<\/p>\n
This new iteration of a complete unknown is largely hidden from view from his audiences, sat behind a baby grand and lyric sheets for most of the set, only the top of the head visible to many paying punters. Bootlegs and fan reports suggest an 84-year-old artist in fine form as he enters the fourth year of touring his most recent album, Rough & Rowdy Ways<\/em>. The voices is strong, sometimes he adds an echo to it, his wayward piano leading a skeletal band of brothers through a clutch of old songs \u2013 \u201cDesolation Row\u201d, \u201cIt\u2019s All Over Baby Blue\u201d, \u201cEvery Grain of Sand\u201d among them \u2013 that form a kind of frame around the restless, shape-shifting unearthly powers of the new ones.<\/p>\n For the Dylan faithful, not being able to see the singer sing is not a problem. Just being in the same room is a blessing. \u201cMost are downright reverent, with shining eyes, almost like believers,\u201d reads a report from Friday night at a sports arena in Lingen. For newcomers without that depth of belief, it might be a little galling to come to one of his concerts without being able to see our Complete Unknown at work. Are they coming because they want to see what it\u2019s all about, or are they here because Bob in 2025 is a piece of history to bear witness to before the stage door closes and the curtain falls for the last time? As one Reddit poster put it: \u201cYou\u2019re seeing history, something you\u2019ll remember forever and be able to tell your grand kids about.\u201d<\/p>\n In Dylan\u2019s favour, his voice, his phrasing and presence sound strong and resolutely in the present moment, indifferent to expectations and onlookers, and to nostalgia too, and that will always be bracingly electrifying. And Dylan has been electrifying since way before Newport \u2013 as a new Bootleg series set is about to demonstrate. The teenager who came to New York to take on the world on his own terms was electrifying audiences in cafes, apartments and concert halls just a few months after first setting his suitcase down.<\/p>\n But he\u2019s been dividing opinion for a long time, too. Local newspaper reviewers were scathing rather than electrified over his appearance at Copenhagen\u2019s Royal Arena. Sixty years earlier, when Dylan first hit Greenwich Village, Bruce Langhorne summed him up thus: \u201cHe was a terrible singer and a complete fake, and I thought he didn\u2019t play the harmonica that well.\u201d<\/p>\n Langhorne revised his opinion swiftly, however, once he started recording with Dylan. \u201cOne of his skills was \u2013 and probably still is \u2013 generating a really strong thread without being distracted by other people\u2019s performances,\u201d he told me in 2004. \u201cKnowing what he wanted to do and doing it. Because he had that thread. He had that thing that you can latch onto. It\u2019s a clarity that many musicians don\u2019t have \u2013 I don\u2019t have it \u2013 the ability to just do a pure performance from beginning to end. To go to the end and deliver your message.\u201d<\/p>\n The new Bootleg Series set, Through the Open Window<\/em>, is all about that thread. It charts the folk process of Robert Zimmerman transmogrifying into Bob Dylan, a role he has played for 61 years and is still playing, and his peculiar genius for knowing what he wants to do and doing it, from start to finish. The set comprises eight CDs (and a 2CD cut-down), 139 tracks, 48 of them new releases, and a 125-page photobook and essay by Sean Wilentz, the set’s producer, which is illuminating.<\/p>\n It begins with schoolboy Bob and his mates singing \u201cLet the Good Times Roll\u201d onto an acetate disc at a music store in St Paul in 1956, and ends with his first headlining show at a sold-out Carnegie Hall in October 1963, aged 22, before 3,000 people who hang on his every word, especially the ones they haven\u2019t heard yet (such as \u201cThe Times They Are a Changin\u201d with which he opened that concert).<\/p>\n In between, you get excerpts from The Gaslight, Gerdes, Carnegie Chapter Hall, The Town Hall, and sundry parties, radio broadcasts and informal singing sessions that found their way to glory on reel-to-reel magnetic tape. Standouts? At random: an early account of \u201cYoung But Daily Growing\u201d from the Chapter House; a debut album out-take in \u201cHouse Carpenter\u201d; \u201cDink\u2019s Song\u201d from a party in Minneapolis in 1961; a nascent \u201cTomorrow is a Long Time\u201d at another Minneapolis party a year later; the run of \u201cHard Rain\u201d, \u201cDon\u2019t Think Twice\u201d, \u201cBarbara Allen\u201d and \u201cThe Cuckoo\u201d from the Gaslight in 1962; a snatch of \u201cThe Ballad of the Gliding Swan\u201d from the BBC play he appeared in in 1962; previously unheard original \u201cLiverpool Gal\u201d, brought back with him from that England trip; and \u201cBob Dylan\u2019s Dream\u201d from the Town Hall gig he delivered to around 1,000 audience members in April 1962. Freewheelin<\/em>\u2019 would come out a few weeks later.<\/p>\n All good, yes? Well, yes. Incredible, a lot of it. The Carnegie Hall discs are a blast. The above paragraph merely brushes the surface of what\u2019s been gathered from the formative years of this Complete Unknown. There\u2019s lots of blues, sessions with Big Joe Williams, Victoria Spivey and Harry Belefonte. But some hardcore fans with time on their hands to compare what\u2019s included on those eight discs and, more importantly, what ISN\u2019T, are not so happy. There seems to be quite a bit that\u2019s absent, mostly from private tapers, including the Karen Wallace tape; while completists bewail the Town Hall and Chapter House concerts not coming in full.<\/p>\n There\u2019s another issue, too: is this a set to be listened to, or one to be kept on the shelf, an historical record returned to for reference, like an encyclopedia? A poster on the Expecting Rain fan forum is revealing: \u201cThis is a must-have simply for historic reasons \u2026 I don’t think I will play this set very often, though.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s the rub. There are great recordings of Dylan\u2019s youthful performances here, but there\u2019s a hell of a lot of them, covering barely more than two years. I\u2019ve been a Dylan fan since I was a squeaky teen, but for a while I struggled to get down and get with it when it came to approaching a stream of this monolithic set of eight jam-packed CDs of strummin and hollarin\u2019.<\/p>\n I love the old-world folk ballads he covers on his way to becoming Bob Dylan, often sat playing in someone\u2019s apartment, and there\u2019s a thrill to hearing iconic songs still paint fresh, but it\u2019s a set and an object that carries the weight of a museum, too. An aural museum, but with a museum\u2019s dead weight, even as the living Dylan continues lightly in his progress across Europe this autumn, still alive and still kicking. A part of me thinks he doesn\u2019t deserve this premature museum-ification \u2013 a kind of mummification, but without the poetry.<\/p>\n Over in Tulsa, there\u2019s a big building housing his archives. How much more will fill it? Will this be a Hall of Records for the ages, or a future Ozymandias as times change beyond our current imagining? No oner knows; not even posterity, whose face is turned away from the living. But he\u2019s out there, the kid who became Bob Dylan, still singing and playing the songs he wants to play, playing that thread and leaving no room for nostalgia.<\/p>\n