Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings, the catalog division of Sony Music Entertainment, recently issued Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series Volume 18: Through The Open Window, 1956-1963on October 31, 2025.
Through The Open Window tells the story of Dylan’s emergence and maturation as a songwriter and performer, from Minnesota to the Greenwich Village bohemia in the early 1960s. Arriving amidst a global resurgence in appreciation for Dylan, the collection includes rare Columbia Records outtakes, recordings made at club dates, in tiny informal gatherings, in friends’ apartments, and at jam sessions in long-gone musicians’ hangouts. Many of the recordings are exceedingly rare; others have never been presented in any form.
The box set is a unique account of Dylan’s early years, when he honed his talent, and transformed traditional folk songs and lyric sketches into some of his greatest and most enduring songs, including “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” It concludes with a previously unreleased recording, in its entirety, of Dylan’s landmark concert at Carnegie Hall on October 26, 1963. A culmination of Dylan’s exceptional early rise, that concert also marked the end of the beginning of Dylan’s long career.
"Bob Dylan's arrival in NYC from that country they call the Midwest, the very week in New Year '61 when John Kennedy moved into the White House, revealed already a young man with more than just plain old ambition," posits Boy from the North Country Gary Pig Gold.
"Young but Daily Growing to say the very least, as all aspiring creators must this wise-beyond-his-time 20-year-old was instantly sopping up all sights, sounds, and influences the Village and its denizens then had to offer. But as he singularly recast this all, as few others around him ever did, or could, Dylan somehow clearly recognized a future beckoning, and began to forge a path in that direction forward with horizons far above and beyond the bleak Bleecker basket houses and traditional folk-restrictive retreads.
"As an indelible, and unarguably game-changing result, the persona he then invented and inhabited, plus of course the songs he soon began to write continue to burst open today, just as they did in those extremely early sixties, a multitude of windows for us all."
Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series Volume 18: Through The Open Window, 1956-1963 is assembled by author Sean Wilentz, and producer Steve Berkowitz.
“Of that time and those places, this collection is just a fragment,” writes author and historian Sean Wilentz in his 125-page liner notes essay. “Even so, as an aural record of an artist becoming himself—or in Dylan’s case, his first of many artistic selves—the collection aims to collapse time and space, not as a nostalgic reverie but as a living connection between the past and the present, the old and the new, which are never as distinct as we might think.”
The 8CD Deluxe set includes 139 tracks – 48 never-before released performances, as well as 38 super-rare cuts plus a hardcover book with extensive liner notes by Sean Wilentz and over 100 rare photographs. The 2CD and 4LP highlight editions include 42 tracks.
Upon my initial listening to a number of selections in the Deluxe package, they penetrate and resonate:
Pretty Boy Floyd (Gerdes Folk City, NYC, 1961)
Introduction: In the Pines (Carnegie Chapter Hall, NYC, 1961)
Rambling, Gambling Willie (Freewheelin’ Outtake, NYC, 1962)
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall (The Gaslight Cafe, NYC, 1962)
Oxford Town (Witmark Demo, NYC, 1963)
Bob Dylan’s Dream (Town Hall, NYC, 1963)
With God on Our Side (Newport Folk Festival, RI, 1963)
Blowin’ in the Wind (Newport Folk Festival, RI, 1963)
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall (Carnegie Hall, NYC, 1963)
The Ballad of the Gliding Swan (BBC-TV, London, 1963)
“The early Witmark demo [“Oxford Town”] demonstrate that Dylan learned and absorbed much in Hibbing, Minnesota, before he relocated and re-invented himself in New York,” emailed writer/poet Dr. James Cushing. “The thing is, that he needed to do was individuate himself and separate himself from his background before he could appreciate his background.
“The liner notes are possibly the best of the whole bootleg series, and the first four CDs overflow with new discoveries and recontextualized favorites.
“I'm glad to see the whole 10-26-1963 Carnegie Hall here, but I would have also liked the whole 4-12-1963 Town Hall concert and the whole 12-1961 Minnesota Hotel Tape (we get only 8 out of 25 songs).
"Through the Open Window is tied with The Complete Basement Tapes and More Blood, More Tracks as the best of these bootleg series boxes (The Cutting Edge 18CD set is a special case).
