Wider Grooves, Superior Sound: Mobile Fidelity’s 45RPM Edition The Last Word in Analog Fidelity!
Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home represents the moment that pop and rock music became their own art form, expressions finally treated with the same seriousness and respect as classical and jazz. Incalculably influential, the 1965 landmark established myriad benchmarks in songwriting, sound, artwork, and performance. It served the world notice that Dylan was no longer just the virtuoso visionary tuned into the wants of the folk community. It’s a disarming broadcast that declares Dylan’s surroundings and personality, and those of his audiences, whether they knew it or not, drastically changed.
As part of its Bob Dylan catalog restoration series, Mobile Fidelity is thoroughly humbled to have the privilege of mastering the iconic LP from the original master tapes and pressing it on 45RPM LPs at RTI. The end result is the very finest, most transparent analog stereo edition of Bringing It All Back Home ever produced. Forever renowned for its organic sound, the album’s you-are-there-presence is fantastically enhanced on this superb version, with wider and deeper grooves affording playback of previously buried information.
The sonics are so realistic, balanced, and tonally accurate that acoustic guitars resonate with the woody decay they do as when you strum them on your lap. Equally vivid are the textures of the drum skins, amplified pitch of the electric guitars, and ambient hum of the interior space of Columbia’s Studio B. Both the plugged-in and acoustic sides claim a discerning level of microdynamics, spaciousness, imaging, and warmth that will send even the most rabid Dylan fan into a tizzy. And what better record to cause such enthusiastic reactions?
More than 45 years after its release, Bringing It All Back Home continues to come on like a prophetic transmission from a savant who’s privy to cerebral viewpoints, mental transferences, and “thought dreams” elusive to everyone but him. With the flipside of the album, Dylan strings together four of the most unflinching, forward-reaching, and boundary-breaking acoustic-based compositions ever played. In addressing liberating psychedelia, lost innocence, institutional naiveté, and tarnished relationships, respectively, Dylan constructs a compositional quartet/suite that functions as metaphor for his waving goodbye to political folk music’s imprisoning rules and bounding restrictiveness—and a rough guide to the transcendental poetry, shape-shifting vocal phrasing, and alternate tunings he now embraced.
Side One remains one of the boldest cohesive artistic statements ever assembled. Dylan, forever throwing down the gauntlet to detractors and narrow-minded fans, plugging in with a band and kicking it all off with the in-your-face hootenanny “Subterranean Homesick Blues” before romping, slashing, and rolling through “Maggie’s Farm,” another fun albeit caustic indictment of homogenous thought and bohemian method. Dylan’s attitude undergoes a self-awakening metamorphosis, his lyrical scope broadened, his hallucinogenic interests increased, his willingness to embrace paradoxes and shake them out with mind-convulsing aptitude in line with his progression towards bizarre imagery.
Ranked 31 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, Bringing It All Back Home marks the moment when paradigms permanently shifted, preexisting standards fell, and fresh aural, poetic, and sonic dialects came to fore. Albums don’t come more vetted. You deserve to experience it in the finest-possible quality. |