Bob Dylan - Dylan Hears A Who (1966)

Following his motorcycle accident in 1966, Bob Dylan was forced to cancel his upcoming Yale Bowl performance, as well as the rest of the tour that would have followed. A cracked vertabrae meant that he was out of action for a number of weeks while he convalesced, and then he decided to take a break from the rock-star lifestyle for a further few months while he re-thought his life. During this prolonged period of inactivity he re-evaluated his life, looking back at his childhood, and rediscovered his Dr. Seuss books, re-reading them with a new perspective. He had the idea of setting some of the poems to music, as an experiment to make sure that the trauma of the crash had not affected his song-writing talent, and when he'd finished he was keen to record the results. Fearing that his reputation as a voice of the people could be damaged if word got out about what he was doing, he gathered a few close musician friends and swore them to secrecy, and they recorded a number of the new songs together. When they were finished Dylan was pleased with the results, but knew that he could never release them officially, and so he locked the tapes away in his vault. Now confident that he had not lost his muse he started writing again in earnest, and in the spring and summer of 1967 he joined his backing band The Hawks at the communal band house Big Pink, recording over 100 new songs in what would become known as 'The Basement Tapes'. The Dr. Seuss recordings stayed hidden for forty years, until bootlegs started to leak online in 2007, in the form of an album now titled 'Dylan Hears A Who', and accompanied by contemporary artwork, so we are now able to hear the results of those late 1966 recording sessions, which helped Dylan gain the confidence to kick-start the next stage of his career.

Track listing

01 Oh, The Thinks You Can Think
02 Green Eggs & Ham
03 Miss Gertrude McFuzz
04 McElligots Pool
05 Too Many Daves
06 The Zax
07 The Cat In The Hat