I swung on to my old guitar, grabbed hold of a subway car

Continuing my trip back through the 1965 album charts.

16/05/65 : Bob Dylan - Bob Dylan


An unlucky thirteenth visit with Bobbles - after our recent visit with Tom's debut album, we have another one kicking off a long and illustrious career. But I suspect I'm not gonna like it.

Actually, I didn't mind it. It's got some very fancy guitar playing on it and whilst he does have an annoying voice on it, it's not the annoying Bob voice he developed in later years. Interestingly, considering this is his debut album and he was at the comparatively tender age of 21, he's often singing like a grumpy old grandpa - and also, oddly, often only through the left stereo channel. There's way more harmonica on here than I'd usually go for - but hey, whaddya gonna do? It also gives us the third version of "The House Of The Rising Sun" this year (after Joan Baez and Marianne Faithfull) and I didn't mind his version at all. I'll certainly not be rushing back to the album but it's an interesting (first) step on a long and varied career, so I'm glad I caught up with it - it's almost like I'm mellowing to Bob in my old age.

We're at #13 in the charts this week on his third week of a five week run, with this being as high as it got. The top five this week were Bob Dylan, TSOM, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and Mary Poppins and we have three new entries for The Animals (#7 - pretty high for a new entry for the time), Burt Bacharach (#16) and Jim Reeves (#18).

Wikipedia has less than I was expecting (114 milliPeppers) and it tells us it didn't get much attention to start with, but, unsurprisingly, got more interest as his career progressed. It's mostly traditional folk tunes, but has a couple of Dylan originals on it - there's an awful lot of background information in there, but it's mostly just "Bob wasn't that well known at the time, but things were about to change". Critically, it was pretty much ignored at the time but has been revisited often since and is viewed as "generally OK" - interestingly, commercially it's the only Dylan album never to chart in the US.

"Customers also listened to" Joan Baez and some random folk compilations - no major surprise there methinks. I didn't love the singing here, but it was a lot less annoying than I was expecting and it's got some very decent guitar playing on it so all in all, it was an unexpected, if not quite pleasant surprise. 

09/05/65 - Him again?!?
23/05/65 - A beautiful voice

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