Essential Bob Dylan (2000)

1. Blowin' in the Wind
2. Don't Think Twice, It's All Right
3. The Times They Are A-Changin'
4. It Ain't Me, Babe
5. Maggie's Farm
6. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
7. Mr. Tambourine Man
8. Subterranean Homesick Blues
9. Like a Rolling Stone
10. Positively 4th Street
11. Just Like a Woman
12. Rainy Day Women #12 & 35
13. All Along the Watchtower
14. Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)
15. I'll Be Your Baby Tonight
16. Lay, Lady, Lay
17. If Not for You
18. I Shall Be Released
19. You Ain't Goin' Nowhere
20. Knockin' on Heaven's Door
21. Forever Young
22. Tangled Up in Blue
23. Shelter from the Storm
24. Hurricane
25. Gotta Serve Somebody
26. Jokerman
27. Silvio
28. Everything Is Broken
29. Not Dark Yet
30. Things Have Changed

Notes and Reviews

The musicians:


References:

Trivia:

Reviews:

From The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia by Michael Gray:

"Essential Bob Dylan, The [2000] Released a mere five months after The Best of Bob Dylan Vol. 2,
this compilation duplicates enormous chunks of it, plus huge chunks of the first Best of Bob Dylan
from just three years earlier. In fact of the 30 tracks on this double-CD set, only four tracks are
not on one or other of those so-called best-of compilations: and of the four, two are different versions
of songs that were also on those compilations. You could also complain that there’s nothing
from the first album, a disproportionate amount from Bringing It All Back Home, that the Basement
Tapes are hardly best represented by ‘Quinn the Eskimo’, there’s nothing from Street Legal, Shot of
Love (isn’t ‘Every Grain of Sand’ more essential than ‘If Not for You’?), and nothing from the two
solo acoustic albums of the early 1990s. And so on. Yet of course you could complain whatever was
chosen, because of what would have to be omitted. To add to the confusion over Dylan compilation
albums all available at the same time, a 36-track version of this album, with the same title, was released
in the UK, France and Australia in 2001 (and in Germany as The Ultimate Bob Dylan). The
extra tracks included the unmessed-up version of ‘Dignity’. On its UK re-release in 2005, this was the
album that saw a significant sales increase immediately after the TV showing of the No Direction
Home film."

Best Song:
I think the original version of "Like a Rolling Stone" is the best song on every album that contains it but I would like to shine a light on a personal favorite: The version of "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere "on this album is from "More BD Greatest Hits". It was recorded in 1972 with Happy Traum and should be heard.
According to Alias

Favorite Lyric:
"Ghengis Kahn and his brother Don
Could not keep on keepin' on"
(from the '72 version of YAGN)
According to Alias