.</p><p>Many of these recordings have been heavily bootlegged, some excerpted on previous Bootleg Series, but they've never been presented as completely and in as great fidelity as they are on this two-disc set. Great fidelity seems almost unnecessary for such simple recordings, although the cleanliness enhances the intimacy, so familiar songs are lent freshness when surrounded by the thumping of a microphone or closing of a door. This disarming intimacy — verging on eavesdropping — is as attractive as the 15 songs that never appeared on an official Dylan album. Some of these songs are throwaways — "Bound to Lose, Bound to Win" lacks finished verses, with Bob promising that he'll write them down later — but there's considerable charm in hearing Dylan tossing off a song, plus some of these half-forgotten discards, like "Guess I'm Doing Fine" and "All Over You," are still quite strong. Nevertheless, the real appeal of this volume of the Bootleg Series is to listen as Dylan develops as a songwriter and artist. The songs spilled forth at an astonishing rate, and the great majority were not only superb, they were different from what came before, with his Woody Guthrie homage quickly replaced by a quick-witted protest singer who then started to delve into the personal in revolutionary ways. At its core, these demos are the sound of Dylan becoming Bob Dylan, and it's an evolution that's spellbinding.</p><p><strong>—Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p><hr/><p>In his 2004 memoir, Chronicles, Volume One, Bob Dylan writes of encountering Mike Seeger in the early 1960s in Greenwich Village, and being left spellbound by the effortless mastery the folk legend exhibited in his interpretations of a dizzying array of traditional American song forms. "He played these songs as good as it was possible to play them," Dylan writes, adding that, "What I had to work at, Mike already had in his genes, in his genetic makeup... The thought occurred to me that maybe I'd have to write my own folk songs."</p><p>The 47 songs collected on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964 allow us to witness how Dylan went about doing just that. Representing the fruits of his first two publishing contracts (with Leeds Music and with M. Witmark & Sons), the set reveals a much subtler and more fascinating journey than the popular shorthand myth of Dylan's shifting cleanly from folk apprentice to political firebrand to poetic rock'n'roller. For starters, a great many of the songs to which Dylan first affixed his name as writer were simply his own original lyrics atop traditional folk melodies. Not all of these words excoriated social injustice either— far from it. Even from the beginning, there were love songs and outlaw songs, moodily poetic songs and broad jokes. Still, The Witmark Demos does demonstrate an evolution in songwriting genius, and one that took place in a frighteningly short period of a time by a young man who'd yet to turn 24 when the last of these recordings were made. On this set, you can hear Dylan moving past the bedrock melodies of folk and crafting indelible ones of his own ("Don't Think Twice, It's All Right"). You can hear him perfecting the protest song ("Blowin' in the Wind", "Masters of War"). And you can hear him falling in love with the music of words and beginning to invent a new vocabulary for pop music (a scratchy, nascent piano-only take of "Mr. Tambourine Man").</p><p>Only 15 of the set's 47 songs are unheard in any incarnation on a previous Dylan release (more on them later). The other 32 are split fairly evenly between germinal takes on songs from early-60s Dylan albums and alternate rough cuts of tunes that appear in equally embryonic states on the first Bootleg Series issue, 1991's Volumes 1-3. You might think auxiliary efforts would be of interest only to Dylan obsessives— and in some cases these readings scarcely differ from others in his catalogue. Still, there are revelations: The oft-covered "Tomorrow Is a Long Time" has appeared previously only in live form on Dylan's second greatest hits compilation, and the version here is far richer, the guitar playing lovely and sublime. The classic protest song "Oxford Town" may be less immaculate here, but it's more bracing and insistent. The readings of "Mama, You've Been on My Mind" and "I'll Keep It with Mine" are especially pained and plaintive, while the bitingly satirical "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" and "Rambling, Gambling Willie" are looser and more ebullient here than anywhere else they've appeared before.</p><p>As for the 15 "new" songs, a few are mere fragments and a few others are fairly boilerplate, but again there are real treasures. "Farewell" haunts with its melody while "The Death of Emmett Till" haunts with its words, yet both are outshone by the bitterly ironic tour de force "Long Ago, Far Away", where Dylan enumerates social injustices ostensibly relegated to the distant past that were in fact still occuring in his own time, witheringly spitting the refrain, "Those things don't happen no more nowadays." "I'd Hate to Be You on That Dreadful Day" and "All Over You" further display comic sides, and then there's "Long Time Gone", which shows us an initial flowering of the unflappably cool mythical icon Dylan would fully become in the mid-60s. The song's refrain offers a perfect summation of how this set reveals the historical depth of Dylan's musical education as well as the lengths to which he would eclipse it. "I'm a long time a-comin'," Dylan sings, "and I'll be a long time gone."