JUST ABOUT AS GOOD AS IT GETS!

Now an internationally venerated and still sometimes audience-baffling 72 year old, Bob Dylan started to be increasingly broadly recognised as a significant songwriter and maverick entertainer between 1963 and 1965, depending on your local media coverage. For a couple of years before that he had been the new kid on the block within NYC’s Greenwich Village community of rootsy troubadours. This 45 track 2CD set reveals his developing confidence and individuality during that formative period. They’re not all polished performances. Along with professionally produced studio recordings from which his first commercial LP was compiled in March 1962, here are historic 1961-62 live recordings from NYC stage venues and radio broadcasts. They include earliest known recordings of some of his own compositions that would carry him onward, amidst a telling repertoire of his interpretations of the folk, blues, gospel and country songs that were firing him up at the time and inspired the adolescent would-be rocker from Minnesota to become the sparky sage of sixties sub-culture leading to worldwide recognition. This is not a ‘Greatest Hits’ package. It is a striking portrait of an intuitive student on the cusp of becoming an experimental master of his art.

CD 1: 1 Gospel Plow / 2 Hard Times in New York Town / 3 Baby let me follow you down / 4 Highway 51 Blues / 5 Talking New York / 6 Roll on John / 7 Hard Travellin' / 8 In my Time of Dyin' / 9 You're no Good / 10 Smokestack Lightning / 11 Man on the the Street / 12 1913 Massacre / 13 Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues / 14 Fixin' to Die / 15 Stealin' Stealin' / 16 Baby please don't go / 17 A Hard Rain's gonna fall / 18 Song to Woody / 19 Don't think Twice, it's alrigh / 20 Handsome Molly / 21 Kind Hearted Woman Blues / 22 See that my Grave is kept clean / 23 House of the Risin' Sun / 24 Acne / 25 Freight Train Blues

CD 2: 1 Mean old Southern Railroad / 2 Rocks and Gravel / 3 Pretty Peggy-O / 4 Talking Merchant Marine / 5 Cocaine / 6 Ain't no more cane on the Brazos / 7 The Cuckoo / 8 Sally Gal / 9 Ballad of Hollis Brown / 10 Omie Wise / 11 Motherless Children have a hard Time / 12 I Heard that Lonesome Whistle Blow / 13 No more auction block / 14 Man of Constant Sorrow / 15 The death of Emmett Till / 16 Po' Lazarus / 17 Moonshine Blues / 18 John Brown / 19 In the Pines / 20 Song to Woody (Live)