SHARE Bob Dylan’s debut album, a self-titled interpretation of folk classics with two original compositions, was such a big flop when it released in 1962 that record executives considered dropping his contract. But Dylan, then an aspiring 20-year-old singer-songwriter, had the good graces of influential record producer John Hammond, who had signed the budding star to Columbia Records and stood by him. “His guitar playing, let us say charitably, was rudimentary, and his harmonica was barely passable, but he had a good sound and a point of view and an idea," Hammond would later recall of Dylan in biographer Robert Shelton’s 1986 book