The £1m Bob Dylan recording – how does it actually sound?

Bob Dylan was 21-years old when in 1962 he sat down in a Greenwich Village coffee shop opposite the Gaslight Cafe, where he had been performing on and off since arriving in New York a year before, and wrote Blowin’ In the Wind.

It took him all of ten minutes. ‘I was never satisfied with Blowin’In The Wind,’ he would later tell his first biographer Robert Shelton. It was, he said, ‘a lucky song… one dimensional.’

It would be almost a year before the song was released on his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. The most potent of what he would later call his ‘finger-pointing’ songs. It went on to become the anthem of the burgeoning civil rights movement, and to be recorded  by some 300 different artists, from Peter, Paul and Mary to Stevie Wonder,  the most covered of all Dylan’s compositions.

Dylan recorded the song for the first time on July 12, 1962, on a mono 7 and a half inch-per-second reel to reel tape recorder. Today, sixty years on from that original recording, Christie’s will be auctioning a new version, recorded by Dylan last year with a five-piece band, using what is being hailed as a new groundbreaking patented technology to create a ‘One-of-One Ionic Original Disc’. The sale estimate for this single existing copy of the recording is between £600,000 and £1 million.

According to Dylan’s long-time collaborator and friend T-Bone Burnett, who produced the record, which has been created with a process involving the original acetate, or master recording, being layered with a protective quartz and sapphire solution to make it particularly long lasting, it ‘advances the art of recorded sound and marks the first breakthrough in analogue sound reproduction in more than 70 years’. 

Yesterday morning I joined a number of  prospective buyers and committed Dylan fans queuing outside a small room in Christie’s, eager to hear just how dramatic the promised improvement in sound would be - the only chance to hear the sound was in person before it goes under the hammer today.

There was an air of hushed reverence as I entered the room where the record was to be played, on equipment that defined the term state of the art. Wearing white gloves, Michael Piersante, who engineered the original recording session and had flown to London for precisely this purpose, handled the disc as if it was the Book of Kells as he placed it on the deck. I clamped on the £4,000 headphones and watched as the needle was lowered down.

The music sounded fantastic.

The clarity and sense of presence was like no other recording I had ever heard before. It sounded as if Dylan was in my head - a place that he has actually occupied since I first heard Subterranean Homesick Blues as a schoolboy and thought, who and what the hell is that?

Over the years, much like an original acetate recording, Dylan’s voice has weathered and decayed - a fact that has tested even his most loyal fans watching him perform. But, due to Covid, Dylan had not been on the road for almost two years when he recorded the new version of Blowin’ In The Wind and his voice was comparatively rested, and if not exactly rejuvenated, then certainly all the stronger and more assured.

Sixty years after it was written, the lyrics of the song have lost none of their relevance and sting - if anything they sound more relevant than they ever did - but the angry, urgent intensity of the 21-year-old Dylan has now given way to the melancholic fatalism of the 81-year-old.

Could it be worth £1million?  Whether you think so largely depends on how devoted a Dylan fan you may be, and how deep your pockets are. The answer is…well, you know the answer.