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CD of the month
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Music buff's choice
Bob’s back again ...
It’s perhaps surprising that Bob Dylan has not yet been granted the full remaster/bit-mapping/bonus track treatment that has been afforded every last footnote act in pop history. A handful of his remastered albums did slip out a couple of years ago, however, and they have now been joined by ‘Bob Dylan’ and ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ (both Sony), from 1962 and 1964 respectively. |
Staying in the mix... |
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‘Bob Dylan’ is remarkable in that it boasts only two Dylan originals - ‘Talking New York’ and ‘Song To Woody’. The rest of the album largely comprises the kind of songs Dylan was playing around the folk clubs of New York at the time. It was from this album that The Animals picked up on ‘House Of The Rising Sun’, an early example of Dylan’s ability to provide mega-hits for other artists - but rarely himself.
‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ was the high point of Dylan’s protest period, with the title track still a rallying call for bedsit revolutionaries. But the acerbic ‘With God On Our Side’ has lasted less well than such individual portraits of injustice as ‘The Ballad Of Hollis Brown’ and ‘The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carol’.
The absence of bonus material is a minor disappointment, and there may even have been a case for the kind of 2-on-1 reissues granted the early Beach Boys catalogue, but this is to quibble, for both these reissues are, in their different way,s iconic. |
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