</p><p>— <strong>Joshua Love, Pitchfork</strong></p><hr/><h4>In Concert At Brandeis University</h4><p>Originally released on Amazon as a bonus disc for early purchasers of 2010's The Bootleg Series, Vol. 9 and The Original Mono Recordings, Bob Dylan in Concert: Brandeis University 1963 saw a wide release in the spring of 2011. Unlike the archival concerts that have popped up in The Bootleg Series, Brandeis University 1963 isn't a major statement. At seven songs, it's brief and there's no mythology behind the show; a recording wasn't even known to exist until a tape was found within the collection of music critic Ralph J. Gleason in 2009. It may be minor, but as a live recording of Dylan between the release of his debut and The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, it is certainly noteworthy, a glimpse of Dylan working folk festival bills unencumbered by fame or legend. He chooses topical songs for his two sets, bypassing "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" and "Blowin' in the Wind" in favor of "Masters of War," "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues," "The Ballad of Hollis Brown," "Talkin' World War III Blues," and "Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues," material that accentuates the show's roots in May of 1963. Dylan is in good form, open and sometimes skirting on the edge of being lively, never quite revealing that it was slightly risky to entertain a festival audience with a collection of originals previously unheard by the crowd. If the show doesn't quite manage to be memorable, it is certainly engaging, a worthwhile 38 minutes even if it doesn't quite have much more than a historic hook to warrant repeated plays.</p><p><strong>— Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p><hr/><p>This short live album was originally released in 2010 as a bonus disc to The Bootleg Series, Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964, which collected rough recordings that Bob Dylan made as part of his first two publishing deals. They were impromptu sessions in a glorified broom closet, but produced the first known recordings of some of his signature tunes, including "Don't Think Twice It's Alright" and "Blowin' in the Wind". At nearly 50 tracks, the hefty set provides a good context for In Concert: Brandeis University 1963, which was recorded during the same period. By showing his songs in their earliest, roughest, unfinished forms, Witmark allows us some insight into Dylan's creative process, while Brandeis offers a glimpse at his performative process. Together, the two sets trace a careful trajectory from song kernel to setlist, from private development to public presentation, which makes them an intriguing and useful primary source that reveals new facets of this thoroughly studied artist.</p><p>The Brandeis show was recorded in May 1963, which is auspicious: Just two weeks later, Dylan would release his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, which would make him folk's first rock star, rocketing him out of college gymnasiums and into concert halls. At this point, he was still in his very early twenties and had released only one previous record, a self-titled LP that was a notoriously poor seller. At the Brandeis Folk Festival, he was billed under Pete Seeger and Jean Ritchie, among several other, more established acts.</p><p>As scholar Michael Gray writes in the new liner notes (which weren't included in the bonus version), this was a fairly typical Dylan show for the time. It's likely he gave many similar performances in 1962 and early 1963, and all that distinguishes this one from any other is that it survives. Only recently discovered in the archives of the late critic Ralph J. Gleason, co-founder of Rolling Stone, the tapes provide a valuable snapshot of pre-fame Dylan, who gives a rambling performance that balances gravity with levity. "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" and "Talkin' World War III Blues" scoff at anti-communist scaremongering and war-profiteering justifications, and Dylan's barbed satire provokes some laughs from his audience. He addresses the same subjects on the dead-serious "Masters of War" and "Bob Dylan's Dream", on which his earnest strumming and mournful harmonica evoke a sense of solitude, as if sanity in the face of such madness has isolated him from humanity.