Imagine walking into a record store in 1962, strolling up and down the aisles, briefly flipping through that stack or this stack, and coming upon one particular album. You absorb the cover, the liner notes, and the like. That face on the cover is going to be known for decades to come, but right now it’s just another face in a sea of faces. What really comes through when examining that cover is the confidence. There\u2019s just a hint of a smirk, but this young kid, whoever he is, knows what he\u2019s doing.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to remove what Bob Dylan means to the American culture, zeitgeist, whatever you want to call it when it comes discussing his music. So much of it has been analyzed and critiqued; it\u2019s probably not ridiculous to think there\u2019s a Dylan 101 class on college campuses across the country. Going back to that store in \u201962, it\u2019s a near impossible task to start at the beginning with Dylan and not think of what was to come.\u00a0 Yet when we start there, at the beginning, that 19-year-old kid staring back at you from the cover has no idea what to think.<\/p>\n
What hasn\u2019t changed from 1962 is how striking of a personality Dylan exudes. One would never categorize Dylan\u2019s voice as \u201cgeneric,\u201d even from this, the start of his career. The slurry speech, the gentle nods at humor, the weariness that he possessed even at 19 add character to this simple album. At times you are convinced that you are listening to someone far older, someone whose life has worn them down. <\/p>\n
The majority of the tracks on Bob Dylan<\/i> are not composed by its namesake. Instead, there are songs that had existed in the folk\/blues community for quite some time. \u201cIn My Time Of Dying\u201d and \u201cThe House Of The Rising Sun\u201d are the most familiar to the modern day audience, albeit in different forms. Zeppelin\u2019s eleven minute take on the former and the Animals\u2019 rock epic version of the latter are great in their own right, but hearing Dylan interpret them in his style was quite fascinating. <\/p>\n
The two Dylan originals are \u201cTalkin\u2019 New York\u201d and \u201cSong To Woody,\u201d but of the two, \u201cTalkin\u2019 New York\u201d is the most interesting. The way Dylan portrays New York is both complementary and negative; his fish out of water take on the city\u2019s skyscrapers are the standard fare one expects the first time they visit. The jabs that Dylan then takes at Greenwich Village, the folk community, and the general lifestyle of the city is more in line with what we\u2019d come to expect from Mr. Zimmerman.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s not much to actually digest on Bob Dylan<\/i>; the record is straightforward. The seeds are there, the picture is starting to take shape, but if we are in our record store in 1962, what comes next? The remarkable thing about Bob Dylan is the fact that he became Bob Dylan. The music business is a cruel one, with far more crushing failures than uplifting successes. For all we knew, this kid would never have amounted then anything to more than one decent album. Of course, we all know how the story actually turned out…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":27919,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[5866],"rating":[5612],"class_list":["post-42853","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-bob-dylan","rating-rating-b-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42853\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42853"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=42853"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=42853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}