Moonshiner – Bob Dylan

“The whole world’s a bottle/and life is but a dram./When a bottle gets empty/God it ain’t worth a damn.” –unknown

I have been reading the Bob Dylan autobiography recently and have been going through Dylan’s back catalog and dusting off my old mp3’s to relisten to his music and imagine what it might have been like to be present for the 1960’s music scene.  Various tapes, recorded during live Dylan performances at the Gaslight Theater during his stay in Greenwich Village in 1962, were circulated as bootlegs until 2005 when Columbia cobbled together some of the songs to release as a 17-track live album.  It’s the earliest Dylan I’ve heard, and it captures a tender, uncertain time in the early stages of his career, yet the songs exemplify the keen lyrical power of music that would come, with or without Dylan’s consent, to speak for his generation.  Among the tracks that would be refined on proper LPs (many of which are early versions of songs now quintessential to Dylan’s ouvre) I discovered Moonshiner–an elegiac folk ballad of unknown origin though most resources point to Irish folk roots (it still serves as a popular pub song there).   You can listen to the live Gaslight version here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKGIlanky0U

The song would later show up as a track that did not make the final cut for The Times They Are A’Changin’ but was later released on Volume 1 of the 8 volume and counting bootleg series.  Listen to the studio version of the song here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RiZhejroXU

I also discovered an interpretation of the song by Cat Power, in signature sultry minor key, which can be heard here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx120yg_JDk

I love this song as a pinprick in the immense mythical tapestry that has been woven over time in an attempt to capture the enigmatic Bob Dylan.

~James