</p><p>The setlist is, however, lackluster, showcasing what would become deep-album cuts to the neglect of his better material. By the time he winds up his lengthy intro to "Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues", his talking blues delivery has grown tiresome even. Of course, Dylan was likely tailoring his setlist to his audience and perhaps to the festival itself. Regardless, at seven songs (six-and-a-half if you discount the excerpt of "Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance"), Brandeis is necessarily slight. It needs context. In that regard, it might have been interesting to hear this set as one of the many live performances from that same folk festival, if only for the opportunity to contrast Dylan with his contemporaries and to determine his place within the folk scene. Otherwise, it's difficult— if not impossible— to determine from these recordings what exactly distinguished this ambitious young artist from everyone else with a guitar and harmonica. Ultimately, Brandeis was more valuable and revealing as a bonus disc than as a standalone album.</p><p>— <strong>Stephen M. Deusner, Pitchfork</strong></p>
Bob Dylan	The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert At Philharmonic Hall	<p>It does seem strange, very strange indeed, to be hearing an official release of this historic concert, which has been available as a bootleg for decades. The Halloween gig at Philharmonic Hall in New York was a special part of the tour for Another Side of Bob Dylan, arguably his greatest acoustic recording. What's more poignant, however, is how it previews the material on Bringing It All Back Home. While the songs on Another Side hinted at things to come, nothing could have prepared audiences for the dreamy surrealism of "Mr. Tambourine Man," or the nightmarish abstract poetry of "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," and "Gates of Eden" -- all of which appear on Disc One. The remainder of the material comes from Dylan's preceding catalog; there are stirring protest and topical songs, folk songs, humorous narratives, love songs, great wisecracks, and talking blues -- "Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues!"), most of them classics -- "With God on Our Side," "Hard Rain's Gonna Fall," "Times They Are A-Changin'," "Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," "Mama You've Been on My Mind," "All I Really Want to Do," "It Ain't Me Babe" -- all of these songs and many others (there are 17 in all) are delivered with the confidence of the seasoned performer; a man who knows his audience and how to handle them. It's not cynical, not detached, just masterful. For those unfamiliar with this set, Joan Baez makes an appearance near the end of the show, and duets with Dylan on four cuts including an amazing read of "Silver Dagger." It is true that if you possess the boot, you have all the music here, and chances are, it has some pretty good sound. But you'll need this version, too. For starters, the sound is spectacular, wonderfully warm and immediate, and the transfer is extremely clean with wonderful dynamics. Secondly, the package is deluxe. In addition to a fine essay by Princeton historian and author Sean Wilentz (he made the gig when he was 13), there are a truckload of killer photos from the show and the period, along with complete discographical information that puts the bootleg packages to shame. For those interested in the acoustic Bob Dylan, this concert is like the grail; his voice is in impeccable shape, and his delivery is revelatory. For those interested in the transition from acoustic to electric, this show is the seam, and for those who are die-hard fans, this is another welcome item in the official catalog.</p><p>— <strong>Thom Jurek</strong></p>
Bob Dylan	Another Side Of Bob Dylan	<p>The other side of Bob Dylan referred to in the title is presumably his romantic, absurdist, and whimsical one -- anything that wasn't featured on the staunchly folky, protest-heavy Times They Are a-Changin', really. Because of this, Another Side of Bob Dylan is a more varied record and it's more successful, too, since it captures Dylan expanding his music, turning in imaginative, poetic performances on love songs and protest tunes alike. This has an equal number of classics to its predecessor, actually, with "All I Really Want to Do," "Chimes of Freedom," "My Back Pages," "I Don't' Believe You," and "It Ain't Me Babe" standing among his standards, but the key to the record's success is the album tracks, which are graceful, poetic, and layered. Both the lyrics and music have gotten deeper and Dylan's trying more things -- this, in its construction and attitude, is hardly strictly folk, as it encompasses far more than that. The result is one of his very best records, a lovely intimate affair.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p>
Bob Dylan	BBC Broadcast
Bob Dylan	Seems Like A Freeze Out
