The Essential Bob Dylan [Original recording remastered]

Trying to make a compilation of Bob Dylan's music is equal to taking 30 of Picasso's works, and saying "this is the artist"; the immense creativity is too deep, the development and changes too wide.
There will always be songs that the listener will feel were a mistake to omit, and for me "Ballad of a Thin Man" is the one I wish had been in this collection.
Disc One starts in 1962, with the folk days of "Blowing in the Wind", to when he went electric with "Like a Rolling Stone" from the ground-breaking Highway 61 Revisited, to the soft lilting folk/country sound of "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" from John Wesley Harding, released in 1967.

Disc Two starts with the romantic "Lay, Lady, Lay" from 1969's Nashville Skyline, through the 70's and the return of acoustic guitar and harmonica with two songs from Blood on the Tracks, to end the decade with the beginning of his Christian recordings, and a great track from Slow Train Coming, "Gotta Serve Someone".

Ten years later brings him to the fabulous "Everything is Broken", from Oh Mercy, and the collection ends with "Things Have Changed" from 1999, which was featured in the film "Wonder Boys", and the reason I bought this CD set. After viewing the film, what I remembered and liked the most was this powerful, marvelous song..

I am one of those that feel no one sings Dylan better than Dylan, and truly enjoy his rough, expressive voice; it is interesting to hear it through the span of nearly forty years on one compilation...it has become huskier, with a bit more wobble, but to my ears better than ever.
Total time for Disc One is 56:24, Disc Two 68:31, and the sound quality varies somewhat from song to song, but overall it is excellent.

I'm a great fan of Dylan, but I always feel that he's poorly served by compilations like this. It's the kind of thing you buy if you just want a few bite-sized mouthfuls of an artist's work, and you're pretty sure you won't be wanting to go any deeper than that. If that's all you're looking for from Dylan then fair enough, you'll probably find this adequate. But you'll get a much more rewarding and well-rounded introduction to Dylan if you spend a little bit more money and buy a few of his best albums instead.

I would describe this as a 'best-known' rather than a 'best-of' compilation: I mean, it mainly consists of tracks that were released as singles, and also of songs that are well-known to the general public through cover versions by other artists. The problem is that Dylan's singles are not always his best work, and in many cases are not very representative of the rest of his material. There are great songs on here, of course -- eg 'Positively 4th Street' is definitive mid-60s Dylan; 'Like a Rolling Stone' is arguably the greatest rock single ever, by anybody -- but given the wealth of Dylan's back catalogue some of what they've chosen for this collection is actually a bit ordinary. 'Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?', from 1965, is a disjointed-sounding piece that lumbers along for four minutes without ever really hitting a groove; it's not a patch on the album material he was recording at around the same time. 'I Want You' is one of the weaker, 'poppier', tracks on the wonderful 'Blonde on Blonde' album from 1966. 'Everything is Broken', likewise, is not a particularly inspiring advert for the generally excellent 'Oh Mercy', from 1989. To take another example, 'Dignity', which was recorded for the same album but not released until 1994, is a muddy, laboured-sounding midtempo shuffle that takes six minutes to go nowhere in particular.

There are a few intelligent and unexpected choices on this compilation, most notably 'Blind Willie McTell', an outtake from the 1983 'Infidels' album. Also, 'Not Dark Yet' is an outstanding track from 1997's 'Time out of Mind', one of his best songs. On the whole, though, I think the best way to get an appreciation of Dylan's work is to buy a few of his best albums and listen to those. (My own recommendations, just for the record, would be, in order of release: Freewheelin'; Highway 61 Revisited; Blonde on Blonde; Blood on the Tracks; Desire; Time out of Mind.) You can pick them up for a couple of quid each these days, so it's not likely to break anybody's bank account. And they contain classic, career-defining material that hardly ever gets included on collections like this.

I was introduced to Bob Dylan not long ago, when I bought one of his cds on a whim. Truth to be told, I liked it so much that I wanted to buy another one, if possible a cd that would allow me to listen to some of his best songs without having to buy too many cds at the same time.

I am happy to say that with this cd, "Essential Bob Dylan", I managed to do just that. Among the wonderful songs included in this cd you will find jewels such as "Like a rolling stone", "Blowin´in the wind", "Subterranean homesick blues", "Positively 4th Street" and "The times they´re a- changin´".

I am pretty sure that I will go on buying Dylan´s cds, as I enjoy his songs, and specially the the fact that his creativity knows no limits. All the same, I certainly don´t regret buying this cd, and I strongly recommend it to all those who like Bob Dylan, and to those who don´t know much about him but want to give his songs a try.

Belen Alcat