AN “INCOMPLETE” UNKNOWN: Bob Dylan’s "Through The Open Window" (The Bootleg Series Vol. 18) reviewed. By Harold Lepidus (Boston Harold Podcast)
AN “INCOMPLETE” UNKNOWN: Bob Dylan’s "Through The Open Window" (The Bootleg Series Vol. 18) reviewed. By Harold Lepidus (Boston Harold Podcast) October 24, 2025
The newest installment of the Bob Dylan “Bootleg Series,” this one volume 18, is the long rumored Through The Open Window, a collection of some of his earliest recordings, going back to 1950s Hibbing, Minnesota, up through October, 1963, including material that has never even been leaked (officially or otherwise) into the hand of collectors.
First of all, I must mention Sean Wilentz’s essay included in the accompanying booklet. Writing about Dylan doesn’t get any better than this. Wilentz not only details what the young singer-songwriter and future reluctant spokesman for a generation was doing, but places it all in the context of the times. He also traces back the roots of Dylan’s compositions (“Pirate Jenny” by Kurt Weill and Bertoil Brecht) , as well as other influences (especially David Van Ronk and Suze Rotolo).
It’s interesting that the box set ends on October 26, 1963, with a complete recording of his prestigious concert at Carnegie Hall. The original intent was to possibly release a live album of the event. In almost exactly one month from that date, two major events will occur that would forever change the world on the same day, November 22. In the United Kingdom, it would be the release of the album With the Beatles, and in East Texas, a murder most foul. In many ways, it’s the end of a chapter, closing the pages and the texts. The times were indeed a-changin’, but not in the way it was hoped, and certainly not in the way it was expected.
By the end of October, 1963, Dylan was twenty-two years old, and had only released two full-length albums, Bob Dylan and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Nine of the ten songs were already recorded for the next album, The Times, They Are A-Changin’, and those all appear here as studio outtakes and live versions. A large percentage of the songs have never appeared on any Dylan studio album, including the ancient 1956 recording at a St. Paul record shop, and an early original, “I Got a New Girl” in Hibbing, MN, in 1959.
There are plenty of the expected Woody Guthrie songs, including "Jesus Christ,” “Hard Travelin’” and “I Ain’t Got No Home,” the last of which he sang at the New York Woody Guthrie tribute concert in 1968.
A sample of some of the other songs: The Reverend Gary Davis’ “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” “Devilish Mary,” a traditional song first recorded in 1924 by Gil Turner and His Skillet Lickers. Another traditional song, titled “In the Pines” here, has been covered by many artists including Seattle’s Nirvana, under the title “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” Again, it’s all referenced in Wilentz’s essay.
Also included in the set is the stuff of legend. The previously unheard song "Liverpool Gal,” known only by its lyrics, can finally be experienced by all. It was recorded by his friend Tony Glover at his Minneapolis home on July 17, 1963. According to Wilentz’s essay, it is an adaptation of a song Dylan would revisit in a few years, “Lily of the West.” It was inspired by a woman he met on his recent trip to London. Dylan also played “Eternal Circle” to start there, and the recording ends with Dylan and Glover jamming on “West Memphis.”
Other highlights include a possible alternate version of “Only a Pawn in Their Game” than the one seen in Dont Look Back, from the July 6, 1963, at the SNCC Voter Registration Rally in Greenwood, MS, and an unannounced performance of "World War II Blues” at the legendary Club 47 in Cambridge, MA, previously only excerpted in the documentary, For The Love of the Music: The Club 47 Folk Revival.
While everything before the autumn of 1962 is interesting for a myriad of reasons, when “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” comes on, it hits like a ton of bricks. Nothing before this October, 1962, performance at the Gaslight Cafe, prepares the listener for the quantum leap between his earlier songs and this one. (Singer Peter Wolf’s recent memoir, Waiting On The Moon, recounts Dylan’s first public performance of the song.)
(It’s also interesting that this release is seeing the light of day at this time. One would think that the late 1975 sessions for the following years’ album Desire would have been excavated in time for the continued 50 year copyright control by Sony. Maybe the abundance of recent Rolling Thunder Revue product may have put the kibosh on it? Will it be one of those rare, limited, European-only, copyright protection releases before the end of the year?)