“Best in the sense that while these three provide a rich context for Dylan's work in three key periods, 1967, 1974, and 1961-63, they are also wonderfully listenable as albums. The Basement recordings are wildly funny and surreal, the Blood on the Tracks sessions extend the music's intimacy into epic proportions, and this new set allows us to hear a talented young man develop into a genius.
“In their 60+ years of life in our culture, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan and The Times They Are A-Changin’ have become jewels, and the new box set is the perfect velvet presentation case.”
During 1975-2025, I’ve asked some of my nearly 2,500 interview subjects about Bob Dylan’s 1961-1963 world.
A handful of them worked with Dylan, encountered him in his seminal 1961-1963 period, covered his catalog, and a filmmaker who documented him on screen.
Billy James: As an actor, I appeared on Broadway and then television. I saw Dylan in the Village. I met James Dean around the NBC TV studios in New York. I then was a publicist at Columbia Records.
In 1961 I taped an interview with Bob Dylan for the company and prepared his first biography. I worked for Columbia as a talent scout as well. I went to Bob’s solo acoustic recording sessions and continued as a writer for the Columbia label. Regarding the early Dylan that I met, I wrote an article for the weekly edition of Variety when I worked at Columbia Records. My headline ran “Folk Fans Find a James Dean.”
Chip Monck: I knew Dylan and saw him at the Gas Light. Dylan was playing a set there in probably 1961, and Albert Grossman came in on his usual talent hunt. Dylan does 3 or 4 songs, and the kitchen door slams. And all of a sudden, those tapes become Bob Dylan: Live at the Gaslight 1962, with no credit to the engineer Richard Alderson. It was a single microphone record. Richard made his own mikes from RCA 77-A that (TV host) Johnny Carson would later use. Then after that, we go to the Kettle of Fish, which is upstairs and while having a drink, I introduce myself. “That was great I really like that. That was fun. Sorry about the door slamming.”
Dylan was extremely new and different and had already been turned down to play the Village Gate because Art D’Lugoff, the owner, already had Jack Elliot. Art was one of the most important people in Greenwich Village on so many levels.
Then Dylan and I met again on the street. He said, “You got a typewriter, don’t you?” “Yes, I do.” “I want to use it.” “OK. Here are the keys. I’ll show you where I live. And by the way, it’s right next door to the Village Gate. So, if there is anything you want to listen too or want to eat or have something to drink you can just walk through the door with this key and you are in the Gate.” “OK.”
Every now and then I’d come back into the apartment after my two shows at The Gate and he’d be there plucking away. “Can I see it?” “Yeah.” “Don’t you think it would be better if it was phrased like…”
“I don’t need a fuckin’ co-writer! Nor do I need to pay royalties to your typewriter. You can read it but just keep your fuckin’ mouth shut.” “OK. Would you like to have something to eat Mr. Dylan?” (Laughs).
That was about the extent of it. Every now and then it would go missing and then it would come back and have a complete, new typewriter ribbon in it and a new Correcto type ribbon.
I figured this is a co-owned typewriter and fine with me. I don’t have to type his words. “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Hollis Brown” were two I remember. “Hard Rain” was the primary. And what I’d do is just take out the paper in the wastebasket at end of the night, iron it flat, put it in a folder which was unfortunately lost when my first wife Barbara sold our Bridge Hampton, Long Island house. Some contractor probably has it in his files.
I did the sound and lights at the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967. Luckily enough, my intercom system was telephone operator head sets of circa ‘57, and a pair of Mcintosh 240 amplifiers which Bob Dylan was kind enough to give me.
At the ‘69 Woodstock Music Festival, the intercom system I was using with a telephone operator head set had a couple of 240 Mcintosh amps that Bob was kind enough as to lend me after my AT&T unit crashed.
So, at the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971 I saw him do “Hard Rain” with the guitar. Since I only saw it previously as the uncompleted number.
Fred Catero: I was an engineer at Columbia and started in 1962 as a mixing engineer. Roy Halee did most of the rock stuff. John Hammond, [who signed Dylan to the label] introduced me to Dylan. I worked with [producer] Tom Wison on Dylan [1964 and 1965] sessions.
The head of Columbia engineering, Eric Porterfield, designed all-tube hand-built consoles from the former radio rooms. Columbia studios had a custom Ampex 8-track, a live chamber and Altec Lansing A7 speakers. “The Voice of the Theatre.” For microphones I used a Neumann U47 and maybe a SM57 on lead vocals. The studios had great natural echo, reverb and leakage. You wanted that. In fact, it added to the drama.
