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 whirring like a toy that might blow up. The Jokers—three kids with a last bus home and more nerve than gear—cut a sliver of Shirley & Lee’s Let the Good Times Roll. Thirty-odd seconds, history cupped in the palm of a hand no one’s washed yet. You can hear him at fifteen: a smudge of grin, a piano figure in shoes two sizes too big, joy that won’t sit still. The myth didn’t hatch; it slipped through a crack in the window.

Now there’s a box to hold it, eight discs, 139 tracks, a filing cabinet of molt and lightning, The Bootleg Series Vol. 18: Through the Open Window, 1956-1963. Steve Berkowitz and Sean Wilentz—one a producer with a nose for master tapes, the other a historian who knows where the bodies dance—curate this thing like an evidence locker. They drag the origin story into the bright light, not to sanitize it, but to let you see the seams, the stitches, the sheer rush of a kid hustling his way into being.

This one isn’t about the electric guillotine or the Rolling Thunder featherbed. It’s the before times: home tapes, parlor hootenannies where somebody’s aunt pours coffee over gossip; Greenwich Village clubs with air you could spread on toast; studio outtakes where John Hammond tolerates wonder and doubt in equal measure; harmonica sessions where a nobody kid is told to take off his boots before he blows for Harry Belafonte. It ends—appropriately, inevitably—on October 26, 1963, Carnegie Hall, the end of the beginning, two discs that feel like the face of a clock the second before midnight.

The delight of this set is not that it proves he learned Woody Guthrie’s songs or that he could flatten a blues, which he did and could. It’s that it catches him inventing Bob Dylan as a stage act, performance art with a splinter in it. People always say “Woody” and yeah, Woody’s in there like a saint’s reliquary rattling in the closet. But so are Lord Buckley’s hipster sermons, Lenny Bruce’s kamikaze timing, Wavy Gravy’s deadpan cosmic clown. The kid learned how to lace a song intro with a punchline that doesn’t apologize, how to build a set where the patter glues the bones and the banjo takes the pulse. If you’ve only known the sphinx at the piano in later years, here’s a young man who can’t shut up. He’s a wind-up Beat poet in a cap, telling lies so brazen they read as a higher form of truth. Gallup, New Mexico. Six years in carnivals. You believe him because he believes the story while he’s telling it. He’s not escaping Hibbing; he’s building it a trapdoor.

There’s a moment with John Hammond that should be bronzed. 1961, first album sessions, he’s doing Man of Constant Sorrow, a song older than the dust jackets at the Folklore Center. He finishes a take and you can hear the Boy Scout peeking out of the carny: “Did you get that?… Did you like that?” Hammond asks if someone else did it. “Not that way… A different way, I guess,” says the kid, and then, with a shrug so casual it might be a knife, “Judy Collins did it. But not like that.” He’s already a star in the only band that matters: one kid, one idea of himself, splintering and reforming in front of a microphone.

The Village material comes on like a rush of adrenaline to a paper cut. You get Gerde’s Folk City, April 16, 1962, a five-song set that’s like a mold of the young artist’s teeth. Corinna, Corrina, pliable as gum, becomes a blues prayer you can hum while cracking your knuckles. He scats into Deep Ellum Blues—he only did it twice, both in ’62—high harmonica like a jingle you can’t turn off. And then he trots out a new song, only partially finished. He pronounces it “blown” on the title line, a scuff mark on a door that’s about to swing wide: Blowin’ in the Wind, almost but not quite hatched, a lullaby for the evening news.

That’s the thing about these discs: they show you how fast the molecules rearranged. In late ’61 he’s still a Carter Family understudy pulling the lines in East Virginia Blues like taffy till they snap back and sting. By mid-’62 he’s hardened into a craftsman who can swap coaches mid-gallop: Dave Van Ronk’s arrangement of House of the Rising Sun wearing a different coat, Jesse Fuller characters carjacked into his own mythology. And tucked into the rush of he-said, she-said, there are songs where he slips into a woman’s skin and doesn’t make a show of it. Dink’s Song, a lament as big as a river, is sung soft but with flint; North Country Blues isn’t a pose, it’s a room you sit in till your knees hurt. Liverpool Gal—finally out of the attic, five minutes and forty-seven seconds from a Minnesota party on July 17, 1963, and the only time he ever did it—floats like a postcard the mailman forgot for sixty years.