Talk about this set has been bandied about for quite some time, with such supposed potential titles as The Villager and The Coffee House Years. I can’t help but wonder if this was originally somehow meant to coincide and compliment (and correct the narrative of) the film A Complete Unknown? That biopic was announced just before the pandemic at the start of 2020, with the working title Dylan Goes Electric. This of course means that there had been discussions for quite some time before that.
In any case, this volume of the Bootleg Series (8 CDs, or various sampler versions) appears to be the one not particularly aimed at Dylan’s forever growing older fanbase, but more likely to the new, Timothee Chalomet-seduced neophytes. At nine hours, it’s a lot to take in. I hope this essay will help you navigate this fertile, unchartered ground.
Of course, the older demographic should also find the set desirable as well. I’m sometimes baffled by what fellow Bobcats expect. Some have grumbled that there’s not much here that we are not already familiar with. We all have a significant amount of this material, but when was the last time any of us has re-explored them so deeply? If you told me 40 years ago that these newfangled compact discs would be packaged in a box, with a detailed essay and pictures, with even some stuff that would still have been unheard of, it would have been unimaginable. How many copies of Blonde On Blonde do they have? How many versions of Blood on the Tracks? I mean, how lucky we are that each year, we get such a gift!
The earliest recordings are from people’s homes in Minnesota and New Jersey, a radio broadcast, Greenwich Village clubs, various concert appearances, and the recording session with Carolyn Hester, where Columbia’s A&R man, and the session’s producer, John Hammond, Sr., first met Dylan. And that’s just the first CD, going up to September, 1961!
The material included here features recordings culled from numerous legitimately released sources, as well as archaeological artifacts that have been unearthed, and have only been heard by a handful of people. Among the sources that have been officially released include The Bootleg Series, European “Copyright Collections,” promotional only releases, and guest appearances on other artists’ sessions.
The variety is truly mind boggling. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to see this scruffy little folkie as he bulldozed his way through any barriers put up by the folk community, but the Wilentz essay certainly helps. The songs go from heartbreaking to hilarious. They cover the entire spectrum of what is now known as Americana. Dylan as a sponge, absorbing everything around him, laying the groundwork that would be the bedrock of all that was to come.
Musician and author Ryan H. Walsh wrote an essay in 2023 about Dylan’s first ever headlining Boston gig in April, 1963. This paragraph places the reader in the tiny Kenmore Square cafe where Bob “Dillon” was playing. (The audio is not included in the set.)
On the Yana stage, soon-to-be-released stunners were unveiled one after the other: “Girl From the North Country,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and “Masters of War,” with its melodic blueprint unmistakably arising from the English ballad “Nottamun Town” (and potentially from a Boston connection, via local folksinger Jackie Washington’s cover of “Nottamun Town,” released in 1962). At this time, Dylan sang songs about impending nuclear war and romantic heartbreak back to back, with equal weight, where losing your girl was just as bad as the literal end of the world, and there was something both insane and magnetic about this gambit. (RYAN H. WALSH - 60 years ago, Bob Dylan’s Boston debut was a freewheelin’ good time)
TL;DR
These recordings bring me back to my own discovery of early Dylan material. While my initial Dylan fanaticism was formed in the 1970s, it wasn’t until the 1980s that my hunter/gatherer instincts truly kicked in. Living in the Boston area at this time meant there were plenty of used record stores around, so crate digging became a favorite, and affordable, pastime.
When I was a kid, like five years old, I asked my parents to buy a mono copy of Meet The Beatles LP sometime around the band’s first appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. I had not seen it, but the event even infiltrated my nursery school aged consciousness. The Beatles’ Second Album was soon to follow. Left to my own devices, I had nothing better to do than examine the information on the album covers and Capitol “rainbow” labels. Don’t ask me how I’d even heard of the songwriters that composed the unoriginal songs the Fabs covered. However, by studying the credits and making the assumption that the names in the parentheses were the composers (remember I was only five!), I immediately became a fan of Chuck Berry and Little Richard (Penniman), and with later albums, Buddy Holly and Carl Perkins, among others. It wasn’t difficult to make the connection to these 1950s pioneers. It’s funny how antiquated these records sounded back then. They seem timeless to me now.
With Dylan, however, reaching back to the days of Woody Guthrie was more of a challenge. Guitar-based rock and roll was what I craved mostly, but pretty much anything on New York Top 40 radio at the time was fair game, from bubblegum to MOR to rhythm & blues to country to rock. Things were moving fast in those heady days. What was new was what was hip, and last year’s records were yesterday’s papers. The mod and hippie eras, and beyond, were what was happening, man.