I knew the rooms and where the best place was for piano or bass or the singer. I used two Neumann mikes. One for the guitar which I aimed at an angle down, so it’s not picking up too much voice, and then the vocal mike, not in front of him, almost where the same mike is for the guitar is facing upward. ‘Cause they tend to look down anyway as they play.
Allen Ginsberg: Dylan said that Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues had inspired him to be a poet. That was his poetic inspiration. In fact, I remember when Kerouac was asked on The William F. Buckley TV Show in the 60’s. “What Beat Generation meant?” Kerouac said, “Sympathetic.”
We [beat generation writers] were being more candid and truthful than most other public figures or writers at the time. We were switched over to writing a spoken idiomatic vernacular, actual American English, which turned on many generations later.
I think what happened is that we followed an older tradition, a lineage, of the modernists of the turn of the century continued their work into idiomatic talk and musical cadences and returned poetry back to its original sources and actual communication between people. We wrote, and we were in the tradition of William Carlos Williams spoken vernacular, comprehensible common language that anyone could understand, coming from Whitman through William Carlos Williams through be-bop. We were built for it.
I remember the first moment I saw Dylan. It was a concert with Happy Traum I went to in Greenwich Village. I suddenly started to write my own lyrics, instead of Blake. Dylan’s words were so beautiful.
The first time I heard them I wept. I had come back from India, and Charlie Plymell, a poet I liked a lot in Bolinas, at a Welcome Home Party played me Dylan singing “Masters of War” from Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and I actually burst into tears. It was a sense that the torch had been passed to another generation. And somebody had the self-empowerment of saying, “I’ll Know My Song Well Before I Start Singing It.”
Johnny Cash: I became aware of Bob Dylan when the Freewheelin’ album came out in 1963. I thought he was one of the best country singers I had ever heard. I always felt a lot in common with him. I knew a lot about him before we had ever met. I knew he had heard and listened to country music. I heard a lot of inflections from country artists I was familiar with. I was in Las Vegas in ’63 and ’64 and wrote him a letter telling him how much I liked his work. I got a letter back, and we developed a correspondence. We finally met at Newport in 1964. It was like we were two old friends. There was none of this standing back, trying to figure each other out. He’s unique and original.
Jackie DeShannon: In 1963, I was invited by Peter, Paul and Mary to see Bob Dylan at his first concert appearance at Town Hall in New York. Immediately I knew how important he would be. When I returned to Los Angeles, I tried to convince the [Liberty] record label to let me do an entire album of his songs. No one at the company listened and understood.
I did eventually record a few of his tunes: “Blowing in the Wind,” “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right,” and “Walkin’ Down the Line” on a Liberty album in the early ‘60s.
Robby Krieger: I saw Dylan perform in 1963. I was in high school in Menlo Park, near San Francisco. There were some guys there from Boston and New York in the dormitory with me and they were into Bob Dylan. I had never heard him before. They had his debut LP. So, they played the first album and I got totally into him.
On Dylan’s first album I really liked his guitar playing. I thought he was a great fuckin’ acoustic player. He did some stuff that was pretty damn good. And his harmonica work. I had never heard anyone play harmonica like that. Not a blues harmonica player sucking in the notes. I was amazed he could do all that stuff and sing at the same time.
Then, what do you know. He came to Berkeley for the first time and we saw him at the Community Theater. We just got tickets. I wasn’t hooked up then. (laughs). It was a good experience. He had the buckskin jacket. I bought into the whole thing, basically. I later bought a harmonica rack holder. When I saw him live, I sort of realized at the time there were some interesting and unique tunings on stage. I thought he was pretty cool at that first concert, and then the week after that we saw Joan Baez play at Stanford University.
Andrew Loog Oldham: I worked as a press agent for the Beatles, Chris Montez, Bob Dylan and the Little Richard/Sam Cooke/Jet Harris 1962 tour before I met the Rolling Stones in 1963.
In 1963 I managed to score some press for the still-unknown-folk singer in England. I was doing PR in January ‘63 and bumped into manager Albert Grossman at the Cumberland Hotel, Marble Arch. His client, Bob Dylan was in London to play a minor role in a BBC2 television drama, Madhouse on Castle Street. He would eventually perform two songs: “Blowin’ in The Wind” and “Ballad of a Gliding Swan.” [It was later broadcast on January 13, 1963].
