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New York Times
26-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
An Early Bob Dylan Recording Hits the Auction Block
On Sept. 6, 1961, a little-known 20-year-old calling himself Bob Dylan took the stage at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village and played a six-song set. More than 60 years later, a reel-to-reel tape of those songs has gone up for auction. Only about 20 people were at the short performance, but it is well known to folk-history fans and Dylanologists partly because it was preserved on tape. Terri Thal, Dylan's manager at the time, brought a bulky Ampex recorder in a leather case to the show and set it up on a table at stage left. Dylan knew she was going to record, Thal said: 'He programmed his set as an audition.' That set, performed more than three decades before the birth of Timothée Chalamet — up for an Oscar this Sunday for his portrayal of Dylan — included 'Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues,' 'He Was a Friend of Mine' and 'Song to Woody,' a reference to Woody Guthrie. The recording became a tool that Thal used to try to persuade out-of-town clubs to book Dylan, who had acquired something of a reputation among the cognoscenti in the Village but wasn't well known elsewhere. Now, the tape, described by RR Auction in Boston as 'Dylan's earliest demo recording,' is being offered for sale along with other Dylan-related ephemera, including a sequined suit from his 1975 Rolling Thunder tour and a Martin D-41 acoustic guitar he gave to Bob Neuwirth, a musician who was instrumental in assembling the band for that tour. The recording is significant, said Mark Davidson, the senior director of archives and exhibitions at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Okla., because it documents a performance by someone on the cusp of fame and before he fully developed his own inimitable style. 'He's still sort of in that Woody Guthrie jukebox phase,' Davidson said. Richard F. Thomas, a classics professor at Harvard University and the author of 'Why Bob Dylan Matters,' said that at the time of the Gaslight show, Dylan was a 'young genius committed to his art and his performance' but who was 'still trying to make it.' It was indeed a seminal time for Dylan. Days after that performance, he met John Hammond, a producer and talent scout, often credited with discovering Dylan. And just weeks later in The New York Times, the critic Robert Shelton described Dylan as 'a bright new face in folk music,' a 'cross between a choir boy and a beatnik' who performed with 'originality and inspiration.' Within a month Dylan had signed with Columbia Records. Thal said that she met Dylan soon after he arrived in New York, through her husband, the folk singer Dave Van Ronk, whom Dylan admired while growing up in Minnesota. For a while, Thal said, Dylan was a regular visitor to their home in Manhattan, where he wrote and practiced early versions of 'Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues.' That song, Davidson said, was inspired by a newspaper clipping about an ill-fated boat trip that Noel Paul Stookey, a member of Peter, Paul and Mary, gave to Dylan. Months before the Gaslight show, Dylan asked Thal if she would manage him. (She was already Van Ronk's manager.) Thal quickly agreed. 'I thought he had a touch of genius,' she said. 'He was not a great guitarist, he was not a great singer. But he had developed a presence, and it was incredibly distinctive.' The Gaslight, a cellar establishment on MacDougal Street, where The Times reported, 'the delicate finger-snap is the mark of thundering applause,' was one of Dylan's early haunts. He described it in his 2004 memoir, 'Chronicles: Volume One,' as 'a cryptic club' where performers hung out in an upstairs room reached via fire escape and played poker between sets, with bets generally ranging from a nickel to a quarter. ('I usually folded my cards if I didn't have a pair by the second or third draw,' Dylan wrote, adding that the singer Len Chandler told him: 'You gotta learn how to bluff.') The cafe was also important in his development as a professional musician: a venue that paid. After being booked there, he wrote, he 'would never see the basket houses again,' referring to spots where people passed the hat to collect donations for performers. According to a chronological account of set lists on Dylan's website, the 1961 Gaslight show was among his earliest performances, and just the second in New York City. A small number of these shows had been recorded, including Dylan's first listed performance in New York, as part of the Riverside Church Hootenanny Special, a 12-hour marathon that took place inside the church theater. But Thal's recording was the first to be created in a professional capacity, with the aim of obtaining work for Dylan, said Bobby Livingston, an executive vice president at RR Auction. He added that the auction house was selling the tape as an artifact owned by Thal and that she did not purport to own the rights to its songs. Livingston estimated that the tape would fetch at least $25,000 at auction. Of course, that doesn't include the cost of a working reel-to-reel machine, which, if eBay is any guide, could add a few hundred or a few thousand dollars. Unauthorized versions of the Gaslight performance have long circulated. Thal believes that someone made and kept a version without her permission when she went to a studio to have the Ampex reel copied, so she would not have to bring the original with her when she visited clubs. In addition to the songs performed at the Gaslight, the tape includes an embryonic version of 'Mr. Tambourine Man,' with Dylan accompanied by a piano. That was added to the tape later by a friend, Thal said. By that time, she no longer managed Dylan, having been replaced by Albert Grossman. Thal said she obtained gigs for Dylan including at Gerde's Folk City, which was cited by Shelton in his Times article. But even though she played the Gaslight tape for bookers in Boston, Philadelphia and Springfield, Mass., they passed on Dylan. 'The guy in Springfield laughed at me,' she said. Another booker, she said, asked: 'Why should I hire a Jack Elliott imitator,' a reference to the singer-songwriter Ramblin' Jack Elliott. Thomas, the classics professor, pointed out that seeing Dylan live was a big part of what made him so compelling. That could explain why some of those who listened to the Gaslight tape without having seen him play might not have been swayed. 'The magic of Bob,' he said, 'is that everything comes together in performance.'
