There are times when boxed sets of a musician’s work are nothing more than a way to appeal to two potential buyer groups. First, there are the just-starting-out-and-wanting-to-jumpstart-the-collection buyers who see it as a crash-course in their new interest’s catalog. And then there are the borderline obsessive-compulsive completists who will wade through 50 songs they already have on the original albums just to lay hands to the one never-before-released track that’s tucked on the end of the boxed collection. In the end, the question oftentimes begs to be asked: other than sales numbers, what’s the point?
In the case of Columbia/Legacy’s newly-released box set Bob Dylan – The Original Mono Recordings, the answer is clear: this is the way this period of music was meant to be heard. From Bob Dylan’s self-titled debut album released in 1962 to 1967’s John Wesley Harding, the studios were simply the canvas, not a brush or a color. There were no Electric Ladyland sessions exploring the realms of sonic redesign. The original monaural recordings of Dylan’s first eight LPs were documents of the music, plain and simple.
The recordings were captured in single-channel mono – any stereo manipulation of the sound was a matter of dissecting the event as it happened and rearranging history. (And in the case of just the young Mr. Dylan and his guitar, if you’re faced with concocting some stereo separation, what else can you do but put the vocal here and the guitar over here?) They were intended to be heard in mono: through the single cluster of holes in the dashboard, the transistor pressed to the ear, or the record player’s self-contained speaker. (They weren’t called turntables back then, boys and girls – they were record players.)
Think of the sound of Dylan’s early music as a cone: on the far end – the receiving end – the sound would prove itself to be as big as the whole world. But what needs to be remembered is that the small end of that cone was no bigger than perhaps a foot-and-a-half in diameter – whatever the distance was from the treble strings of Bob Dylan’s guitar to his mouth. That was it. The harmonica sat just inside that same circle, waiting to be employed as needed.
When the number of players increased, so did the size of that sonic cone’s point of origin – but it was still a single point, a defined sonic source, a solid punch. To bust the presentation apart for the sake of stereo separation is to change it. Ultimately, you’ve altered the message.
The Original Mono Recordings represents the first time these albums have been available on CD in their original mono form. In addition to the two titles already mentioned, the box set includes The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963), The Times They Are A-Changing (1964), Another Side Of Bob Dylan (1964), Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965), and Blonde On Blonde (1966). Note those original release dates, folks (the actual span is from March of ’62 for Bob Dylan to December of ’67 for John Wesley Harding) – those were the years when Dylan was becoming Dylan and the evolution expressed itself in prolific song.
Rather than a cut-by-cut re-review of material that has been written about constantly for 40-something years, let’s take a look at the albums included in The Original Mono Recordings, focusing on one key moment from each that represents the power and immediacy of the mono presentation.
It’s hard to believe that the young lad on the cover of Bob Dylan – all pinchable-cheeked and doe-eyed – was the owner of the road-weary voice contained within. Of course, he really wasn’t – he was just borrowing it. Woody Guthrie was young Bob’s hero and the hobo zenmaster’s presence is felt all over the album. There are glimpses of what lay ahead for Dylan, however – even the harsh world of rock and roll. And the mono presentation only adds to the drama.
“Highway 51” on Bob Dylan is more than a rearranging of an old Curtis Jones blues tune – it’s absolute pure punk. Seven years before Ron Asheton’s fuzzed-out guitar welcomed in “I Wanna Be Your Dog”; fifteen years before Johnny Rotten snarled his way through “Anarchy In The UK”, Bob Dylan – corduroy cap, sheepskin jacket and all – growled and banged his way through “Highway 51” with a vengeance. He may have come into town on a path cleared by Woody, Cisco Houston, and Sonny Terry, but this performance shows that Dylan was planning on blazing trails of his own. The mono mix concentrates the fierceness of his attack on the song, from the driving, pounding, dead-nuts-on bass string runs to his wild-sounding rhythm flails. In stereo, the song’s delivery is spread out and softened; here, you’re looking Dylan straight in the eye – and he stares right back at you.
His second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, was released a year later. By then, Dylan was starting to show more of himself; where his debut included only two originals, eleven of Freewheelin’s thirteen tunes are his.
“I Shall Be Free” jumps up and kicks its heels in all its slapstick glory in mono. The concentration of the sound intensifies the tightrope walk of Dylan’s performance: you think he’s going to lose it, trying to drive home way more words and syllables than there’s possibly room and time for – but just as it seems that the song is going to crash, he catches it and keeps it spinning. This is total Buster Keaton/Charlie Chaplin teetering-on-the-edge-of-disaster slapstick combined with wordsmithery that tosses out big questions left and right.
Offered in mono, “I Shall Be Free” is as colorful and playful as a big ol’ R. Crumb cartoon – dig Dylan’s imaginary conversation with President Kennedy (“my friend Bob” and “my friend John”) and his “Mr. Football Man” on TV (a predecessor to the Stones’ man who “comes on to tell me how white my shirts can be”?) – but you can feel the intensity of the real message right beneath the surface. The stereo mix doesn’t allow for proper appreciation of how hard he’s working the guitar or the little squalls of rhythmical harp between verses. Mono invites you in.
There are no cartoons, though, on The Times They Are A-Changin’ – and there’s no subtlety, either. The album’s songs all belong to Dylan and they are observations of a world overrun with hate, racism, and poverty. These performances are all the more powerful in the stark mono setting.
