Bob Dylan – Bob Dylan (180 Gram LP Vinyl)
Product Details
Recorded in just two sessions in November 1961, Dylan was 20 years old when he walked into Columbia's Studio A with little more than a guitar, a harmonica, and a head full of Woody Guthrie. The album sold modestly at first, earning him the nickname "Hammond's Folly" after the producer who signed him, but the songs here, particularly his own "Talkin' New York" and "Song to Woody," already hint at the writer who would reshape American music within a few short years.
Numbered Special Edition
The Understated Debut That Launched a Peerless Career: Bob Dylan Is the Clearest Connection to the Singer-Songwriter's Folk Roots Pressed on MoFi SuperVinyl for Reference Playback: Mobile Fidelity 33RPM SuperVinyl Mono LP
Features the Direct Sound Dylan Intended. Bob Dylan's self-titled 1962 debut is as understated an entrance as any significant musician has ever made. Well-versed in American roots music, Dylan simultaneously pays homage to tradition and extends it by putting his own stamp on classic material that metaphorically functions as the soil of contemporary songs and styles.
Free of ego and performed with masterful conviction, Bob Dylan ranks with the initial efforts of giants like Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones. Nodding to Woody Guthrie and re-imagining Blind Lemon Jefferson's 'See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,' Dylan straddles the past and future. He authoritatively displays the ability to handle weighty topics such as death, sorrow, and lamentation with the vaudeville flair, bluesy mannerisms, and poignant command of an artist three times his then-20-year-old age.
Sourced from the original master tapes, housed in a Stoughton jacket, and pressed on MoFi SuperVinyl at Fidelity Record Pressing, Mobile Fidelity's numbered-edition 180g 33RPM mono SuperVinyl LP brings the contents of this seminal release as close as they've ever come to live-in-the-studio quality. Transparent to the source, Dylan's voice, acoustic guitar, and harmonica come across with exceptional realism - the 'husk and bark' to which Robert Shelton referred in his legendary New York Times review of a Dylan appearance at Gerde's Folk City - courtesy of the format's nearly non-existent noise floor, groove definition, and quiet surfaces.
Heard in the original mono configuration, Dylan's vocals are in the heart of the musical action and as one with the accompaniment. This reissue paints an incredibly accurate portrait of the concrete mass of sound, featuring no artificial panning and offering straight-ahead immersion into the music that producer John Hammond recorded in just two days in November 1961.
Though much has been made of the commercial indifference that greeted the album upon its low-key release, focusing on sales figures and the reaction of a public not yet hip to Dylan's name misses the forest for the trees. Distinguished from the era's other folk efforts by way of the singer-songwriter's determination, brazenness, and lived-through-this worldliness, Bob Dylan lays the groundwork for the path he'd soon trailblaze and everyone else would follow.
As Dylan scholar and pop-culture critic Greil Marcus observed in 2010: 'Everybody knew Joan Baez and the Kingston Trio; if you knew Bob Dylan, you knew something other people didn't, something that soon enough everybody had to know. Within a year, an album could put an adjective in front of the singer's name as if it were already common coin.' Mono is how almost everyone first heard Dylan's opening salvo. A career like no other starts here.MoFi SuperVinyl.
Developed by NEOTECH and RTI, MoFi SuperVinyl is the most exacting-to-specification vinyl compound ever devised. Analog lovers have never seen (or heard) anything like it. Extraordinarily expensive and extremely painstaking to produce, the proprietary compound addresses two specific areas for improvement: noise-floor reduction and enhanced groove definition. The vinyl composition features a new carbonless dye (hold the disc up to the light and see) and produces the world's quietest surfaces. This high-definition formula also enables cleaner grooves that are virtually indistinguishable from the original lacquer.
MoFi SuperVinyl provides the closest approximation of what the label's engineers hear in the mastering lab. 1/4' / 15 IPS analog mono master to DSD 256 to analog console to lathe.
Tracklist
Side A
A1. You're No Good (1:37)
A2. Talkin' New York (3:15)
A3. In My Time Of Dyin' (2:37)
A4. Man Of Constant Sorrow (3:06)
A5. Fixin' To Die (2:17)
A6. Pretty Peggy-O (3:22)
A7. Highway 51 (2:49)
Side B
B1. Gospel Plow (1:44)
B2. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down (2:32)
B3. House Of The Risin' Sun (5:15)
B4. Freight Train Blues (2:16)
B5. Song To Woody (2:39)
B6. See That My Grave Is Kept Clean (2:40)
UPC: 821797152310
Label: Mobile Fidelity
Release Date: 11.15.24
Format: LP Vinyl