Joseph Henry “T Bone” Burnett is probably best known for producing the soundtracks to the Coen brothers’ movies, particularly “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and “Inside Llewyn Davis,” but he’s also got a side line: Designing new analog sound recording/playback systems.
Back in 2008 he announced something called CODE, which purported to reproduce master-tape sound quality on CDs, in an effort to combat mp3 technology. Unless you’re a hardcore audiophile you’ve never heard of it, which tells you how successful it was.
He’s at it again with something called Ionic Original. According to Burnett, acetate provides the highest fidelity in replaying music, but it degrades quickly. So he developed a process that coats an aluminum disc with hardened acetate that he says will degrade so slowly that you won’t notice it for a thousand plays or so.
Considering that most Boomers have tinnitus or hearing loss from decades of listening to loud music, much of it of medium fidelity in the first place, I’m not sure how broad the market for that might be. But Burnett has learned his lesson. His Iconic Originals are aimed not at the masses but the fine art/collectibles market.
For his first release he got Bob Dylan and a small acoustic band to lay down a new version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” — the first time Dylan has recorded it since his original — and had Christie’s auction off the one and only physical disc as an art object. It fetched $1.78 million, about double the pre-auction estimate.
More importantly for us, the song, recorded last year, has found its way to YouTube. According to whoever posted it, the backing band consists of Burnett on electric guitar, Greg Leisz on mandolin, Stuart Duncan on violin, Dennis Crouch on bass, and Don Was on bass.
Even those in the younger half of the Boomer generation might not appreciate the impact the song had when it appeared on vinyl in 1963 — not so much Dylan’s reading on “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” as the Peter, Paul and Mary cover single released three weeks later. Their version, recorded on the first take, sold 300,000 copies within a week, but was kept out of the No. 1 spot on the Hot 100 by Stevie Wonder’s “Fingertips.”
Dylan debuted the song in April 1962, more than a year before the record appeared, at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village. It was only two verses long at the time.