The Guardian
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Why A Complete Unknown should win the best picture Oscar
So how did it feel? Bob Dylan's early years in New York have been chronicled, dramatised, riffed on and pored over more than the Last Supper. James Mangold's biopic – told very much with the backing, though not the guiding hand of Dylan Inc – somehow achieved the impossible: keeping the people with working knowledge of the musical rota at the Gaslight Cafe as interested as those with little more than an acquaintance with TikTok covers of Blowin' in the Wind. And that's perhaps the key case for A Complete Unknown to win the best picture Oscar. Sure, it's an excellent movie with a hair-raising performance from its lead, but I think the reason so many younger or non-Dylan fans enjoyed it is, curiously, its capturing of the notion that one man's art can give people hope for change. The fact that the film itself is very specifically about Dylan rejecting that position is neither here nor there. A Complete Unknown captures a moment when a 19-year-old weirdo from Minnesota could arrive in Manhattan, somehow find a place to stay and scrape by (not that we see much detail on this) on the money he received after playing and passing around a hat in dingy folk clubs. Sadly, it bears about as close a relation to the realities of 21st-century life as the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Yes, a nation may have turned its lonely eyes to Dylan – only for him to stick his fingers in them – but at least the rents were cheap (and no one had social media). A Complete Unknown might not be a cinematic masterpiece, but it's already one of the great mainstream films about the visceral power of art – and at a time when the modern political moment is overwhelming any sense of cultural resistance. Why else does it deserve to win? Timothée Chalamet's performance as Dylan is so good that it's been written off by some as no more than a feat of imitation. But compare his Bob with the real one of Dont Look Back or No Direction Home and it's clear that we're watching a rare player here. A generational talent in the very real sense that he's the only male actor under 40 good enough to open all kinds of movies (his last three being this, Dune: Part 2 and Wonka, for goodness sake.) There are also impeccable supporting turns. Ed Norton is utterly taken by the kind, tender utopian spirit of Pete Seeger and Monica Barbaro repositions Joan Baez as a vital artist who exists separately from Dylan, as well as someone pleasingly unwilling to take his shit ('You're kind of an asshole, Bob'). Then there are two scenes that made the hairs on my arms stand on end. They're both testament to the power of drama (given that they didn't happen). In the first, Dylan's fabled first visit to Woody Guthrie's hospital bedside, Bob serenades his hero with Song to Woody, the foundation stone for the entire film, and Dylan's career. The other moment comes when Baez spots Dylan's lyrics to Blowin' in the Wind and the two start singing, a thrillingly tender moment of two people finding literal harmony. Some of the main criticisms of the film can be comfortably filed under This Is Not a Documentary: principally the historical accuracy of moments such as the 'Judas' cry, relocated from a crowd member in Manchester, England, to Newport folk festival, and Seeger's anger at Dylan's decision to go electric. (It is also worth adding that the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, one of the most significant figures in modern musical history, is done extremely dirty here – but you need an adversary.) A better criticism would be to point out that – given that the production company was approached to make the film by Dylan's manager Jeff Rosen (more on that here), A Complete Unknown is as much a portrait of the artist as a young man as it is a canny Marvel-level bit of intellectual property management. Despite its near two-and-a-half-hours length, I was left wanting more as Dylan rode off on his motorbike in the final scene. A Complete Unknown captures the most culturally significant era of his career but, as everyone watching it knows, there are decades of fascinating Dylaning to come. Sign me up for the 10-part Netflix dramatisation of the Basement Tapes sessions.