Bob Dylan	Times They're Changin'	<p>If The Times They Are a-Changin' isn't a marked step forward from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, even if it is his first collection of all originals, it's nevertheless a fine collection all the same. It isn't as rich as Freewheelin', and Dylan has tempered his sense of humor considerably, choosing to concentrate on social protests in the style of "Blowin' in the Wind." With the title track, he wrote an anthem that nearly equaled that song, and "With God on Our Side" and "Only a Pawn in Their Game" are nearly as good, while "Ballad of Hollis Brown" and "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" are remarkably skilled re-castings of contemporary tales of injustice. His absurdity is missed, but he makes up for it with the wonderful "One Too Many Mornings" and "Boots of Spanish Leather," two lovely classics. If there are a couple of songs that don't achieve the level of the aforementioned songs, that speaks more to the quality of those songs than the weakness of the remainder of the record. And that's also true of the album itself -- yes, it pales next to its predecessor, but it's terrific by any other standard.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p>
Bob Dylan	While The Establishment Burns
Bob Dylan	Bringing It All Back Home	<p>With Another Side of Bob Dylan, Dylan had begun pushing past folk, and with Bringing It All Back Home, he exploded the boundaries, producing an album of boundless imagination and skill. And it's not just that he went electric, either, rocking hard on "Subterranean Homesick Blues," "Maggie's Farm," and "Outlaw Blues"; it's that he's exploding with imagination throughout the record. After all, the music on its second side -- the nominal folk songs -- derive from the same vantage point as the rockers, leaving traditional folk concerns behind and delving deep into the personal. And this isn't just introspection, either, since the surreal paranoia on "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" and the whimsical poetry of "Mr. Tambourine Man" are individual, yet not personal. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, really, as he writes uncommonly beautiful love songs ("She Belongs to Me," "Love Minus Zero/No Limit") that sit alongside uncommonly funny fantasias ("On the Road Again," "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream"). This is the point where Dylan eclipses any conventional sense of folk and rewrites the rules of rock, making it safe for personal expression and poetry, not only making words mean as much as the music, but making the music an extension of the words. A truly remarkable album.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p>
Bob Dylan	Highway 61 Revisited	<p>Taking the first, electric side of Bringing It All Back Home to its logical conclusion, Bob Dylan hired a full rock & roll band, featuring guitarist Michael Bloomfield, for Highway 61 Revisited. Opening with the epic "Like a Rolling Stone," Highway 61 Revisited careens through nine songs that range from reflective folk-rock ("Desolation Row") and blues ("It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry") to flat-out garage rock ("Tombstone Blues," "From a Buick 6," "Highway 61 Revisited"). Dylan had not only changed his sound, but his persona, trading the folk troubadour for a streetwise, cynical hipster. Throughout the album, he embraces druggy, surreal imagery, which can either have a sense of menace or beauty, and the music reflects that, jumping between soothing melodies to hard, bluesy rock. And that is the most revolutionary thing about Highway 61 Revisited -- it proved that rock & roll needn't be collegiate and tame in order to be literate, poetic, and complex.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p>
Bob Dylan	Live At Newport 1965
Bob Dylan	Highway 61 Revisited	<p>Taking the first, electric side of Bringing It All Back Home to its logical conclusion, Bob Dylan hired a full rock & roll band, featuring guitarist Michael Bloomfield, for Highway 61 Revisited. Opening with the epic "Like a Rolling Stone," Highway 61 Revisited careens through nine songs that range from reflective folk-rock ("Desolation Row") and blues ("It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry") to flat-out garage rock ("Tombstone Blues," "From a Buick 6," "Highway 61 Revisited"). Dylan had not only changed his sound, but his persona, trading the folk troubadour for a streetwise, cynical hipster. Throughout the album, he embraces druggy, surreal imagery, which can either have a sense of menace or beauty, and the music reflects that, jumping between soothing melodies to hard, bluesy rock. And that is the most revolutionary thing about Highway 61 Revisited -- it proved that rock & roll needn't be collegiate and tame in order to be literate, poetic, and complex.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p>
