Bob Dylan - Bootleg Series Vol. 9: Witmark Demos 1962-64

Nowadays in music journalism, a rumor is good as a fact. And when the longtime Bob Dylan fanzine Isis leaked the rumor of The Bootleg Series Vol. 9 earlier this year, it immediately went viral. As per normal, word of any new Dylan release is explosive information, and every major music blog—even Rolling Stone—joined in the hype. Finally in August, Columbia Records confirmed the October 19 dual release of The Bootleg Series Vol. 9, The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964, along with a new limited-edition box set, The Original Mono Recordings.

In 1962, with the ink still drying on his Columbia contract, a 20-year-old Bob Dylan signed with Leeds Music, a song publishing firm run by Lou Levy. After recording eight demos, Dylan's new manager, Albert Grossman, bought the Leeds contract on January 5, 1962 and resold it to Witmark Music Publishing, where Dylan recorded another 41 demos through 1964. These austere versions are essentially stripped-down song templates with Dylan singing to simple piano or acoustic guitar arrangements. Originally made to be passed around among music producers, musicians, and industry insiders, these recordings were never intended for the public ear.

Although a few of the demos were showcased on 1991's The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3, the bulk have remained unreleased until now. The 47 songs on the new two-disc compilation are book-ended by a fragment of “Man on the Street” from the Leeds sessions and a piano version of “I'll Keep It With Mine” from Witmark. In between are the first-ever takes of many songs that were released on Dylan's first three albums, including “Baby Let Me Follow You Down,” “Masters of War,” and “Don't Think Twice.” As Colin Escott writes in the liner notes, “The two-and-a-half year span of these recordings encapsulates an artistic transformation like no other in our time... It's almost like being there at the moment of creation again.”

The biggest feature of the Witmark compilation is the inclusion of 15 never-released originals that haven't been heard by the public in any form—essentially an album's worth of virgin material from the height of Dylan's early folk years.

In the 1960s, multi-track recording was purely state-of-the-art. Even as late as 1967, the Beatles laid down Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band on a four-track recording console, cutting edge stuff at the time. Most car radios and home record players still had that single speaker, and in the studio, engineers and artists recorded music with this in mind. It was an entirely different approach. In record stores, there was the “Mono” version and the “Stereo” version of vinyl albums, with the price difference of a dollar or two. Stereo equipment, being such new technology, was an expensive luxury for the few audiophiles and sound elitists who could afford it.

Recording for an audience of predominantly mono listeners, artists in the 1960s had to work harder to make a song sound convincing. This was especially true for someone like Bob Dylan, whose first three albums consisted of only guitar and vocals. With mono, the ear has less distractions. There are no stereo nuances, no multiple sound layers to get lost in. Because of the primitive technology, a song's melody and lyrics were forced to carry the workload.

These days, as we explore the final frontiers of audio technology with our Dolby Surround systems and enormous digital entertainment complexes that dominate our lives, there's an anti-technology backlash arising—a cult of music enthusiasts searching for authenticity. Now that all the vintage music from the 1950s-70s has been “Digitally Remastered!!!” people are turning back to the simplicity embodied in vinyl records and the mono sound delivery.

Being released simultaneously with The Bootleg Series Vol. 9, the new limited-edition box set, The Original Mono Recordings, features Dylan's first eight albums re-released in their original mono format. To capture the genuine sound quality from the first pressing, Columbia/Legacy used acetates from the original masters to create the new digital masters. The collection includes:

Bob Dylan, March 1962
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, May 1963
The Times They Are A-Changin', January 1964
Another Side of Bob Dylan, August 1964
Bringing It All Back Home, March 1965
Highway 61 Revisited, September 1965
Blonde on Blonde, June 1966
John Wesley Harding, January 1968

Available in both 180-gram vinyl ($269.99) and CD ($129.99), the box set includes the stickers, liner notes, and anything else that came with the original. More, the vinyl edition comes with a collector's T-shirt, and exact replicas of the album dust jackets round out the package for both versions. Meanwhile, a commemorative booklet contains an assortment of vintage Dylan photos, along with a new essay written by Greil Marcus, one of America's foremost Bob Dylan chroniclers. Looking back, Marcus recalled what it was like listening to music in mono in the 1960s:

“You were hearing bigger sounds than you and maybe the musicians and producers themselves had ever imagined there could be, all in that single sound, still on that single speaker, which now sometimes seemed to have caverns inside of it. There was nothing diffuse about that sound; it got your attention. It hit you in the face.”