Of all the revealing sets in Bootleg series which gave us an idea of Bob Dylancreative process, decision making, and a strangely high GPA for following one's most fertile impulses and songwriting instincts, nothing could have prepared us for how comprehensively completed Through an open window is like an origin story based on facts.
By strange coincidence, it was supposedly produced by Legacy Recordings long before this. Complete unknown and Timothée Chalamet's portrayal of Dylan intrigued a younger generation of Chalamet fans, making them wonder where exactly this Bob Dylan guy might have come from. But it follows much of the same temporality as the film, except that it starts and ends earlier and shows us some things we probably never expected to see.
Co-produced by American historian Sean Wilentz and music producer Steve Berkowitz. Through an open window includes Dylan's earliest known recordings and his first live performances of culture-changing songs such as “Blowin' in the Wind.” More than usual for a Bootleg Series release, the accuracy of each recording can vary greatly, as some songs were recorded by Dylan or his colleagues using rudimentary equipment, or covertly by audience members who had the foresight to record a young man who seemed to be in a constant state of metamorphosis from one week to the next.
In his extensive liner notes, Wilentz tells us that the first thing we hear—a version of Shirley and Lee's “Let the Good Times Roll”—was a homemade recording made at the Terlinde Music Shop in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Christmas Eve 1956. Bob Zimmerman took a Greyhound bus to St. Paul from his family's home in Hibbing to hang out with friends and record music with their band, the Jokers.
The 78-acetates they cut that day are short (this selection only lasts 37 seconds), but yes, the future Bob Dylan is there, playing the piano and singing with the glee of a young Jokerman, and history is made; Zimmerman was 15 years old and had just made his first recording. Four years later, he was documented learning acoustic guitar and writing his own doo-wop-inspired material, such as the breezy “I Got a New Girl,” in which he embraced what we've come to call his sweeter, high-pitched sound. Nashville Skyline voice from the late 1960s.
As he made his circuitous route to the ailing Woody Guthrie and the New York clique but somehow inclusive folk music community (which, again, was briefly depicted in Complete unknown), Dylan absorbed as many aspects of folk culture—and its relevance to enlightened intellectuals, equality-driven moralists, and working-class people—as he could. He also often told tall tales about where he was from, as if he was trying to make people believe that he was the character of the folk standards he sang come to life.
This is a period in the Dylan legend that has attracted as much scrutiny and scorn as it has reverence, because some who lived through the period and others who analyzed it from decades away dismissed him as an opportunistic Guthrie imitator and folk plagiarist who had never heard of a subversive character, story or song that he wouldn't claim as his own countercultural invention.
But over the course of 139 recordings of songs he learned and songs he wrote from various sources (collected here as an eight-CD box set), Through an open window conducts a kind of forensic examination of Dylan's earliest discoveries about artists, songs, fashion, jokes, diction, accents and stage personas – some of which he adopted and rejected, others so fundamental that they are present in his self-expression to this day. What he made of them in a short time does not sound like a cowardly pretension, but rather the product of genuine curiosity, respectful study and an insatiable accumulation of knowledge.
If Dylan really was a thief, providing evidence of all the conspiracies and intrigues that led to his alleged song crimes through the ultra-transparent Bootleg Series would certainly be a fool's errand. Instead, the series is steadfastly concerned with inspiration, often demonstrating that becoming someone means going through the creative processes of life, while in public life one can develop quickly and paradoxically.
“But to live outside the law, you gotta be honest,” Dylan later sang in 1966’s “Absolutely Sweet Marie.” He seems to have foreseen this credo as soon as he received (and supposedly ignored) the first suspicious glances thrown at him in Greenwich Village. That this collection of facts, containing curiosities and Dylan's earliest appearances in history, including pre-fame sessions in which he was asked to play harmonica by the likes of Victoria Spivey and Harry Belafonte, culminates with his triumphant headlining performance at Carnegie Hall on October 26, 1963, is no coincidence.
In Wilentz's extraordinary 125-page notes (it's a book!), he argues that Dylan's artistry has grown so quickly in the two and a half years since he landed in New York that we may still take it for granted. When he took the stage that night, his second album was released. Free Bob Dylan was released to acclaim, and its sequel, Times are changinghas been recorded and is waiting in the wings. However, many of the faithful in attendance, who had already seen him perform these unreleased songs live, hailed them as future classics, with shouts and proto-Beatle fervor. It was as if they recognized the enormous leaps and mastery in his craft that Dylan quickly achieved.
Indeed, Wilentz suggests that despite all the attention and historical significance that songs like “A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall” are now canonizing free and even “The Times They Are A-Changin'” deserved, they may not compare to the complex literary and song achievements of the more subtle and lesser-known “Only a Pawn in Their Game” and “The Ballad of Hollis Brown,” which reveal the precocious, socially conscious lyrical force that Dylan truly was. By the fall of 1963, he had so conquered and rediscovered the realm of heartfelt folk that he had already moved beyond it to innovate again as the surreal, underground stoner rock poet he would soon become.
From the start of its impressive first career survey, the Bootleg series has been a gift for Bob Dylan fans. For younger followers, few sets can compare to Vol. 8, Tell signswhich covered his work between 1989 and 2006, because his treasures were truly shocking—and they remain deeply mysterious. But now an argument can be made for significance Through an open windowbecause this is the epicenter. Although large chunks of the material have been circulated previously (such as bootlegs), Wilentz's restorative sonic thoroughness and chronological contextualization are invaluable.
through an open window features a young, passionate Bob Dylan (who in every performance here attacks the material as if he really means it), right between An Anthology of American Folk Music And Tapes from the basementwith a spirit of discovery, joy, ambition, awe and American exceptionalism that made him the greatest songwriter and musical force of our time, right from the start.
