Bob Dylan - Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan — Bob Dylan

180-gram 33 RPM Mono SuperVinyl LP

1/4" / 15 ips analog mono master to DSD 256 to analog console to lathe

Understated debut launched a peerless career!

Pressed on Mobile Fidelity SuperVinyl for reference-quality playback!

Bob Dylan's self-titled 1962 debut is as understated of an entrance as any significant musician as 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 Printing jacket, and pressed on MoFi SuperVinyl at Fidelity Record Pressing, Mobile Fidelity's numbered-edition 180-gram 33 RPM 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 that features no artificial panning and offers a straight-ahead immersion into the music 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 miss 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 none other starts here.

 

 

1. You're No Good

2. Talkin' New York

3. In My Time of Dyin'

4. Man of Constant Sorrow

5. Fixin' to Die

6. Pretty Peggy-O

7. Highway 51

8. Gospel Plow

9. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down

10. House of The Rising Sun

11. Freight Train Blues

12. Song to Woody

13. See That My Grave Is Kept Clean

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