This Dylan is not for the faint-hearted nor for the philanderer nor for the person who has only just realised that s/he had better find out what Bobby boy is all about before it's too late. Those guys will completely disagree with my five star rating and say it's only worth about three, tops.
All you get is Bob and his guitar, harmonica and piano. That's it. No embellishments, no overdubs, no clever production. The (few) stutterings are kept in, the (occasional) numbers that just peter out because Bob forgets his words are kept in, and even when he suggests to the listener that all the words are not needed and he'll write them out later, that's kept in too, apparently as everything was originally. There are 44 songs over 45 tracks, "Man on the Street" being included both in full and as a fragment. And all the ones you've heard before, all those that are well known, have better recordings available elsewhere, in some cases in several versions.
But to think (as you listen) that here was the guy who was just beginning to be called the poet of a generation, merely rattling off one masterpiece after another in some tiny studio devoid of either audience or conducive atmosphere, at the age of 21: it's simply astounding. Already you have here "Hard Times in NY Town", "Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic", "Blowin' in the Wind", "Hard Rain", "Tomorrow is a Long Time", "Emmett Till", "Let me Die in my Footsteps", "Hollis Brown", "John Birch", "Masters of War", "Oxford Town", "Don't Think Twice", "I Shall be Free", "BD's Dream", "Boots of Spanish Leather", "Girl from the North Country", "When the Ship Comes In", "The Times They are a-Changin'", "Tambourine Man", "I'll Keep it with Mine". You have demo-standard versions of songs from the man's first five albums; you have brilliant songs like "Bear Mountain" and "John Birch" that Bobby played live for a few years but didn't release on record for decades; you have songs ("I'll Keep it with Mine", "Walkin' down the Line") that were first released by other artistes (which is partly why the collection exists). This one album shows why Robert Zimmerman became His Bobness: respect, respect, respect!
And if Robert Zimmerman had fallen fatally under a Manhattan bus straight after making these recordings, this would have been his equivalent to Robert Johnson's Complete Recordings. And at least as important. Utter genius.