By the end of 1961, just a year after arriving in New York from the Midwest, Bob Dylan already contained multitudes. He proves it Through the Open Windowthe eighteenth volume of the interminable Bootleg Series. At just 20 years old, that autumn Dylan recorded his first album alongside producer John Hammond. Among the many unreleased songs contained in the eight CDs of the box set there are also scraps from those sessions, including an alternative version of the traditional Man of Constant Sorrow. With the insecurity of a scout asking for the scoutmaster's approval after trying to tie a knot, Dylan cuts a take and then asks Hammond if he liked it. When Hammond asks if anyone else has already recorded that piece, a completely different Dylan comes out. «Not like that. Judy Collins did it, but not a version… not like this. It's something else.”
In the context of a box set that recounts Dylan's artistic growth in great detail before his electric breakthrough, the dialogues linked to Man of Constant Sorrow they represent a moment that is both marginal and revealing. Not because Dylan's version is superior to anyone else's, he doesn't turn it into a rock number like he will with other folk and blues, but his disdainful reference to Judy Collins suggests that the bold artist is beginning to emerge who will downsize anyone in his path to self-redefinition, shaking up the world of New York folk and popular music as a whole.
Through the Open Window covers the years from 1956 to 1963 and is therefore somehow complementary to the biopic A Complete Unknown released last year. It begins before the events narrated in the film, with a very young Robert Zimmerman having fun playing Shirley & Lee's hit Let the Good Times Roll in a music shop in St. Paul in what is Dylan's first known recording. The box set reaches up to a couple of years before the electric turning point at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. A bit like the film, it tells a story we know: a serious and ambitious boy, but apparently awkward and with a mysterious past, moves to a big city, enters the community of musicians, leaves everyone speechless with his talent and his songs, and then begins to abandon the songs inspired by the news of the day and dedicate himself to more ambitious, poetic, personal lyrics.
It is a story, needless to say, that has already been told by the official records that go back to Bob Dylan to Another Side of Bob Dylan And Bringing It All Back Home and beyond. But Through the Open Window shows us another side of that transformation. Thanks to a myriad of sources – live club recordings, tapes of Dylan singing in private homes or at gatherings, outtakes, on-stage jokes – he allows us to witness the change in this boy who moves from the Midwest to New York, frequents the cafes and clubs of the Village, plays for friends, interacts with other musicians, plunderes their repertoire (particularly that of mentor Dave Van Ronk) and converses with an enthusiastic radio DJ. It is a familiar story, yes, but there was no such detailed document of this metamorphosis, a document which also makes us understand how rapid and intense it was.
Edited by Steve Berkowitz and Sean Wilentz, the mammoth box set (also available in a reduced edition on two CDs for Dylanologists short of money) includes a certain amount of material already released in previous Bootleg Series and in other anthologies. But 48 songs had never been heard by anyone outside of collectors and keepers of Dylan's archive, which adds to their historical value. We can finally hear one of his sets in the fall of 1961 at Gerde's Folk City. That's not what the critic witnessed New York Times Robert Shelton, later writing an enthusiastic review that earned the folksinger a recording contract, but one a few days later. There is also the first live performance of Blowin' in the Wind which shows how the song was already finished from the beginning. Not all rarities live up to the legend that preceded them: the set at Folk City is certainly not perfect and Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Bluesthe infamous mockery of the ultra-conservative group, sounds far too jokey, but it's been a long time hoped that they would be officially released.
The transformation from a lively and cheeky young folksinger, a flesh, blood and cap version of the Anthology of American Folk Music that people were discovering in those years, the absolute mastery of the game manifests itself in ways large and small. Recordings of Woody Guthrie and Jesse Fuller made before arriving in New York demonstrate that he was already immersed in American popular music, and that his sound and identity were already in the process of being formed before he even headed to the city. We understand better how much he took from those around him. In a first, uncertain version of Tomorrow Is a Long Timehe quotes the “tape recorder” in front of him as if he were auditioning for a Guthrie biopic.
Those who attended his first performances in New York confirm this: Dylan was witty and his sense of humor is another revelation of the box set. He often wins over audiences with anecdotes about almost being hit by a bus, the idea of written setlists (“I don't really believe in lists… I went around copying all the best songs I could find from other people's lists”) or a ridiculous pseudo-hootenanny movie he just saw in Times Square (“Don't tell anyone,” he says and adds, “42nd Street, a very hip street”). He is a talkative and affable Dylan, a side rarely – if ever – seen on stage again. We can also glimpse signs of his post-folk future in an autograph piece titled I Got a New Girl who sings as if he were already preparing Self Portrait and in the piano piece Bob Dylan's New Orleans Ragouttakes by The Times They Are A-Changin' with a rock and roll heart. He wasn't a purist, not even from the start.
As we get closer to the end of the box set, i.e. the complete recording of the concert in autumn 1963 at Carnegie Hall which consecrated him, Dylan shows an increasingly marked sensitivity for traditional. Not only that: the speed with which his pieces become mature is astonishing. The transformation of Tomorrow Is a Long Time in the poignant beauty we know is remarkable and the version of The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrollrecorded at a friend's house in Los Angeles, is magnetic. When he arrives at Carnegie Hall, Dylan has three albums behind him and is master of his own voice, his own songs, his own presence. Sing North Country Blues as if he really belonged to that family of miners, and then moving on to A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall in a way that almost seems to tell us: that was the folk of then, this is the folk of now, and done the way I want.
The concert occupies the last two discs of Through the Open Window and it is surprising and revealing. The audience is silent during the protest songs and laughs when Dylan talks about an academic who didn't get the point of Blowin' in the Wind (“And this guy will become a teacher!”). You can feel the adoration that people feel for him and it is justified: it is one of Dylan's best (yet unreleased) concerts. At that moment, on that evening, the idea that he would soon abandon that way of making music and some of those songs – for example he will never play again Lay Down Your Weary Tune – was probably inconceivable. Yet he moved on, electrified his music just over a year and a half later, and put the Carnegie Hall season behind him. And he actually says it Through the Open Window that Dylan has always been on the verge of closing one window and opening another, overlooking a new world.
From Rolling Stone US.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
