Hot on the heels of the announcement that Dylan’s early Witmark demos are being released as The Bootleg Series Vol. 9 comes this news that Legacy are going to be re-releasing the first 8 of Dylan’s records as a special mono box-set. Spanning 1962′s Bob Dylan to 1967′s John Wesley Harding, The Original Mono Recordings partner The Witmark Demos 1962-4 to showcase the incredible development during 5 pivotal years that sealed Dylan’s reputation as a phenomenon in modern music.

The records have been “painstakingly reproduced from their first generation monaural mixes”, and this will be the first time that the mono versions have been made available on CD. In addition to the CD set, the records will also be available on vinyl.

As well as the mono version of the records, there will be the usual paraphenalia – photos, and booklets, but also each LP will include an essay by critic Greil Marcus.

The 8 records included in the set are:

Bob Dylan – 1962
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan – 1963
The Times They Are A-Changin’ – 1964
Another Side Of Bob Dylan – 1964
Bringing It All Back Home – 1965
Highway 61 Revisited – 1965
Blonde on Blonde – 1966
John Wesley Harding – 1967

Preorders are available at SonyMusicDigital.com/bobdylan and Amazon.

So why re-release the records in mono when the stereo mixes have been available forever? And why am I so excited at the prospect?

Stereo may seem to be an obvious choice for superior reproduction, but this wasn’t always the way a record was meant to be heard. Mono was often the way that a performer wanted their music to be listened to, as a single channel of sound.

When artists put together their “preferred” versions of a record, they might concentrate on the mono mix and have the stereo mix follow that template – sometimes they might even farm out the stereo mix to someone else. For instance The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, where the mono version was prepared by the Beatles, and the stereo version was left to Geoff Emerick – with some interesting repercussions; see also this NPR discussion between Bob Boilen and Beatles historian Kevin Howlett. I could only afford one of the Beatles’ remastered sets, and I went for the stereo version. No regrets, but it makes me all the keener to hear Dylan’s mono recordings.