The first Record of the Month Club pick for 2026 is the original version of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, released in 1963 before being pulled by Dylan and Columbia Records, and re-released with an alternate track listing.
Early pressings of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan originally included four songs that were later pulled: “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” “Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” “Rambling Gambling Willie,” and “Rocks and Gravel.” Those tracks were replaced at the last minute with newer recordings, and Columbia supposedly destroyed the original copies before release. A handful slipped through anyway, making the original version of the album incredibly rare and valuable today—one copy has sold for around $35,000.
The original release was finally made available to the public on Record Store Day Black Friday in late 2025 in a limited pressing of 13,000 copies. The RSD release of Freewheelin’ includes the four alternate songs as well as original liner notes by Nat Hentoff that didn’t appear on the version of Freewheelin’ we know so well.
Record of the Month Club members will be getting a copy of the Record Store Day Black Friday release.
Freewheelin‘ also includes the track “Oxford Town,” written in 1962 in response to the Ole Miss riot over James Meredith’s enrollment at the University of Mississippi. The song never names Meredith or the university, keeping its message broader and more timeless, as Dylan later explained. Dylan has only performed the song live once—at the Tad Pad on the Ole Miss campus on October 25th, 1990.
A little more on The “original” Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan:
The final drama of recording Freewheelin‘ occurred when Dylan was scheduled to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show on May 12, 1963. Dylan had told Sullivan he would perform “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues”, but the “head of program practices” at CBS Television informed Dylan that this song was potentially libelous to the John Birch Society, and asked him to perform another number. Rather than comply with TV censorship, Dylan refused to appear on the show. There is disagreement between Dylan’s biographers about the consequences of this censorship row. Anthony Scaduto writes that after The Ed Sullivan Show debacle, CBS lawyers were alarmed to discover that the controversial song was to be included on Dylan’s new album, only a few weeks from its release date. They insisted that the song be dropped, and four songs (“John Birch”, “Let Me Die in My Footsteps”, “Rambling Gambling Willie”, “Rocks and Gravel”) on the album were replaced with Dylan’s newer compositions recorded in April (“Girl from the North Country”, “Masters of War”, “Talkin’ World War III Blues”, “Bob Dylan’s Dream”). Scaduto writes that Dylan felt “crushed” by being compelled to submit to censorship, but he was in no position to argue.
According to Heylin, “There remains a common belief that [Dylan] was forced by Columbia to pull ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’ from the album after he walked out on The Ed Sullivan Show.” However, the “revised” version of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was released on May 27, 1963; this would have given Columbia Records only two weeks to recut the album, reprint the record sleeves, and press and package enough copies of the new version to fill orders. Heylin suggests that CBS had probably forced Dylan to withdraw “John Birch” from the album some weeks earlier and that Dylan had responded by recording his new material on April 24. Whether the songs were substituted before or after The Ed Sullivan Show, critics agree that the new material gave the album a more personal feel, distanced from the traditional folk-blues material which had dominated his first album, Bob Dylan.
A few copies of the original pressing of the LP with the four deleted tracks have turned up over the years, despite Columbia’s supposed destruction of all copies during the pre-release phase (all copies found were in the standard album sleeve with the revised track selection). Other permutations of the Freewheelin‘ album include versions with a different running order of the tracks on the album, and a Canadian version of the album that listed the tracks in the wrong order. The original pressing of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan is considered the most valuable and rarest record in America, with one copy having sold for $35,000.
