The Original Mono Recordings

This set gathers Bob Dylan's first eight studio albums, from his 1962 self-titled debut of traditional and blues-derived material through 1968's John Wesley Harding, as they were originally mixed and most widely heard: in mono. Dylan emerged from the Greenwich Village folk scene as a songwriter of extraordinary range, moving within a few years from topical protest songs through surreal electric rock to the stripped-down parables of his late-'60s work, a trajectory that reshaped the vocabulary of popular songwriting. Albums like The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan and The Times They Are A-Changin' became touchstones of the folk revival and the civil-rights era, while Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited marked his controversial, galvanizing turn to electric rock and roll. Blonde on Blonde, recorded largely in Nashville, is regarded as one of the first major rock double albums and a high-water mark of his mid-'60s output. In these years mono was the dominant commercial format and the mix Dylan and his producers actually supervised, while the stereo mixes were often assembled afterward by engineers without the artists present. Critically, these records are considered among the most significant in American popular music, cementing Dylan's reputation as a generational voice and a central figure in the evolution of folk into rock.