Bob Dylan	Bringing It All Back Home	<p>With Another Side of Bob Dylan, Dylan had begun pushing past folk, and with Bringing It All Back Home, he exploded the boundaries, producing an album of boundless imagination and skill. And it's not just that he went electric, either, rocking hard on "Subterranean Homesick Blues," "Maggie's Farm," and "Outlaw Blues"; it's that he's exploding with imagination throughout the record. After all, the music on its second side -- the nominal folk songs -- derive from the same vantage point as the rockers, leaving traditional folk concerns behind and delving deep into the personal. And this isn't just introspection, either, since the surreal paranoia on "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" and the whimsical poetry of "Mr. Tambourine Man" are individual, yet not personal. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, really, as he writes uncommonly beautiful love songs ("She Belongs to Me," "Love Minus Zero/No Limit") that sit alongside uncommonly funny fantasias ("On the Road Again," "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream"). This is the point where Dylan eclipses any conventional sense of folk and rewrites the rules of rock, making it safe for personal expression and poetry, not only making words mean as much as the music, but making the music an extension of the words. A truly remarkable album.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p>
Bob Dylan	The Other Side Of The Mirror - Live At Newport	<p>"Bob Dylan going electric" at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival is one of those epochal moments in rock history that seemingly everyone has heard about, but what few people seem to know is that it wasn't some ephemeral event that we only know from word of mouth — filmmaker Murray Lerner documented the performances at the Newport Festival for several years running, and The Other Side of the Mirror collects footage from the three years Dylan appeared at the celebrated folk gathering, allowing us to see Dylan's rise through the folk scene for ourselves. Watching Lerner's documentary, what's most remarkable is how much Dylan changed over the course of 36 months; the young folkie performing at the afternoon "workshop" at the side of Joan Baez in 1963 is at once nervy and hesitant, singing his wordy tunes while chopping away at his acoustic guitar and energizing the crowd without seeming to know just what he's doing. In 1964, Dylan all but owns Newport, and he clearly knows it; he's the talk of the Festival, with Baez and Johnny Cash singing his praises (and his songs), and his command of the stage is visibly stronger and more confident while his new material (including "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "It Ain't Me, Babe") sees him moving away from the "protest songs" that first made his name. When the audience demands an encore after Dylan's evening set (Odetta and Dave Van Ronk were scheduled to follow him), Peter Yarrow tries to keep the show moving along while Dylan beams at the crowd's adulation, like the rock star he was quickly becoming.</p><p>By the time the 1965 Newport Festival rolled around, Dylan's epochal "Like a Rolling Stone" was starting to scale the singles charts, and the hardcore folk audience was clearly of two minds about his popular (and populist) success. When Dylan, Fender Stratocaster in hand, performs "Maggie's Farm" backed by Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield and the rhythm section from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the raucous but hard-driving number inspires a curious mixture of enthusiastic cheering and equally emphatic booing, and while legend has it that the version of "Like a Rolling Stone" that followed was a shambles, the song cooks despite drummer Sam Lay's difficulty in finding the groove, though if anything the division of the crowd's loyalties is even stronger afterward. After these two numbers, Dylan and his band leave the stage, with Yarrow (once again serving as MC) citing technical problems (if Pete Seeger really pulled the power on Dylan, as legend has it, there's no sign of it here); Dylan returns to the stage with an acoustic six-string to sing "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" before vanishing into the night without comment. While much of the audience at Newport in 1965 wanted the "old" Dylan back, his strong, willful performances even on the acoustic stuff makes it obvious that the scrappy semi-amateur we saw at the beginning of the movie was gone forever, and the ovations suggest more than a few people wanted to see Dylan rock. Lerner's film tells us a certain amount of what we already knows, but it gently debunks a few myths about Dylan during this pivotal moment in his career, and his performances are committed and forceful throughout; no matter how many times you've read about Dylan's Newport shoot-out of 1965, seeing it is a revelatory experience, and Lerner has assembled this archival material with intelligence and taste. This is must-see viewing for anyone interested in Dylan or the folk scene of the '60s.</p><strong>— Mark Deming</strong>
