Bob Dylan (album) - Aftermath

Aftermath

Bob Dylan did not receive much acclaim until years later. "These debut songs are essayed with differing degrees of conviction," writes music critic Tim Riley, " even when his reach exceeds his grasp, he never sounds like he knows he's in over his head, or gushily patronizing...Like Elvis Presley, what Dylan can sing, he quickly masters; what he can't, he twists to his own devices. And as with the Presley Sun sessions, the voice that leaps from Dylan's first album is its most striking feature, a determined, iconoclastic baying that chews up influences, and spits out the odd mixed signal without half trying."

However, at the time of its release, Bob Dylan received little notice, and both Hammond and Dylan were soon dismissive of the first album's results.

The album did not initially sell well either, and Dylan was for a time known as "Hammond's Folly" in record company circles. Mitch Miller, Columbia's chief of A&R at the time, said US sales totaled about 2500 copies. Bob Dylan remains Dylan's only release not to chart at all in the US, though it eventually reached #13 in the UK charts in 1965. Despite the album's poor performance, financially it was not disastrous because the album was very cheap to record.

On December 22, 1961, a month to the day after Bob Dylan's final session, Dylan was in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he and his friend Tony Glover paid a visit to their friend, Bonnie Beecher. Dylan held an informal session at her apartment, performing twenty-six songs which were recorded by Glover on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Often known by a misnomer, the "Minneapolis hotel tape" soon entered private circulation, providing a thorough look at Dylan's musical potential only a month after recording his debut album. A larger and far more diverse selection of songs, they were all recorded the night of the 22nd in roughly two and a half hours.

Among the songs recorded that night were the harrowing, racially-charged morality tale "Black Cross," Big Joe Williams' "Baby Please Don't Go" (in which Dylan displays his growing skills at bottleneck guitar), the Pentecostal "Wade in the Water", Dylan's own reinterpretation of the traditional "Nine Hundred Miles" (retitled "I Was Young When I Left Home" and later issued on The Bootleg Series Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack), the traditional "Poor Lazarus", a Memphis Jug Band arrangement of the traditional "Stealin'", another rewritten folk song called "Hard Times in New York Town" (based on the traditional "Hard Times in the Country Working on Ketty's Farm" and subsequently released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991), and the John Lomax discovery "Dink's Song". (According to Clinton Heylin, Lomax first heard the song "in 1908 when, across the Brazos river from Texas A&M College, he heard a lady called Dink sing her song." First published in Folksong USA, Dylan's "hotel" recording would later be included on The Bootleg Series Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack.)

Though only a few selections from the Minneapolis hotel tape were ever officially released, all twenty-six songs have been heavily bootlegged and celebrated by Greil Marcus, a music critic who wrote about the recordings in Rolling Stone Magazine. As Heylin writes, some of these songs gave Dylan "an all-important clue as to how he might mold traditional melodies and sensibility to his own worldview." This would grow to fruition when Dylan began work on his next album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, a year later. By then, both Dylan's reputation and his stockpile of original compositions would have grown considerably.

Bob Dylan was re-released in 2010 with new liner notes by Greil Marcus.