Open the Window, Hear the Howl: Bob Dylan’s Origin Myth, Remixed, Rewired, and Still Breathing

Through The Open Window: Bootleg Series 18 (A Review The Never Happened)

Put aside your misgivings about AI for ten minutes (if you have them). We can and should, have a long discussion about that later. For now just enjoy these words on the new BS box, which were most definitely not written by Lester Bangs in the form that they appear. He contributed, but so did a lot of other great Dylan writers. Don’t think twice, it’s all right.

The story doesn’t begin with a harmonica wheeze or a godhead proclamation or a Times Square billboard the size of a moral. It starts with a car in a driveway. Beatty Zimmerman moves the thing onto the street so her kid can bang away in the garage with his pals while the neighbors grit their teeth and the Minnesota winter leans its shoulder into the door. Hibbing, where adolescence hangs in the air like frost and dreams sound like Little Richard ricocheting off sheet metal. They called him Elvis. They called him Little Richard. He called himself hungry.

Cut to St. Paul, Christmas Eve 1956, Terlinde Music Shop, an acetate lathe w…