Bob Dylan’s formative years are the subject of the latest release in his extensive Bootleg Series of albums. Bootleg Series Volume 18: Through The Open Window, 1956-1963 chronicles Dylan’s early years as the young singer-songwriter was making a name for himself in the burgeoning folk scene springing out of New York’s Greenwich Village.
Available as an eight-CD box set, two CDs or 4LPs from 31st October, the compilation includes rare and unheard home recordings, studio outtakes and live renditions, with a complete recording of his show at Carnegie Hall in October, 1963, also included. The eight-disc version contains 139 tracks, 48 of which are performances that have never seen the light of day until now.
“Of that time and those places, this collection is just a fragment,” writes author and historian Sean Wilentz in the set’s liner notes. “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.”
Listen to a preview song from the set, Rocks And Gravel (Solid Road), below: