Tom Dunne: A guide to buying Bob Dylan for beginners and younger fans
Joan Baez and Bob Dylan pictured in 1963. Picture: Rowland Scherman/National Archive/Newsmakers.
Pity the young literate music fan. The film A Complete Unknown has revealed to them that they have been living on Planet Bob all this time and just didn’t know it. The camera has at last panned out. The bigger picture: it’s just all Bob.
They are mostly exploring this new love on TikTok. TikTok was made for Bob. Clips of Bob and Joan Baez sharing a microphone at Newport have drawn audible gasps from new fans. “That really happened!” they are exclaiming, “the film is true!”
TikTok will even show you how to dress like Bob. The secrets of the film’s costume designer, Arianne Phillips, of the brilliantly named fashion podcast Who, What, Wear, are laid bare. The onscreen outfits are as accurate as they are timeless.
Older fans are not being left out either. People who have for decades felt that their pearls of Dylan wisdom were being wasted on swine feel that their moment has at last come. One woman wept openly.
“Welcome to the Church of Bob,” she cried, “there is a whole world to discover.”
She then recommended that new fans join her Dylan podcast. “The episode on his 1960s murder ballads is a good place to start” she suggested. Yep, an entire podcast on his murder ballads, and just his ’60s ones at that.
It begs the question: with Bob’s enormous back catalogue; where do you even begin?
So, in the spirit of James Mangold’s triumph, I present to you A Beginner’s Guide to Buying Dylan. I’m going to stick with Mangold’s approach, limiting this guide to the period from 1963 to ’65.
It’s only three years, but it still marks the period during which Bob travelled from “fledgling folk singer” into being, as the writer Ian McDonald said one of the two artists who “switched the lights on” in the 1960s.
So, try these, listen to one a day after meals, until clarity, warmth and love envelopes you.
His second album but the first to feature almost all original songs such as 'Blowin’ in the Wind', 'A Hard Rain' and 'Girl from the North Country'. It took folk music out of the campuses and coffee shops and brought it to a much wider audience.
It’s the one with Suze Rotolo, his then girlfriend, on the cover, possibly one of the most wonderful carefree images of the entire era. You need this one to appreciate what comes next.
His fourth album and the first of a run of four all of which can rightly be described as “masterpieces”. The push past Folk’s boundaries is well underway. If its predecessor, The Times They are a Changing, was a little protest heavy, this is a far more intimate, ambitious affair.
It features, songs such as 'All I Really Wanna Do', 'Chimes of Freedom', 'My Back Pages' and It Ain’t Me. Spend as much time as you can with this, because what happens next, two albums in one year, either side of the Newport Folk Festival, needs all the context you can muster.
One side is electric, one is acoustic. The electric side features songs like Subterranean Homesick Blues, Maggie’s Farm and It’s Alight Ma I’m only Bleeding. The acoustic side features Mr. Tambourine Man. Enough said.
It was the song It’s Alright Ma that Dylan was asked about in a “60 Minutes” interview with the late Ed Bradley in 2004. Bradley played him a few verses. The lyrics are incandescently brilliant. Dylan accredited them to “this wellspring of creativity” that he then acknowledged he could no longer draw from.
“All those early songs were magically written,” Dylan said. “I can’t do that now.”
His sixth album, his second of 1965, containing what Rolling Stone magazine would describe as the “greatest rock song of all time” the epic 'Like a Rolling Stone'. He is 24. It is a song that is as important to the '60s as The Beatles’ 'A Day in the Life'.
I have stopped this guide short of the fourth album in Bob’s genius run. That album is Blonde on Blonde. Don’t go there yet. Delay gratification. Only go there when you have these albums under your belt, and then strap yourself in.
And I haven’t even mentioned Blood on the Tracks. That pleasure is for another day. This new Dylan love is only starting.