My initial attention to Dylan’s music was basically as a spectator. As I mentioned above, it wouldn’t be until the 1980s that my total immersion into his art would take hold.
However, there were connections to Guthrie. The Grateful Dead covered “Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad” on one of their early 70s live albums. Guthrie’s collaborator Pete Seeger, and Guthie’s son Arlo, would be the direct lifelines back to the days of Arlo’s father. They would be present on TV and the radio, making them appear contemporary, and therefore compatible with the current ongoing hipster scene (especially with the latter’s Alice’s Restaurant and Woodstock cred.) However, the youth culture was getting into heavier music, heavier politics, and heavier drugs.
Speaking of heavy, we all knew that Dylan was heavily influenced by Woody Guthrie, although, to at least my snobby, naive, cosmopolitan-based prejudices, his music couldn’t have been more outdated. (I, of course, love him now.) There was a radio program, Woody’s Children, which was broadcast on a New York City classical station, WQXR-FM, starting in 1969. My father listened almost exclusively to classical music, but sometimes he’d have this program on. On one hand I was sort of interested in all sorts of music (thanks to my Dad and the Beatles,) but since I was still pretty young, it was more of an education than anything I would explore on my own. It was clear, however, that Guthrie’s reach went much further than the confines of the Purple Onion and The Ten O’Clock Scholar.
When I went into Dylan overdrive after seeing him with the Band in 1974, I began slowly building my own collection of his music. Before that concert, I only had whatever albums of his that came out in the 70s - Hits Vol.2, Pat Garrett, Dylan (1973), Planet Waves, and side five of The Concert For Bangla Desh. Not a very accurate representation of what helped explain Dylan’s importance. At the Dylan/Band show at the Nassau Coliseum, a Long Island-based entertainment magazine called Good Times, with Dylan on the cover, was being distributed for free. Within its pages was either an article or an ad (I think it was the latter) that listed all of Dylan’s albums at the time (or maybe just the ones on Columbia) with miniature descriptions of each LP’s contents.
Although I didn’t know that much about Dylan’s catalogue by concert time, I at least recognized almost every song of his, and even the Band’s version of “I Shall Be Released” (although not "This Wheel’s on Fire”), in fact everything except “The Ballad of Hollis Brown,” with Robbie-as-Jimi on scorching lead guitar, which blew me away. After the show, I think the first album I bought may have been The Times, They Are A-Changin’ just to hear that song. It was certainly an early post-concert purchase. I wanted that song, and didn’t want to wait until it would be included on the inevitable live album that would be released that summer (Narrator: The 1974 version of that song was not released until last year.)
I could tell that it was a great album, with all sorts of heavy subjects being addressed adroitly as well as poetically. However, it was nothing like the concert I attended. The album was full of political commentary, shining a light into the darkness of the American psyche. It wasn’t much fun, nor was it supposed to be. It was an education, an exposé, if you will.
Sometime in either that late 1970s or early 1980s, I bought mono copies of the first two albums for $2 each at some used record stores in Boston. While I knew they were important records, I felt more like an outsider looking in than someone immersed in them. Education and enlightenment more than entertainment. This would of course change over time.
Early on, I’d start accumulating bootlegs, while later on, especially in the age of the Internet, I’d trade for rare material with total strangers. I occasionally received unreleased recordings from The Unofficial Bob Dylan Free Tape Library. I’d send them blank cassettes and VHS tapes, and they’d be returned with the goods. I must have sent stamped, self-addressed envelopes, as part of the deal. I also found strangers at shows willing to trade. (BTW, if you have the audience recording of The Night of the Hurricane - other than Dylan - that’s my recording.)
Fast forward to 1985, just before the release of Biograph. While Dylan was at a creative and commercial low point, I was busy filling in the gaps of my Dylan collection. This not only meant the official canon, or even bootlegs, but, thanks to Paul Cable’s book, Bob Dylan - His Unreleased Recordings, scouring used record stores to buy albums by artists with songs Dylan wrote but hadn’t released. This meant scooping up used copies of records by Eric Clapton, Harry Belafonte, Bette Midler, Joe Cocker, the Searchers, Ron Wood, and others, often for a couple of bucks each.
