{"id":50156,"date":"2025-10-27T14:28:26","date_gmt":"2025-10-27T14:28:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/2025\/10\/27\/how-they-found-those-rare-tapes\/"},"modified":"2025-10-27T14:28:26","modified_gmt":"2025-10-27T14:28:26","slug":"how-they-found-those-rare-tapes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/2025\/10\/27\/how-they-found-those-rare-tapes\/","title":{"rendered":"How They Found Those Rare Tapes"},"content":{"rendered":"


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\n\tWhen Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz was a student at Columbia in 1969, a new Bob Dylan<\/a> record titled The Great White Wonder<\/a><\/em> began popping up in record stores. Completely unsanctioned by Bob Dylan or his label, it mixed Basement Tapes material with informal recordings of Dylan during his early folk period between 1961 and 1962. \u201cIt was revelatory,\u201d Wilentz says. \u201cYou got to hear Dylan talk, make jokes, boast. It brought you the person behind the idol.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Great White Wonder<\/em> became such a sensation that it essentially gave birth to the entire bootleg industry. And even though acts like Led Zeppelin, the Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, and the Who were very popular in this world of illegal releases, the number of Dylan bootlegs on the market dwarfed them all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\n\t\u201cThe bootleg records, those are outrageous,\u201d Dylan complained to Cameron Crowe in 1985. \u201cI mean, they have stuff you do in a phone booth. Like, nobody\u2019s around. If you\u2019re just sitting and strumming in a motel, you don\u2019t think anyone\u2019s there. It\u2019s like the phone is tapped\u2026Then you wonder why most artists feel so paranoid.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 1991, Dylan decided to beat the bootlegers at their own game by launching the Bootleg Series. It\u2019s stretched to 16 volumes over the past three decades, chronicling practically every era of his career, and they were all overseen by Dylan\u2019s longtime manager, Jeff Rosen. But for the forthcoming 17th volume, Through the Open Window, 1956-1963<\/em><\/a>, which concentrates on Dylan\u2019s earliest recordings during his folk period, the baton was passed to Wilentz.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tNot only is Wilentz a renowned Dylan scholar and author of the stellar 2010 book Bob Dylan in America<\/a><\/em>, but he was around the Greenwich Village folk scene<\/a> as a kid and knows its history like few others. In addition to combing through all the tapes from this time period \u2014 many unheard by even the most serious Dylan fans \u2014 he also contributed a 125-page essay to the box. We hopped on a Zoom with Wilentz to hear about his long history as a Dylan fan, the creation of the box set, and what he hopes to see come out in the future.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

\n\tI\u2019ve been hearing rumors of some sort of \u201cVillager\u201d box set for years. It\u2019s exciting that it\u2019s finally here.<\/strong>
Yeah, I know it is. I heard about it first at a party for the [2023] book, Mixing Up the Medicine.<\/a><\/em> There was this rumor floating around, and I said, \u201cOh, that sounds interesting.\u201d But in some ways, people have been wanting this for forever because ever since the first Bootleg Series in 1991 or even Biograph<\/em> [in 1985], there\u2019s always been this fascination with Dylan\u2019s very, very early career. Finally, we got together to do this.<\/p>\n

\n\tMy guess is that, especially old folks who kind of remember the Village vaguely in the old days, that this will be not a nostalgia trip as I hope, but a way to kind of close the gap between the past and the present.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen were your first exposed to Bob Dylan\u2019s music?<\/strong>
I was exposed to his name before I was exposed to his music because I remember my dad talking to [Folklore center proprietor] Izzy [Young] about him. Izzy said, \u201cThere\u2019s this great new guy in town, you got to listen to him,\u201d and then he proceeded to give my dad a Greenbriar Boys album. I don\u2019t know why he didn\u2019t give me a Dylan album, but I\u2019d heard his name.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThen when Freewheelin<\/em>\u2018 came out, I remember I was in a Sunday school class in Brooklyn. There was a very, very hip slightly older girl I was no doubt lusting after. She came in with this record, and it was almost like holy scripture already. This would\u2019ve been, I guess sometime in \u201962 or \u201963.<\/p>\n

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