I was bored.

 

So I proposed that we widen our net and consider a new set of writers for PEN membership: the pop poet, the singer-songwriter.  Dylan, for starters. Springsteen. Simon. Patti Smith. Dolly Parton. And half a dozen more.

 

The committee was soon disbanded.

 

Probably not because I had proposed to lower PEN’s exalted standards for membership, but….

 

I thought of my PEN proposal as I listened to “The Bootleg Series Vol. 9, The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964.” These 47 songs were not intended for public consumption. Their audience was other musicians — Dylan recorded these songs in the hope that singers with larger audiences would give them a fuller studio treatment and a commercial release. Then he, as the writer, would get royalties.

 

Money — these demos are all about making a living.

 

So, over two years, Dylan went into his publisher’s 6×8-foot studio. He was very much in the first, folksinger phase of his career — he accompanied himself on guitar, harmonica and, occasionally, piano (on “The Times They Are A-Changin’" and "Mr. Tambourine Man,” no less). This two-CD set is exhaustive: 47 songs, 15 that he never put on his own records. [To buy “the Witmark Demos” from Amazon, click here. For the MP3 download, click here.]

 

I don’t mean the massive nostalgia factor for listeners who were around when “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” and “Girl from the North Country” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” redefined American pop music. That should be a huge factor: where you were when you first heard these songs, who you were with, the way they grabbed your imagination, the thought you really ought to go South and do something. But that factor is, simply and astonishingly, absent.

 

What takes nostalgia’s place?

 

Delight.

 

These songs were tossed off. To save money on tape, they were recorded at half speed. But they have been so artfully re-engineered that most of them are just as good as Dylan’s recordings.

 

It says here: They’re better than Dylan’s recordings.

 

For the simplest of reasons: The ink on these songs is still wet when he goes into that little studio. He’s writing at a ferocious rate — Leon Russell recalls Dylan telling him “when he was on the road playing by himself, he’d write two or three songs before the show, and do them on that show then throw them away and never do them again.” So he’s not rewriting or rethinking — these are some of his greatest songs, recorded right after their birth.

 

And they’re just blindingly great — Dylan may be just starting out, but as a writer and a performer he’s completely professional, totally self-assured. Listening to these demos, even the most nostalgic boomer will feel, “It’s like I’m hearing these words and this music for the first time.”

 

The funny songs seem funnier, especially “Talking Bear Mountain Picnic” and “Hard Times in the City” (“If you got a lot of money, you can make yourself merry/Only got a nickel, it’s the Staten Island ferry.”) The epoch-changing songs raise the hair on the back of your neck. And the social commentary could just as easily be directed to today’s enemies of change.

 

“Tin Pan Alley is dead,” Dylan has said. “I killed it.”

 

Yes, he did, and he did it the very first time he released an album of songs that had songs by no other writers. And here they all are, tossed off on tape right before that — this really is Shakespeare in the alley.