A Different Way To Be: in praise of a grassroots approach to releasing records

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Desire by Bob Dylan

"I guess I like it because I played that album at least a thousand times in my teens and remember loving all the documentary style photos, symbolism and general mash up of illustration and collage, and the homemade aspect of it.

It's very much of it's time. Once you've heard each track so many times you know every word the back cover stills remains a bit mysterious." Alex Gravenstein (pictured with his copy)

The collage theme seems to echo the chaotic circus feel of the early sessions for the album and the subsequent Rolling Thunder Revue. As a 2012 Mojo magazine piece on the album noted, for early sessions there were often over 20 musicians were playing at once. The frustation caused Eric Clapton, one of five guitarists, to walk out, apparently muttering, "Zimmy's gone crazy". It also mirrors the accidental nature of how the album fell together (it was pure serendipity that violinist Scarlet Rivera was spotted crossing the road with her violin case and asked by Dylan to attend the sessions).

As Billboard wrote in their glowing 1976 review, "Another plus factor is packaging, with its striking cover shot and liner photos. Also the inside liner notes are by Allen Ginsberg, and they reflect the mood of the recent Rolling Thunder Revue tour of the Northeast."

John Berg designed the album art, with the back cover collage by Carl Barile (whose only other album credit seems to be a Lester Young album on Verve) and collage photos by Ruth Bernal (who also shot covers for Harry Chaplin).

Playlist #1

Here's a selection of tracks from the first 12 records featured on The Turnaround (a few of the videos may not work on all devices). 

1. Words (Between The Lines of Age) by Neil Young (Harvest)

If this doesn't play, just search YouTube for 'Neil Young In A Barn'!

2. Westering by Hiss Golden Messenger (Poor Moon)

3. New Morning by Bob Dylan (New Morning)

4. Kingpin by Wilco (Being There)

5. I'm Waiting For The Man by The Velvet Underground & Nico

6. Little Red Rooster by The Rolling Stones (Get Stoned)

7. Everydays by Buffalo Springfield (Buffalo Springfield Again)

8. Done Somebody Wrong by The Allman Brothers Band (At Fillmore East)

9. Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars by Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim

10. Say You'll Be Min by Kitty, Daisy & Lewis (Going Up The Country single)

11. Travelling Man by Bert Jansch (L.A. Turnaround)

12. Rock and Roll by The Velvet Underground (Loaded)

New Morning by Bob Dylan

I stumbled across this in a secondhand record shop and was intrigued by the back cover. It showed a clearly much younger Dylan than the age of the album (released in 1970) standing next to someone he looked very proud to be photographed with. It was not a Dylan album that I was particularly familiar with, really only knowing "If Not For You" and "Time Passes Slowly", both of which feature on the excellent compilation Biograph, the former also covered by George Harrison on All Things Must Pass. 

It is easy to forget those we revere today also revered their predecessors. None more so than Bob Dylan, who had already been pictured on an earlier album, Bringing It All Back Home, brandishing, among other albums, a copy of Robert Johnson's King of the Delta Blues Singers. His adoration of Woody Guthrie, and his pilgramage to see him on his deathbed, is of course well documented.

Ed Ward's 1970 Rolling Stone review of New Morning sheds more light on the origin of the 1962 photo: 

"To begin with, there's the cover. Dylan, looking like he's been through some rocky times, but confident. And the back cover, with Young Zimmerman and Victoria Spivey, self-appointed "Queen of the Blues," standing by her piano. He's holding a guitar that Big Joe Williams had just given him, and she is beaming up at him, immensely pleased. The look on his face seems to say, "I thought I could do it, and I could. Shit, man, I'm Bob Dylan, that's who I am." And indeed, that's who he was. And is."

The man who took the photo of the young Bob Dylan with Victoria Spivey was Len Kunstadt, Victoria's husband and manager.

In a 2001 interview with Rolling Stone Dylan himself reinforces the point:

Rolling Stone: It seems that some of your most impassioned and affecting performances, from night to night, are your covers of traditional folk songs.

Dylan: Folk music is where it all starts and in many ways ends. If you don't have that foundation, or if you're not knowledgeable about it and you don't know how to control that, and you don't feel historically tied to it, then what you're doing is not going to be as strong as it could be. Of course, it helps to have been born in a certain era because it would've been closer to you, or it helps to be a part of the culture when it was happening. It's not the same thing, relating to something second- or third-hand off of a record.

I think one of the best records that I've ever been even a part of was the record I made with Big Joe Williams and Victoria Spivey. Now that's a record that I hear from time to time and I don't mind listening to it. It amazes me that I was there and had done that.