He talks a lot. He jokes about getting nearly hit by a bus on the way to the club, then riffs about setlists—“I copied down all the best songs off everybody else’s lists”—and snickers about a fake hootenanny movie on 42nd Street. He invents himself in public, and if part of that involves stealing, then this set is the most honest thief’s confession you’ll ever hear. “To live outside the law, you must be honest,” he’d later sing, but here’s the rough draft of that creed: the young man nicking jokes, chords, tunings, diction, then stapling them to his own nervous system. You want to call him a plagiarist? Fine. But listen to the forensic trail—the coffeehouse tapes, the house party reels, the outtakes with their busted strings and big ideas—and tell me if this doesn’t sound like an insatiable student making a run at the library with a shopping cart.

There is sacred comedy in the omissions. Glaringly absent from the early Village days is Black Cross, the Lord Buckley monologue he ate for breakfast; if you want it, the internet has a crumb. There are ghost reels from Karen Wallace’s living room in 1960 where he supposedly sings like Nashville Skyline Dylan nine years early, and a Hibbing High School tape that’s been “coming soon” since Sputnik. Wilentz and Berkowitz don’t pretend the cupboard is bare; they just show you what’s on the shelf and make sure the label doesn’t lie. Yes, a hunk of this has circulated in the wild or popped up in those 50th Anniversary copyright dumps. Yes, the first Gerde’s set we get isn’t the night Robert Shelton wrote the review that made the record deal happen, and Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues still sounds too cute by half. The point isn’t to canonize the flubs; it’s to keep them in the story, which they are.

He goes to London one winter like a man chasing the last bus of the decade. The BBC wants him for a play, Madhouse on Castle Street, which he more or less evades, leaving behind The Ballad of the Gliding Swan like a note pinned to a stranger’s coat. The director’s lover, painter Pauline Boty, meets him at the airport. He ends up playing at a Royal College party all night, the new American species in its natural habitat: a room with no schedule, a guitar that won’t answer to the clock, and an audience that understands that this kid is more dangerous than the furniture.

The harmonica trail is a parallel romance. He walks into a Belafonte session and somebody tells him to take off his boots and he does. On Victoria Spivey sides like Wichita and Dangerous, he howls and ducks, learning how to shadow a voice without stepping on its dress. Danny Kalb and Tony Glover pop up like the friends you keep because they know where the door is when the cops arrive. The duets with Joan Baez are a public rollercoaster: sometimes he plays rough and she looks like she wants a drink of water; other times they crown each other mid-song and the room levitates.

And then there’s Carnegie Hall. Two discs. One night. October 26, 1963. The set list is paced better than most novels. He teases the professors who turn songs into term papers, then lights the fuse. Masters of War detaches from its own body and walks around the aisles, tapping men on the shoulder. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall feels like he’s delivering the weather and the verdict. Who Killed Davey Moore? is still an autopsy report with jokes, and Only a Pawn in Their Game has the composure of a man explaining a fire to the fire. Lay Down Your Weary Tune floats in from some other shore. And somewhere in this run of months he stands on a stage at Town Hall and reads Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, stumbling because he wants to tell it all in the time it takes a match to burn down to your fingers. It’s the closest you’ll ever get to hearing a saint set himself on fire on purpose.

The archival ecstasy is in the contradictions. Early on he sings I Got a New Girl in a voice you won’t really meet again till Nashville Skyline: sweet, bright, almost mannered, like a Midwestern kid trying on a tux in the mirror and thinking he might get away with it. Then you get Bob Dylan’s New Orleans Rag pounding the piano like it owes him money, rock & roll leaking from the seams of a folk suit. He was never a purist; he was a raccoon in the pantry of Americana, and he still is.

