When Bob Dylan first started, the music business was a completely different game from what it is today. Songwriters wrote the songs and different singers sang those songs. At that time, singing, songwriting mavericks like Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Buddy Holly were few and far between. Who’d have ever guessed a skinny bohemian from Minnesota and his acoustic guitar, playing “hard-lipped folk songs with fire and brimstone servings” would come along to lift rock and roll by its bootstraps and help it across the great divide. Was the kid a poet for his time or a genius of all time? Listening to The Witmark Demos, the ninth volume in Dylan’s fabled Bootleg Series, offers the first glimpse of that genius as it develops into something all its own — for any time.
And what to make of these 47 songs, composed and sung by a young man, somehow wiser, more road-weary and seasoned than most men twice his age? Some of them became hits for other singers, like Peter, Paul and Mary’s version of “Blowin’ In The Wind” by and the Byrd’s psychedelic interpretation of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Others would become part of Dylan’s idiosyncratic fabric of folk and blues ruminations — “Man On The Street,” “Poor Blues,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “Master Of War,” “Girl From The North Country” and “The Times Are-A-Changin’.” Still others wouldn’t see official release until long after Dylan had already claimed his throne — “Ballad For A Friend, “ Long Ago, Far Away,” “The Death OF Emmett Till” and “Guess I’m Doing Fine.”
It’s important to remember that the songs here were recorded for Dylan’s publishers, whose intentions were more concerned with the songs than the man who wrote them. Thousands of artists would go on to record Bob Dylan songs, but to hear the master architect, baring his soul with an acoustic and a brave, unpolished vocal is like witnessing birth. The Witmark Demos may have been vehicles to sell songs, but they accomplish more in showing just how delicate and precious a melody and a few words could be when delivered by Bob Dylan. The two-CD package, filled out by an informative 60-page booklet, marks an early chapter in Dylan’s colorful and extensive history, still on the rails with no end in sight.
~ Shawn Perry