Bob Dylan	Bringing It All Back Home [SACD]	<p>With Another Side of Bob Dylan, Dylan had begun pushing past folk, and with Bringing It All Back Home, he exploded the boundaries, producing an album of boundless imagination and skill. And it's not just that he went electric, either, rocking hard on "Subterranean Homesick Blues," "Maggie's Farm," and "Outlaw Blues"; it's that he's exploding with imagination throughout the record. After all, the music on its second side — the nominal folk songs — derive from the same vantage point as the rockers, leaving traditional folk concerns behind and delving deep into the personal. And this isn't just introspection, either, since the surreal paranoia on "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" and the whimsical poetry of "Mr. Tambourine Man" are individual, yet not personal. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, really, as he writes uncommonly beautiful love songs ("She Belongs to Me," "Love Minus Zero/No Limit") that sit alongside uncommonly funny fantasias ("On the Road Again," "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream"). This is the point where Dylan eclipses any conventional sense of folk and rewrites the rules of rock, making it safe for personal expression and poetry, not only making words mean as much as the music, but making the music an extension of the words. A truly remarkable album. [In 2003, Columbia/Legacy reissued 15 selected titles from Dylan's catalog as hybrid SACDs, playable in both regular CD players and Super Audio CD players. Each title is packaged as a digipak, containing the full original artwork. On each of the titles, and on each of the layers, the remastered sound is spectacular, a considerable upgrade from the initial CD pressings. Bringing It All Back Home was one of five titles that also included a 5.1 Surround Sound mix.]</p><p><b>— Stephen Thomas Erlewine</b></p>
Bob Dylan	Don't Look Back 65 Tour Deluxe Edition	<p>The best documentary movie ever made about a single rock artist (although Dylan wasn't really a rocker when much of it was shot). It's all about Dylan's 1965 British tour and the frantic scene that surrounded him. A minor flaw: it doesn't get any better than the opening conceptual video of "Subterranean Homesick Blues."</p><p><b>— Bruce Eder</b></p><hr/><p>Director D.A. Pennebaker's black-and-white 1967 documentary film Don't Look Back largely chronicles Bob Dylan's tour of the U.K. in the spring of 1965, the last outing on which the not-quite-24-year-old singer/songwriter appeared solo, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar and harmonica. Already, however, he had begun to move toward folk-rock, having just recorded and released his LP Bringing It All Back Home, half of which consisted of arrangements featuring electric instruments. That he is in a transitional phase in his development comes out early, as the film opens with what is in effect an early music video, in which he stands in a an alley holding and discarding a pile of posters featuring words from his current folk-rock single, "Subterranean Homesick Blues," as the record plays on the soundtrack. Then begins the film proper, as Pennebaker's hand-held camera follows him from his arrival in England on April 28, 1965, to his final concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London on May 10. Right off the bat, the director's major theme, Dylan's relationship with the news media, emerges in a press conference at which mass-market journalists, skeptically treating him as a phenomenon, ask hostile questions couched in posh English accents. "Do you think that a lot of the young people who buy your records understand a single word of what you're singing?," asks a woman, following up with, "Would you say that you cared about people particularly?" Dylan responds jokingly and good naturedly at first. But later in the film, as he reads or has read to him articles and reviews written about him and continues to encounter journalists backstage, he loses his patience and begins to give as well as he has gotten, and in considerably less calm tones, for example, telling off an unidentified reporter for Time magazine (Horace Judson) in no uncertain terms. It's not hard to hear the songwriter about to turn out "Ballad of a Thin Man" in his remarks. Something similar happens as Pennebaker chronicles the backstage and hotel room gatherings at which Dylan encounters fans and fellow musicians; again, things start out friendly enough, but there are also angry outbursts as too many people, some of them drunk, behave badly around the singer and get tongue lashings as a result. Again, the soon-to-be-written "Positively 4th Street" comes to mind. Dylan's main entourage consists of Bob Neuwirth, serving as personal assistant, and manager Albert Grossman, who does some shouting of his own and is glimpsed negotiating the terms of a television appearance (probably the one Dylan did for the BBC a few weeks later). Pennebaker also provides some footage of Dylan on-stage at various venues on the tour, although this is not primarily a performance film, and no song is performed in its entirety. Others also give impromptu performances backstage and in hotel rooms, including Alan Price, Joan Baez, and Donovan. When it first appeared in 1967, Don't Look Back was an eye-opening look at the tumultuous life of Bob Dylan circa 1965. It only grew in stature in later years, ranking as a classic examination of the world of popular music as it was lived in the '60s.</p><p>—<strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p>
Bob Dylan	Don't Look Back

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