In 1962, a 20 year old Bob Dylan recorded an hour long show for Cynthia Gooding‘s ‘Folksinger’s Choice’ radio programme. History seems to be a bit fuzzy regarding the actual date of recording, or even if the show was actually broadcast at all. My bootleg says 11th March 1962, so that’s what I’m sticking with. You may know differently. What is absolutely astonishing about this show is that it exists at all, and in such brilliant quality. I don’t know what methods were used to extract the show from the radio to someones tape recorder. Maybe the recording is taken straight from the radio station’s own tapes (which is more than likely), but if you’re in any way shape or form a fan of Bob Dylan, you need this bootleg in your collection, it’s simple as that.
What you get is young pre-Columbia Bob playing a mixture of original and traditional material. In it’s own right, that’d be good enough. What makes this recording even better is the between-song chat between Cynthia and Dylan. They’d met each other in 1959, when Dylan sang to Gooding at a party after one of her concerts. She recognised his talent and was impressed enough to go and see him perform his own shows at places like Folk City in New York. Throughout the radio show, she is clearly in awe of him. In fact, I’d say she fancies the pants off him, and Dylan knows it. His tall stories regarding where and how he grew up are in full flow – “I’d just come from South Dakota……I’d come there from Sioux Falls“, “I was a clean-up boy, I used to be on the main line, on the ferris wheel, do just fun rides. I used to do all kinds of stuff like that…..I skipped a bunch of things, and I didn’t go to school a bunch of years and I skipped this and I skipped that.” Dylan talks about his influences, how he writes songs, and when cornered has to admit that, maybe, some of these songs, well, he only wrote the first couple of verses himself and the rest of the song is, I don’t know, something I heard before.
Bob, with healthy cigarette
Fantastic stuff, every wee bit of it. The full tracklisting on the back of the disc is below, but really, download and burn as gapless for that full radio show experience. The link for the whole show (plus artwork) in one complete .rar file is here. As a tempter, here’s one of the between-song chats and a version of ‘Smokestack Lightning’.
Lonesome Whistle Blues
Fixin’ To Die
Smokestack Lightning
Hard Travelin’
Death Of Emmett Till
Standing On The Highway
Roll On John
Stealin’
Long Time Man Feel Bad
Baby Please Don’t Go
Hard Times In New York
“D’ya like that?…………..I sure do!”
Plain Or Pan 