We get the chatter that glues the myth to the man. He introduces Long Time Gone, claims no one’s heard it, and then admits, “I sorta made up half the words to it right there.” He’s both bashful and bulletproof, a kid who wants your approval until he doesn’t need it anymore. We hear the ad-libbed curses in Talkin Bear Mountain Picnic Disaster Blues—“cursin’ picnics”—because the humor is not garnish; it’s a knife. There’s an Elvis-leaning That’s All Right floating by, because the first voice he heard in that garage in Hibbing is still a ghost in his cuffs.

Sound quality? It swings from studio pristine to attic archaeology. But the fidelity’s a false idol anyway; what’s consistent here is the intent. When he does Ramblin’ Round, the harmonica doesn’t just tag along, it teaches his mouth a new way to phrase. When he sings He Was a Friend of Mine at some Minneapolis way station, the room collapses down to a chair and a confession. When he says he doesn’t much believe in lists, he’s not kidding; the catalog he’s making is of new selves, not songs.

And yes, the movie is in the room. A Complete Unknown did what it needed to do—slapped a face and a posture on the fever dream—but this box is the real film, the reel that runs under the eyelids long after credits. It reveals a velocity that no camera can really capture: the speed of a mind mutating weekly, the way he carries everything he’s ever done forward without shedding it. A smart line in the notes says Dylan never lays anything down. That’s the open window. Everything he picks up he pockets for later, and it’s all still rattling in there at Carnegie Hall, where the audience screams like proto-Beatles fans because they already know the future when they hear it.

If you want a grievance, here’s one: the first acetate is only thirty-six seconds, a fragment lopped from what might’ve been an eight-minute medley. It’s like finding the first cave painting with somebody’s boot print over the buffalo. But maybe that’s right. The whole set is a lean into incompletion. It proves he contained multitudes before he knew their names, and it invites you to stand in the drafts—Minnesota to East Orange to MacDougal Street to London—and feel how fast the air changes.

Listen to Dusty Old Fairgrounds at Town Hall and hear him imagine the carnival even as he’s disowning the lie that he worked one. Hear John Brown and understand why certain protests fossilize and others stay dangerous. Hear alternate Masters of War and Girl From the North Country that remind you that songs aren’t objects; they’re weather systems that pass over different fields and ruin different crops each time. Hear Boots of Spanish Leather as if the letter arrived two days early and changed hands at the door.

The set also proves something few hagiographies dare: sometimes the legend is anticlimax-proof because it’s propped up by a thousand small irrefutable thrills. He was already good. Not because Robert Shelton said so, not because Joan took him by the hand onto festival stages, not because Albert Grossman aimed him at Carnegie like a torpedo. He was good at fifteen in a music shop. He was good the first night he fibbed about Gallup. He was good the night he asked Hammond if he liked it and then shrugged off Judy Collins with a flick of his wrist.

There are bootleg mosaics that make better party soundtracks. There are cleaner anthologies for the neat freaks who think history should be remastered. This isn’t that. Through the Open Window is a cabinet of living specimens. It’s also, bless it, a blast. You don’t “study” Talkin’ New York; you smirk and remember being broke and somehow proud of it. You don’t diagram the first live Blowin’ in the Wind; you register the instant it stopped being his question and became ours. And by the time he finishes Carnegie, you understand why the applause sounds like panic: we were losing the folk messiah the same moment we finally got him. He was already moving beyond us, hauling everything he’d stolen, learned, and invented into a future that would refuse to sit still.

So open the window. Let the cold from Hibbing in, let the Village laughter call up the stairs, let Lord Buckley’s tongue wag in the corner and Woody’s ghost find a chair, and listen to a boy invent a man. There’s no moral beyond this: the ancient footsteps don’t fade when the tape stops; they fade when we stop putting our ear to the floor. This box is a floor. Lean down. If you don’t hear it, you might be in the wrong house. But if you do, you’ll realize the best thing about Bob Dylan isn’t that he became Bob Dylan. It’s that he never stopped dragging every previous version of himself along for the ride, boots off when asked, harmonica ready, jokes in the pocket, lies at the ready, truth sneaking in the side door. End of the beginning? Sure. But beginnings are just endings that haven’t learned their lines yet. And this kid, Lord help us, was already writing new ones on the way to the next gig.

— Nobody and Everybody

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