By Michael Goldberg.
Bob Dylan’s Early Days: New 8 CD set focuses on Dylan’s transformation into the greatest songwriter of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series Volume 18: Through the Open Window, 1956-1963, is one of Dylan’s best Bootleg Series albums, topped only by the Basement Tapes set and The Cutting Edge 1965–1966 (which includes all the recordings that went into the making of Dylan’s first three rock ‘n’ roll albums, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde). Anyone who likes Dylan’s early ‘60s acoustic albums needs Through the Open Window.
I’ve been savoring these recordings since I got an advance copy in September of this year. But I’ve also been learning some things while listening. Even in the late ‘50s, before Dylan had become a serious songwriter, a distinct personality came across in his voice, guitar and harmonica playing. There was simply no one like Dylan, and it didn’t matter if he was covering Woody Guthrie or the Memphis Jug Band, the unsophisticated recordings that exist, sometimes made in friends’ apartments, have that unique Bob Dylan sound.
The new set was compiled/produced by historian/Dylan expert Sean Wilentz (author of Bob Dylan in Americaand numerous history books) and Grammy-winning producer Steve Berkowitz (who previously oversaw Sony’s release of reissues for Dylan, Johnny Cash, Miles Davis, Robert Johnson and others). Wilentz wrote the brilliant liner notes for the beautiful 124-page photo-filled book that comes with this collection. In those notes, Wilentz writes about Dylan’s development from his teenage years through his early twenties as a songwriter, musician, singer and live performer; the recordings Wilentz chose for the 8 CDs back up his contentions.
The first song on the first disc is one of the earliest known Dylan recordings, a not particularly memorable version of “Let the Good Times Roll.” Still, it’s exciting to hear such an early recording, one which indicates just how far Dylan would come as a recording artist as the years passed. The Jokers, a high school rock trio Dylan fronted, paid to record this song and some others at the Terlinde Music Shop in St. Paul, Minnesota on Christmas eve, 1956. Also included is one of the first examples of Dylan’s songwriting, “I Got a New Girl”; the song doesn’t hint at the songwriter Dylan would become in the early ‘60s, but I dig this recording, and find his singing and the melody reminiscent of songs on the New Morning album that would be recorded and released more than a decade later in 1970. Writes Wilentz, “’I Got a New Girl,’ taped by another friend, Ric Kangas, in 1959, replicated doo-wop chord changes along with a line about his ‘teenage queen’ straight from that year’s monster hit, ‘Sixteen Candles’ by the Crests.”
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Though Dylan played rock ’n’ roll in high school, before he moved to Minneapolis to briefly attend the University of Minnesota (and also played rock ’n’ roll after he got there), Dylan was exposed to folk and blues recordings. Those records as well as the Minneapolis folk scene, located in a bohemian area not far from the University known as Dinkytown, had a big influence on Dylan. As Wilentz notes, it was after hearing a record by Odetta that Dylan sold his electric guitar and bought a double-O Martin acoustic. A good quality recording made at Dylan’s apartment in 1960 by a teenage friend includes live performances of Jesse Fuller’s “San Francisco Bay Blues” and Woody Guthrie’s “Jesus Christ” (both appear here on the first of the eight CDs). It’s interesting to find Dylan singing about Jesus, anticipating his future religious leanings.
It was also after moving to Minneapolis that Dylan began reading books by the Beats; the poetry and prose of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Jack Kerouac would have a profound influence on Dylan’s songwriting. Although he had written songs as a teenager, as a folk singer Dylan mostly played songs by others, including many by Woody Guthrie, his main musical idol at the time.
Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village, New York, intent on becoming a star, on January 24, 1961, and soon visited Woody Guthrie at Ward 40 at Greystone Park State Hospital in Morris Plains, New Jersey, where Guthrie suffered with Huntington’s Disease. Guthrie songs that Dylan performed in Minneapolis and the Village included “East Virginia Blues,” ‘Hard Travelin’,” “Pastures of Plenty,” “This Land is Your Land,” “Pretty Boy Floyd,” “Ramblin’ Round,” and “Ain’t Got No Home.” Versions of all of those, recorded in friends’ apartments and in clubs and other venues are included here. In the early ’60s Dylan also covered numerous other artists’ songs including the Reverend Gary Davis’ “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” and the Memphis Jug Band’s “K C Moan” and “Stealin’.”
In addition to Guthrie, the other major influence on Dylan was the great blues singer/songwriter/guitarist Robert Johnson. In January 1961 John Hammond, who would sign Dylan to Columbia Records later that year, convinced Columbia to release a collection of Johnson’s recordings from 1936 and 1937, which was titled, King of the Delta Blues Singers.