It was written by Evan Jones and the director was Philip Saville. I got a “fiver” for ten days of work. I managed to get Dylan into Melody Maker. Thanks to Max Jones or Jack Hutton. They were doing me a favor-Nobody else cared…
Dylan and Grossman were very happy together. They acted like they knew something we didn’t know yet. Grossman also managed Peter, Paul & Mary.
In a different realm it was like being in a room with Dylan and Grossman. There was this conspiratorial thing that was so powerful; you knew it had to work.
Murray Lerner: The words just fell on his music. I knew that when I saw him walk in a room at a party around 1962 for Cynthia Gooding. He came in and pulled out his guitar, played a few songs about New York, packed it up and split. He intrigued me. At Harvard University I majored in English and my main interest was modern American poetry. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and their technique of two opposite symbols creating a third idea. Two different images, the unexpected juxtaposition of two different images for the third idea. Which guided me into filmmaking.
I felt that when I screened the music of The Other Side Of The Mirror: Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival film [2007] because he is touted metaphorically as the mirror of his generation, and I thought no, he's beyond that. He always takes the generation beyond that, and he's like on the other side of the mirror, but I also felt the wonderous quality of his imagination took us like Alice to a new world on the other side of the mirror. I felt to break that would be bad.
Dylan's songs and his ideas were so powerful that my thesis, or premise, was that once I got you involved in him and you were also seeing a change in his imagination going in his music that you wouldn't want to leave it. Either I pulled you into it or I didn't. If you weren't pulled into his music and took this journey with him then you're not going to like the film. Nothing you say is gonna make you like it more.
Anthony Scaduto: As a police reporter writing for The New York Post, [on organized crime and the Mafia], I got turned onto rock because I was assigned to cover the Brooklyn Fox theatre, where the kids were ripping up the seats over Little Richard. Rock and roll hit, and I got into it a great deal.
Then Bob Dylan came into the Village. Originally, I hated him…but soon my sentiments toward the man and his music became quite positive. I felt that rock was, and still is, and important part of our culture. I felt there was a so-called message there, and it was saying something to Western society.
My editor suggested I write a book on rock, since Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia [1969] was selling quite successfully. I said, “Dylan, of course,” since I had always wanted to do at least a magazine piece on him.
Dylan was a very hidden character. No one really knew who Bob Dylan was, so I handled him in a very straight biographical manner. Dylan reviewed a work-in-progress manuscript of [Bob Dylan: A Biography, 1972], and interviewed. “You’ve done a good book on me. I want to make it even better.” He later said, “I like the book. That’s the weird thing about it.”
I write with a lot of compassion for Bob Dylan. I respect him as a person and an artist. The people surrounding Dylan always felt that he was a very fragile person. It was as if he had to be protected. It wasn’t until a few years later that Joan Baez, Dave Van Ronk and Suze Rotolo would talk freely and honestly about him.
Dylan only wanted to be the next Elvis. There was this intense pain that forced him to write certain things that came out of the air. A poet feels his own persona, his place in the world, and the screwed-up condition in that world.
If you are going to get into a superstar level, you have got to be hard. In the beginning, Dylan had the bodyguards, the Albert Grossmans. Mick Jagger has the ability to build a wall around himself. You’re an idol, and it’s the kind of thing they put you on the crucifix for. You have to be hard and be protected, or it’s going to destroy you.
(Harvey Kubernik is the author of 20 books, including 2009’s Canyon Of Dreams: The Magic And The Music Of Laurel Canyon, 2014’s Turn Up The Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll In Los Angeles 1956-1972, 2015's Every Body Knows: Leonard Cohen, 2016's Heart of Gold Neil Young and 2017's 1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love. Sterling/Barnes and Noble in 2018 published Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik’s The Story Of The Band: From Big Pink To The Last Waltz. In 2021 the duo wrote Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child for Sterling/Barnes and Noble.
Otherworld Cottage Industries in 2020 published Harvey’s Docs That Rock, Music That Matters. His Screen Gems: (Pop Music Documentaries and Rock ‘n’ Roll TV Scenes) is scheduled for early 2026 publication from BearManor Media.
Harvey spoke at the special hearings in 2006 initiated by the Library of Congress held in Hollywood, California, discussing archiving practices and audiotape preservation.
In 2017, he appeared at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, in its heralded Distinguished Speakers Series and also a panelist discussing the forty-fifth anniversary of The Last Waltz at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles in 2023).