One day around that time, I went to a record convention with a couple of friends. The older of the two called me over, leading me to this 10 LP bootleg box set of unreleased Dylan material from 1961 up until the famous "Judas!" concert of May, 1966. It was called Zimmerman: Ten Of Swords. Dylan’s name was not mentioned. It was on “Tarantula Records” with a catalog number CL 16319, which was the same as the Columbia Records release, Who Stole The Keeshka? by polka artist Frankie Yankovic. I think it cost $30. I bought it.
In April of 1986, Rolling Stone published an article about it. The album’s value immediately blew up. The friend who alerted me to the album in the first place picked up a copy for twice as much soon after.
This was what I needed to help me get inside this music from the old, weird America. According to what was printed on the front cover, this box set contained over eight hours of music. The first seven LPs covered the same period as this new Bootleg Series release.
The box set also included a little booklet, with most of the text taken from Cable’s book, although they "corrected" any negative view he had written into something positive.
I had a few Dylan bootlegs by this time, and some of their contents were included in Ten Of Swords, but now it had context. Now it was organized. Now it was annotated. Now it finally made sense, at least to me.
(End of TL;DR)
Through The Open Window - The Bootleg Series Vol. 18 - 1956-1963 is an amazing collection of Dylan’s early recordings, from officially released material (both common and rare) to unreleased tracks only residing in the elitist hands and hard drives of collectors, to never before heard recordings, some stretching all the way back to Hibbing in 1956.
This is an important collection for a number of reasons. Although The Bootleg Series has occasionally dipped its toes into the earliest days of Dylan’s career, as well as various scattered compilations, this is by far the most expansive and inclusive. Although even with nine hours spread out over eight CDs, it is only a fraction of what’s out there in the world, not to mention what might be still buried deep in the vaults of the Bob Dylan Center. However, it is the perfect starter kit for those just coming aboard. As for veteran Dylan fans, it’s an excuse to revisit these early days. I know I have a lot of this stuff on cassettes, but my player died years ago. I also have vinyl bootlegs, CDRs, VHS tapes, etc. But with the steady stream of releases from the Dylan /Sony camp, I certainly haven’t had the time, or even the inclination, to look back at this pivotal era in Dylan’s artistic development. It’s even more fascinating exploring this after experiencing two “Outlaw Festival" shows in early September. I mean, was this really the same guy? If Dylan wanted to shed off one more layer of skin, Mission Accomplished!
Most notably, a lot of the political content in this set is as relevant as ever, if not more so. While Dylan was categorized as a “Protest singer” at this point in his career, in reality it is only a fraction of the writings pouring out of him. However, with his new songs, as well as his interpretation of the material of others, Dylan addresses war, crime, murder, poverty, racism, fascism, desperation, lack of compassion, the pitfalls of fame, and the threat of nuclear annihilation, among other things. Fittingly, there are more versions of "Blowin' in the Wind” than any other song.
SIDE NOTE: In 2009, Neil Young released a song called “Just Singing a Song (Won’t Change the World).” which is basically a call to action. In the 1970s, the Beatles were offered the chance to raise $230 millions for an unnamed charity if they would reunite. Protest songs - or tours- no longer have the power to propel people into action.
I bring this up because all over social media, people are upset that Taylor Swift, one of music's more benevolent musicians, should solve the world’s problems since she’s a billionaire. This is of course ridiculous. She’s already a role model and inspiration (mostly to young girls). It’s not her job to save the world.
Anyway, back to Dylan.
There are other kinds of songs as well. There are funny “Talkin’ Blues” in the style of Guthrie. There are tender ballads of love, longing, and loss, and morality tales steeped deep in the bible.
This set also disproves the notion that Dylan was just a Woody Guthrie clone, or even just a folkie! There are a smorgasbord of covers, including many by Guthrie, but also Shirley & Lee, Jesse Fuller, Reverend Gary Davis, the Carter Family, Huddie Ledbetter (apparently he never liked his nickname “Leadbelly,” nor did he ever use it to identify himself), Leroy Carr, the Memphis Jug Band, Henry Thomas, the Mississippi Sheiks, Robert Johnson, the Clancy Brothers, and Elvis Presley (via Arthur Crudup), among others. As you can see, he was as much of a blues musician as he was a folkie. And more often than not, he makes the songs his own, except when channeling Guthrie.
