"Now an internationally venerated and still sometimes audience-baffling 72 year old, Bob Dylan started to be increasingly broadly recognised as a significant songwriter and maverick entertainer between 1963 and 1965, depending on your local media coverage. For a couple of years before that he had been the new kid on the block within NYC's Greenwich Village community of rootsy troubadours. This 45 track 2CD set reveals his developing confidence and individuality during that formative period.
They're not all polished performances. Along with professionally produced studio recordings from which his first commercial LP was compiled in March 1962, here are historic 1961-62 live recordings from NYC stage venues and radio broadcasts. They include earliest known recordings of some of his own compositions that would carry him onward, amidst a telling repertoire of his interpretations of the folk, blues, gospel and country songs that were firing him up at the time and inspired the adolescent would-be rocker from Minnesota to become the sparky sage of sixties sub-culture leading to worldwide recognition."