Bob Dylan – Man on the Street Review

We scrape through the barrel of releases on hot summer nights to find something, anything, worth listening to. Compilations of Bob Dylan are always a secure way to spend the evening. A comfortable blanket of expected performances with unexpected quality within. Who knows if it will be as crisp as Supper Club or as rough as The Forgotten Sessions. His YouTube channel, surely a dumpster fire of hidden gems and cobbled-together playlists, is worth a scrounge? It is. Man on the Street makes it worth raking through those many artificially generated playlists for it provides ever-so-slightly different recordings of The Bootleg Series: Volume 1 to 3. The title and another couple of listens to opening track Man on the Street is a dead giveaway, and there is little else in the way of information. 

Whatever the case it is just nine songs and the likes of Song to Woody and Talking New York featuring in this playlist should be a clearer nod to earlier material. Death takes over Dylan’s stream of consciousness on the title track and only the rupture of applause at the end breaks it. It feels sombre and melancholic, a tone Dylan has taken up in his earliest and latest works with a tremendous sense of mortality. It filters into Fixin’ to Die with a more obvious tone to it. What this compilation serves as is an example of the gruff voice Dylan would soon be mocked for. Mr Mumbles is just as much an artistic choice as it is a contemporary change to his voice for the sake of interest. Fixin’ to Die sounds like the gruff articulations of a pub singer trying to cut above the fog and haze brought on by pints of bitter. Smoky function rooms where the crowd is listening but not looking. It adds a necessary character to the songs making up the Man on the Street compilation. 

Perk up when you hear Gospel Plow, for its introduction has pangs of Mr Tambourine Man. Crash back to reality with a giggling audience who make way for an early religious folk experience from Dylan. Again, it utilises the wonders of a gruff voice and a harsher fear of the almighty. Soulful momentum on crisp recordings where the only drawback is Dylan and his positioning. But you can almost see him rocking back and forth, craning his neck as he delivers the likes of Song to Woody and Freight Train Blues, moved by the passion of his earliest efforts. Rare moments of conversational lightness from Dylan can be heard within. 

Though there is little tangible context to connect these songs bar them being early performances, Man on the Street benefits from a cool drift. A soft performance of gentle yet confident folk tones which Dylan hangs his hat on for the first few years of his career. Rightly so. When the likes of Black Cross and Talking New York sound so firm yet fresh, it is a bright sign of the man behind them. There is a silence in these live recordings from the crowd which inflicts awe on a listener decades later. Whooping and hollering can never compete with the crystallised silence, the eruption of crackling, piercing applause following on from a set of career-defining songs. Man on the Street is a nice listen, if a little tricky to place.