Particularly hard-hitting is “With God On Our Side”, whose lyrics question the holier-than-thou-of-course position adopted by any and all sides throughout history. Beneath the words, Dylan lays down a steady but impossible-to-count-off foundation on his guitar. In mono it’s easy to hear how the guitar’s rhythm is constantly changing behind the vocal. Sometimes there is a moment of almost 3/4-time waltz, other times there’s a charging beat, pounding home the message being sung. It’s hard to imagine that what you’re hearing is being performed live by a single person – and the mono presentation makes it all the more remarkable.
Another Side Of Bob Dylan features a number of other sides, actually. It’s obvious right off the bat that this is a lighter-hearted album than its predecessor, with Dylan barely managing to keep a straight face throughout “All I Really Want To Do”. (He finally loses it at the tail end of the last verse, but gathers himself up and lets it fly on the chorus.) The album features some strong guitar work, most noticeably on “I Don’t Believe You” where Dylan tosses out everything from “Walk Right In”-style bass runs to a punched-out chord accompaniment on the final chorus that sounds like a Stax horn section.
But the most interesting revelation on Another Side (and a great example of where the monaural mix shines) is Dylan’s recording debut as a piano player on “Black Crow Blues”. Regardless of what the stereo presentation was ever meant to do, the song actually has more depth in mono: you have better perspective; you actually feel like Dylan is singing across the top of the piano at you; the thumping foot is down below somewhere; and when he catches the occasional chug on the harmonica, you get a sense that he’s trying not to overblow in relation to the piano. It’s a never-before-heard Dylan moment and he’s working hard at it. Another side indeed.
Dylan proclaims that “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” in “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, the raucous romp that ushers in Bringing It All back Home. It’s just as true that you don’t need stereo to tell you where the music is coming from on the album’s 11 cuts, whether it be on the full-band numbers or the solo Dylan performances.
“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” is a unique hybrid, with Dylan accompanied solely by bassist William Lee III. The single-channel presentation gives life to “Baby Blue” – Lee’s bass weaves with Dylan’s acoustic guitar in a way that stereo wouldn’t allow. There’s no funny business here – the only reason why Lee’s bass seems louder at times is because he lays into the strings harder.
The mono payoff on Highway 61 Revisited is so immediate it’s almost scary. In fact, it is scary – that opening crack of Bobby Gregg’s snare drum is right there in mono. Not over there or over there: it’s right there, up front and dead-center. As an attention-getter, Dylan couldn’t have fired off a louder cannon; as a warning shot, it doesn’t allow much time to get prepared for what’s to come.
A heartbeat later, Al Kooper’s miles-deep organ rolls right over top of you, followed by Dylan’s opening salvo, “Once upon a time …” And when Mike Bloomfield pushes to the front to be heard between verses, the mono setting truly makes it seem as if he’s bending deeper over his Telecaster (legend has it he brought it to the session case-less, covered in snow) to get the extra wallop, rather than it just being brought up by an engineer’s hand.
Highway 61 Revisited as a whole revels as a mono album; but that opening crack says it all. It’s the sound of many things being broken wide open forever.
If you thought Blonde On Blonde sounded thickly-textured at times in stereo, wait until you hear it in mono. No matter what the historians say, it’s hard to believe that any of this music could’ve been recorded at any other hours than between midnight and 4:00. For the Original Mono Recordings box set, Blonde On Blonde is broken into two discs, just as the original release was a double album. From the opening slurry madness of “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” to the dense layers of “Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands”, Blonde On Blonde is loaded with singalongs, anthems, and the kind of songs that people apply to the best and worst times in their lives.
“One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later)” is simply full of sound – and full of emotion – as a mono mix. This is as close as Dylan gets to a full-blown apology, and backing up his words are swells of organ, thumping piano, rolls of bass and drum thunder, with snarling, barking guitar. As the song builds to its crescendo (and Dylan unloads his final bit of pathos on the last chorus), it seems that there couldn’t possibly be enough room left in the room for one more bit of sound (not in terms of volume, but in sheer weight) – but then Dylan lets loose with a blast of harmonica that says what his words couldn’t. It’s a moment of majestic ache.
Closing out The Original Mono Recordings is John Wesley Harding, Dylan’s “comeback” of sorts after his infamous motorcycle accident in the summer of ’66. The sound is much more stripped-down – not a total return to Dylan’s roots, however, as he was backed by drums and bass throughout the album (along with Pete Drake’s steel guitar on the final two cuts).
Dylan’s harmonica takes the place of some of the orchestration used on the albums that preceded John Wesley Harding – and it does a fine job of it. There is a delicacy and preciseness to Dylan’s harp work on this album that he doesn’t often employ. Again, the monaural setting is perfect for the natural dynamics of the neck-racked harmonica against the strummed guitar. Witness “I Pity The Poor Hobo”: with just enough of a bass rumble and acoustic guitar to set the mood, Dylan’s harmonica jumps in hand-in-hand with the drums – beginning the story-telling even before the first verse gets underway. Whereas Dylan’s harp colorings are often laid on with wide brush strokes, “Poor Hobo” is full of single-reed bends and wails, resorting to fuller tones only at the very end in a moment of resolution.
Fan or not, you cannot deny the importance of Bob Dylan’s music. And if you never heard these early albums in their originally-intended mono form, you’d never know what you were missing. But once you do …
Bob Dylan – The Original Mono Recordings is the audio equivalent of a true master painter’s work on the original canvas rather than as a color-manipulated print. This stuff is the real thing.
