In his 2004 memoir, Chronicles, Volume One, Bob Dylan writes of encountering Mike Seeger in the early 1960s in Greenwich Village, and being left spellbound by the effortless mastery the folk legend exhibited in his interpretations of a dizzying array of traditional American song forms. "He played these songs as good as it was possible to play them," Dylan writes, adding that, "What I had to work at, Mike already had in his genes, in his genetic makeup... The thought occurred to me that maybe I'd have to write my own folk songs."
The 47 songs collected on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964 allow us to witness how Dylan went about doing just that. Representing the fruits of his first two publishing contracts (with Leeds Music and with M. Witmark & Sons), the set reveals a much subtler and more fascinating journey than the popular shorthand myth of Dylan's shifting cleanly from folk apprentice to political firebrand to poetic rock'n'roller. For starters, a great many of the songs to which Dylan first affixed his name as writer were simply his own original lyrics atop traditional folk melodies. Not all of these words excoriated social injustice either-- far from it. Even from the beginning, there were love songs and outlaw songs, moodily poetic songs and broad jokes. Still, The Witmark Demos does demonstrate an evolution in songwriting genius, and one that took place in a frighteningly short period of a time by a young man who'd yet to turn 24 when the last of these recordings were made. On this set, you can hear Dylan moving past the bedrock melodies of folk and crafting indelible ones of his own ("Don't Think Twice, It's All Right"). You can hear him perfecting the protest song ("Blowin' in the Wind", "Masters of War"). And you can hear him falling in love with the music of words and beginning to invent a new vocabulary for pop music (a scratchy, nascent piano-only take of "Mr. Tambourine Man").
Only 15 of the set's 47 songs are unheard in any incarnation on a previous Dylan release (more on them later). The other 32 are split fairly evenly between germinal takes on songs from early-60s Dylan albums and alternate rough cuts of tunes that appear in equally embryonic states on the first Bootleg Series issue, 1991's Volumes 1-3. You might think auxiliary efforts would be of interest only to Dylan obsessives-- and in some cases these readings scarcely differ from others in his catalogue. Still, there are revelations: The oft-covered "Tomorrow Is a Long Time" has appeared previously only in live form on Dylan's second greatest hits compilation, and the version here is far richer, the guitar playing lovely and sublime. The classic protest song "Oxford Town" may be less immaculate here, but it's more bracing and insistent. The readings of "Mama, You've Been on My Mind" and "I'll Keep It with Mine" are especially pained and plaintive, while the bitingly satirical "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" and "Rambling, Gambling Willie" are looser and more ebullient here than anywhere else they've appeared before.
As for the 15 "new" songs, a few are mere fragments and a few others are fairly boilerplate, but again there are real treasures. "Farewell" haunts with its melody while "The Death of Emmett Till" haunts with its words, yet both are outshone by the bitterly ironic tour de force "Long Ago, Far Away", where Dylan enumerates social injustices ostensibly relegated to the distant past that were in fact still occuring in his own time, witheringly spitting the refrain, "Those things don't happen no more nowadays." "I'd Hate to Be You on That Dreadful Day" and "All Over You" further display comic sides, and then there's "Long Time Gone", which shows us an initial flowering of the unflappably cool mythical icon Dylan would fully become in the mid-60s. The song's refrain offers a perfect summation of how this set reveals the historical depth of Dylan's musical education as well as the lengths to which he would eclipse it. "I'm a long time a-comin'," Dylan sings, "and I'll be a long time gone."
