A New Set of Bob Dylan Demos Shows a Songwriter in Bloom.
By JIM FUSILLI
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/
October 21, 2010
In early 1961, 19-year-old Bob Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village to succeed as a folk singer. But, as he put it in his wonderfully whimsical autobiography, "Chronicles: Volume One," "Nothing would have convinced me that I was actually a songwriter."
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Bob Dylan in February 1963, prior to the release of his second album, 'The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.'
.Yet as demonstrated by the newly released "The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964 (The Bootleg Series Volume 9)," Mr. Dylan took quickly to songwriting, his skills blossoming with almost incomprehensible speed. The two-CD set contains 47 demos recorded during a two-year period beginning in January 1962 for the music publishers Leeds Music and M. Witmark & Sons. Though his earliest songs are derivative, within a span of 24 months Mr. Dylan grew to write "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," "The Times They Are A-Changin'," "Mr. Tambourine Man" and several other songs that would become American classics. Peter, Paul & Mary scored a national hit with "Blowin' in the Wind," a song Mr. Dylan wrote before his 21st birthday.
All the songs on "The Witmark Demos" were recorded, and many were written, in New York City—"The city that would come to shape my destiny," Mr. Dylan wrote in "Chronicles." Early on, it gave him a theme. In the song "Hard Times in New York Town," he wrote: "There's a-mighty many people all millin' all around / They'll kick you when you're up and knock you when you're down."
But if New York proved a challenge, it also provided stimulus. Mr. Dylan was already a prodigious and discerning reader, an avid consumer of pop culture, and he had a democratic approach to good songwriting. In the Village he rubbed shoulders with smart people who were full of ambition and ambitious people who didn't know they weren't smart. "Everybody seemed like somebody and nobody at the same time," he wrote in "Chronicles." He consorted with anyone who had a feel for his destiny. He took it all in, decided what was valuable, and let it all flow into his compositions.
In short time, Mr. Dylan no longer needed to co-opt anyone's compositional style or point of view. He created a new template for contemporary pop composers, combining roiling rhythms, rooted in the rock 'n' roll of his youth, with his distinct style of lyrics—not merely rhymes, but words or phrases no other songwriter would think of using.
The new set contains 15 compositions Mr. Dylan never officially released. Perhaps because they're unfamiliar to us, these songs give a keen glimpse of the songwriter as he's developing, while reminding us of the foundation of his later work. "Ballad for a Friend" and "Standing on the Highway" are the kind of traditional folk-blues that form the spine of Mr. Dylan's best recent compositions. "Long Ago, Far Away" is a rousing precursor to the protest song "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," released in 1965. "The Death of Emmitt Till" foreshadows the extraordinary "Blind Willie McTell," a song Mr. Dylan recorded in 1983.
Given that the versions on "The Witmark Demos" were cut for his song publishers and weren't intended for public consumption, Mr. Dylan performs with surprising fire. "Hero Blues" and "Paths of Victory" sound like they were recorded in concert; so does his reading of "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down," a song he didn't write. To lay out the chords to show the songs' adaptability, Mr. Dylan performs "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "The Times They Are A-Changin'" on piano rather than guitar.
Along with "The Witmark Demos," Columbia has just released remastered mono versions of Mr. Dylan's first eight studio albums, revealing another sign of the songwriter's growth: Of those released in demo version, nine songs appeared on "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" (1963) and four on "The Times They Are A-Changin" (1964). In each case, Mr. Dylan refined his craft as a performer, delivering his songs with intimacy and intensity, dazzling us with wordplay without overwhelming us or pushing us away.
By 1964, Mr. Dylan had moved beyond New York City; a wanderlust that defines him to this day was already in play. Yet it was there in Greenwich Village that he became Bob Dylan, songwriter.
"As for me," he wrote in "Chronicles," "what I did to break away was to take simple folk changes and put new imagery and attitude to them, use catchphrases and metaphor combined with a new set of ordinances that evolved into something different. I knew what I was doing, though, and wasn't going to take a step back or retreat for anybody."
—Mr. Fusilli is the Journal's rock and pop music critic. Email him at jfusilli@wsj.com or follow him on Twitter: @wsjrock.
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