There’s no awful self-consciousness, no wackiness, nor even too much earnestness. This opens with a pleasant acoustic strum, a dum-dum bass line, and a slightly wet folk vocal. Crank her up, Bumstead.įarewell Angelina… most famously recorded by Joan Baez in 1965, Dylan’s only version, recorded for the Bringing It All Back Home sessions only appeared in 1991 on the first Bootleg Series Vol 1-3. They sounded as frail-weak-folk as many of the other folk efforts from the sixties, but that soon lifted and I found the record got better as it played on. My first impression on hearing this record (I always harbour the very highest hopes for these cover albums) was major disappointment. As for simulating the way Dylan might have recorded them, this is a fairly bold claim. The back sleeve of the LP says, “Recorded in the state where everything happens – North Carolina.” The back sleeve also makes the mistaken claim that these are “rare” songs many of which “were never officially recorded by Dylan.” Thus “all the songs on this album are simulated to resemble the way Dylan might have recorded them.” Two operative words here: “officially” – in fact Dylan had recorded all of these songs, and they’ve all been released in an “official” capacity since 1977, mostly through his Bootleg Series.

In the same year as this album was released they put out a Beatles tribute. So who were this band The Original Marauders, raiding and stealing from Dylan’s back pages? No public information that I can find. Jump forward six years and there’s plenty of original sealed copies going on eBay for cheap prices, as though someone suddenly unearthed a box of them in a basement somewhere. When I started this project in 2011 (reviewing all Dylan cover albums released on vinyl), this record was impossible to find anywhere.

Bob dylan band in a box files