“Hammond gave an advance copy of the album to Dylan, telling him that Johnson could ‘whip anybody,’” Wilentz writes. “Dylan immediately began channeling Johnson, borrowing from his themes, images, lyrics, and even vocal mannerisms when not simply performing his songs. Near the start of the new year, Dylan told Izzy Young [who owned and operated the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village] he was writing a new song, ‘The Death of Robert Johnson.’ Apart from Guthrie, no other artist had as profound an impact on his early development. … Decades later Dylan would say that literally hundreds of lines in his own compositions owed something to Robert Johnson.”
It’s a joy to hear Dylan covering so many classics by Guthrie and others, and equally satisfying to experience raw versions of his originals, which he was soon cranking out at a ferocious pace. Joan Baez said that in September 1963, when Dylan stayed at her home in Carmel, California, he produced new songs “like ticker tape.” In April of 1962, he wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind” (which became a huge hit when Peter, Paul and Mary covered it) and in the year that followed, his songwriting skills increased dramatically. As Wilentz notes, “Over that period, he wrote scores of powerful songs and not a few works of genius, above all ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.’ Then, over the civil rights summer of 1963, as his fame began to rise, he turned out one masterwork after another, including ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game,’ ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune,’ and, above all, ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.’”
Although there are 8 CDs of material here (139 tracks – 48 never previously released), it’s far from all the early recordings that exist. For example, I have a ten CD bootleg set, Bob Dylan: Man on the Street (named after one of Dylan’s early original songs), that contains 140 tracks, at least 48 of which are not on Through the Open Window. For this official collection, Wilentz has cherrypicked the best and/or most meaningful of Dylan’s recordings from the early years, making this an endlessly listenable collection that also provides insight into Dylan’s creative growth. Even in the ’50s and early ’60s he was continuously evolving his sound.
So much has been written about Dylan over the years that it’s challenging to come up with something new to say, yet Wilentz manages to do it. His discussion, for instance, of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” is enlightening. Writes Wilentz, “Dylan has remembered basing ‘Hattie Carroll’ on [Bertolt] Brecht and [Kurt] Weill’s ‘Pirate Jenny,’ which is evident in the song’s structure and melody. As a work of art, though, the song is in a class of its own. Unlike earlier topical work out of the folk revival, ‘Hattie Carroll’ is subtle, even circumspect, drawing attention to some of the most salient facts by not once mentioning them, above all the fact that Hattie Carroll is Black and William Zantzinger is white. By compelling listeners to fill in what’s missing, the song redoubles the shame and disgust of what happened. At the same time, when Dylan wanted to intensify the song’s anger, he exploited what might be called colloquial redundancy, using more words than formally necessary (as when he mentions Zantzinger’s ‘rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him’).
“Dylan’s vocal delivery is strongest (especially in the officially released version) at the end of the third verse,” Wilentz continues. “After summarizing her life, Dylan’s steady voice, momentarily indignant, sings the song’s most outraged line: ‘And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger.’ Eliding the ‘William’ and removing the ‘t’ in the killer’s name had already turned ‘Wee-um Zanzinger’ into a hiss, but never more dramatically than at this bitter moment. By expanding that third verse, meanwhile, from six lines to eleven to describe what Dylan surmised was Hattie Carroll’s everyday work life—extending it in part by repeating the words, ‘the table,’ ‘the table,’ ‘the table,’ that she served and cleaned up—Dylan evoked soul-sapping monotony without spelling it out. Inspired literary touches like these appeared in nearly every line of the song.”
While I love this whole collection, these are some of my favorites: A beautiful recording of “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” made by Dylan’s friend, the writer/folk musician Tony Glover, at a party in Minneapolis at the home of Dylan’s friends, Dave and Gretel Whitaker in August of 1962. Dylan had begun writing the song that year when he was missing his girlfriend Suze Rotolo, who was in Europe. “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” which he wrote in the summer of 1962; “Hard Rain” is one of his greatest and most lyrically original songs; the version included here was recorded in October 1962 at the Gaslight club in the Village. “Girl From the North Country” was composed while in Rome in early 1963; the version included is an alternative take recorded in April 1963 during sessions for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. And Dylan and Joan Baez dueting on Dylan’s “Troubled and I Don’t Know Why” from a headlining set by Baez at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens, New York on August 17, 1963.
The box set ends with Dylan’s entire October 26, 1963 Carnegie Hall performance, which fills the final two CDs and marks the end of the beginning of Dylan’s remarkable career. The following year would see the release of Another Side of Bob Dylan, an album whose title makes it clear that something new, or at least different, was happening, and 1965 would bring the start of Dylan’s rock ‘n’ roll years.
Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series Volume 18: Through the Open Window, 1956-1963 is available from October 31.