In 1978, music fanatic David Eckstrom was living on the outskirts of Los Angeles and out for a drive when an unfamiliar song suddenly blasted from the car radio. Struck by the R&B-style call-and-response vocals between the throaty lead singer and soulful trio of backup vocalists, and digging the smooth saxophone, Eckstrom pulled over so that he could listen with purpose, patiently waiting for the DJ to announce the name of the artist behind this great new song.
Sure enough, Eckstrom had just heard Bob Dylan’s “Baby Stop Crying,” the lead single from his newly released album “Street-Legal.” The song served to reintroduce Eckstrom to Dylan, who no longer sounded like the guy whose early ‘60s albums he remembered as mainstays of his older brother’s turntable. Back on the road, Eckstrom rerouted to the nearest record store in Santa Monica and purchased his first small batch of Dylan records, including “Street-Legal.” This was the auspicious start of an ongoing odyssey.
Today, Eckstrom’s personal record collection contains some 6,000 Dylan releases, with an additional 4,000 or so by various well-known and obscure artists hailing from every corner who have covered Dylan, all vying for shelf space with an extraordinary array of Dylan items dating back to his years at Hibbing High School and stretching far beyond. All in all, Eckstrom maintains one of the preeminent private collections of Dylan music and memorabilia. Case in point: Dylan's longtime graphic designer Geoff Gans came calling when searching for visual cues to inspire the look and feel of "The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006.”
Beyond the size of Eckstrom’s collection, it’s the rarity and condition of so many of the recordings that make it truly special and the envy of fellow Dylanologists worldwide. In 1991, Eckstrom secured his crown-jewel item-one of three known copies of a stereo recording of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” featuring four tracks on the label and pressed into the grooves but that were quickly deleted from all subsequent released-for a cheeky $12,345.67.
This is the one-the record that everybody wants but almost nobody has. A few hundred mono copies were pressed and sent out in a single shipment from a plant in Santa Maria, California in early ’63; Eckstrom has some of those, too. Only these first pressings of “Freewheelin’” contained the controversial song “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” which CBS-TV prevented Dylan from performing on “The Ed Sullivan Show” that spring. CBS Inc. followed suit by removing the track from Dylan’s second album, which already had been fully approved and prepared. For reasons still debated by fans and collectors today, three additional tracks were stripped from the intended commercial release, and four new songs shuffled in. Whatever the record execs were thinking, the conundrum at Columbia Records produced a fever dream for crate-diggers in perpetual search for the Holy Grail of Dylan records.
It's fun stories like this, shrouded in mystery and myth, that help keep the candle burning on physical media. Perhaps, at times, it takes human error to make something special, and something a streaming algorithm can’t compute.
Watch to learn more about Eckstrom’s remarkable collection, his 11,000-square-foot Dallas record store, and the rare pressings he loaned to the Bob Dylan Center for the current exhibition “How Many Roads: Bob Dylan and his Changing Times, 1961-1964.”