This collection also shines a light on Dylan as a collaborator. You can hear him blowing his harmonica on sessions by Carolyn Hester (where A&R man John Hammond, Sr., first met him), Harry Belafonte, and Big Joe Williams and Victoria Spivey (the latter can be seen with Dylan on the back cover of Dylan’s 1970 album, New Morning.) Also throughout the set, we not only get the expected duets with Joan Baez, but also appearances with Danny Kalb, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Gil Turner, and Pete Seeger, among others
On disc two, you can hear some outtakes from his 1961 eponymous debut album. Singer-songwriter Peter Case has compared it to Presley’s Sun Sessions. On songs like Fuller’s “You’re No Good,” the energy is pure rockabilly, if not a precursor to punk. On the other hand, Dylan’s performances of “House Carpenter,” “He Was a Friend of Mine,” and Guthrie’s “Ramblin’ Round” show quite a lot of sensitivity for a 20 year old.
He is also charming when conversing with producer John Hammond, the A&R man who signed him to the label. It’s unclear how much of Dylan’s affected speech patterns are contrived, though. The back-and-forth between Dylan and Hammond after a take of “Man of Constant Sorrow,” with Dylan sort of takes credit, but also says he first heard it from Judy Collins, “but not like that.” Of course, “Man of Constant Sorrow” became popular after its inclusion on the soundtrack to the 2000 motion picture, O Brother, Where Art Thou. Dylan added the song to his concert set list around this time.
There are multiple little Easter Eggs (sort of) to look for among the 137 tracks included here.
The melody of “Pretty Polly” (presented here from his Carnegie Chapter Hall, November 4, 1961, concert) was used as the basis for “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” heard later in the set.
There’s a rumor that Dylan did not play on the studio version of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” because he never replicated the fingerpicking accompaniment on stage, choosing to energetically strum his guitar in concert ever since the album came out. However, at the Carnegie Hall concert (which takes up discs seven and eight), one can certainly hear him fingerpicking throughout this performance.
One can hear the progress of “Tomorrow is a Long Time” from the tentative take on disc four, at the home of Dave Whitaker in Minneapolis, MN, on August 11, 1962, to the pristine version performed at New York’s Town Hall, April 12, 1963, included here with a spoken introduction. It was also released without it on Greatest Hits Vol. 2.
Discs seven and eight (and thankfully not six and seven) contain the complete Carnegie Hall concert from October 26, 1963. Dylan’s secret weapon has always been his sense of humor. As a Gemini, Dylan tends to run hot and cold, up and down, left and right, Christian and Jew, acoustic and electric. He can write heartbreaking topical and love songs, but he can also be funny as hell. I actually laughed out loud two times when I first listened to the box set, even though I’d heard both things before. One was when he was being introduced as being from Gallup, New Mexico, and the other is when he told his “Hootenanny Hoot” story at Carnegie Hall on the last disc.
The audience was very attentive. In those days, concerts were rarely recorded by members of the audience. The material Dylan performed was mostly not commercially available at the time, although some may have heard material at previous gigs.
Eight songs that were performed had been recorded for Dylan’s third LP, The Times, They Are A-Changin’, which was scheduled for release early the following year. In fact, the first six songs weren’t on either of Dylan’s released albums. Then came “Blowin’ in the Wind." Four more unfamiliar songs followed, then the first half closed with “Hard Rain.”
In the second half, two songs from Freewheelin’ were performed first. Then two songs from the upcoming album, followed by "Masters of War,” which seven years later would inspire John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero.”
The main set ended with “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” which Wilentz expands on the narrative to add some context to the real story. The encore is another unfamiliar song, “When the Ship Comes In,” inspired by a hotel refusing to let Dylan into a hotel due to his scruffy attire, until Joan Baez convinced them to let him in.
Through The Open Window - The Bootleg Series Vol. 18 is an overview of the beginning of Bob Dylan’s career. The movie A Complete Unknown, does not accurately capture what Dylan was really like. It may be entertaining, and I know many people enjoyed it, but it was not real, nor was it clever. To me, it felt like the script was generated using ChatGPT. Go see Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home, or Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. And if you really want to get a handle on what was going on back then, check the box set out. It may be incomplete, but it's a great place to start.
Street date: October 31, 2025.
Through The Open Window
The Bootleg Series Vol. 18
1956-1963
8CD: amazon.com - .co.uk - .de
2CD: amazon.com - .co.uk - .de
4LP: amazon.com - .co.uk - .de
Unboxing
© 2025 Harold Lepidus. Please do not share most or all of the contents of this review. Excerpts are OK. Thanks in advance.
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